EPISTEMOLOGICAL INTERLUDE

Abstract

The dominant post-Enlightenment Western view of animals has seen them as some kind of machine, objects of no true moral significance, which it is permissible to subject to a range of treatments that would never be tolerated if practised on humans. In reality, defenders of animals, rather than being sentimentalists or somehow insufficiently attached to their own species, are far more in accord with scientific evidence and with the best interests of humanity itself. Animals are fundamentally makers and interpreters of meaning. The rejection of anthropomorphism and anecdote, and the illusion of the invisible observer, are the weapons of an ethnocentric positivism that should be rejected in favour of a strong heuristic position regarding the emotions, consciousness and abilities of animals.

Keywords:

• anthropomorphism
• anecdote
• epistemology
• ethology

Notes

Translated from Dominique Lestel, L'Animal est l'avenir de l'homme: Munitions pour ceux qui veulent (toujours) défendre les animaux (Paris: Fayard, 2010).

1 Strictly speaking we must bear in mind that the two images could both simply be … false.

2 If some think these words exaggerated, I will simply cite in evidence the researcher for CNRS who works on animal behaviour and all of whose articles submitted to academic journals systematically received the same criticism: you must not write “such an animal looks in such and such a direction” but “everything happens as if the animal was looking in such and such a direction.” In other words, each time the researcher attributes a cognitive quality to the animal he studies he is required to specify that everything happens as if the animal had that quality! One last detail that is not without importance: the researcher has permitted me to use his testimony only on the sole condition of respecting … his anonymity! Taking that little detail into account, it's all very well for ethologists and other academics to put their hand on their heart and swear no one believes in the animal-machine in university circles anymore.

3 Moreover, this is what Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten used in 1988 to write the first item on deception in primates in zoos or the natural environment.

4 The literature on the subject is starting to become quite important. We can, for instance, refer to Gosling, “From Mice to Men.”

5 This is not about bringing this or that ethologist in particular under scrutiny, but rather the mode of functioning of the discipline itself.

6 This could be a quotation from Audiard, but it isn't.

7 On the distinction between subject, individual and person among animals, see Lestel, L'Animal singulier.

8 This is an approach that, in many ways, accords well with Karl Popper's falsifiability principle. See Lestel, “What Does it Mean to Observe Rationality?”