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ABSTRACT
An influential view in primate social cognition research is that chimpanzees, as well as other great apes, attribute the mental relation of seeing to others. In a recent article, Tyler Burge challenges this view and argues that data from studies with chimpanzees provide no evidence that chimpanzees attribute the mental relation of seeing but only that they attribute the nonmental relation of sensing. Burge’s argument rests upon the claim that attributions of seeing attribute more than attributions of sensing. We contend that the reasons Burge offers for this claim are unconvincing. We go on to argue that data from a recent study with chimpanzees cannot be explained on the hypothesis that chimpanzees attribute sensing but can be explained on the hypothesis that they attribute seeing. We conclude that, as things stand, there is currently more reason to take chimpanzees to attribute the mental relation of seeing than the nonmental relation of sensing.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Mitchell Herschbach, the anonymous reviewers, Matt Lindauer and Matthew Moore for their very helpful and insightful comments and suggestions on drafts of our paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. All quotations attributed to Burge are from Burge (Citation2018).
2. More specifically, sensing light and light sources, or what Burge calls “visual sensing” (p. 415). Throughout his article, Burge typically refers to visual sensing as simply “sensing,” and to be consistent with his usage, “sensing” will be used here as short for visual sensing.
3. Burge takes his principle of parsimony to be “similar to Lloyd Morgan’s Canon” (p. 412, p. 9).
4. On similar grounds, Burge argues that data from theory-of-mind studies with infants provide only evidence for the sensing hypothesis but “no evidence” for the seeing hypothesis (p. 416). The focus of this essay, however, is on the application of Burge’s argument against the seeing hypothesis for chimpanzees.
5. To be clear, the point in citing Hare et al. (Citation2000) here is merely to show that the main proponents of the seeing hypothesis take chimpanzees to attribute the simple, two-place mental relation of seeing. It is not to show that the data from Hare et al. (Citation2000) are predicted and explained on the seeing hypothesis but not on Burge’s sensing hypothesis. In fact, we agree with Burge that the data from Hare et al. (Citation2000) can just as plausibly be predicted and explained on the sensing hypothesis as they can be on the seeing hypothesis.
6. Similar results have been observed with a recent degree-of-abstraction study with chimpanzees (Vonk et al., Citation2013). In this study, one subject (Joey) showed an ability to learn to attribute the kind chimpanzee to various pictures of chimpanzees while unable to learn to attribute the kind ape to various pictures of apes, even though chimpanzees are a subspecies of ape.
7. We take the modality here to be natural necessity, not logical or conceptual necessity. Thus, throughout this discussion by ‘possible’ we mean naturally possible – specifically, consistent with extant psychological and biological laws.
8. Nothing is being assumed here about the infallibility of our first-person privileged access to our own acts of seeing. There may be occasions when we see but misjudge that we do not, or times when we do not see but misjudge that we do. Such fallibility is entirely consistent with the fact that there are occasions when there are no observable, third-person grounds to attribute seeing to us but there are first-person privileged grounds for doing so.
9. Assuming that it is a fact. Not everyone thinks that seeing is transparent to introspection. Some have pointed out that we can tell by introspection whether we are, for example, seeing a smooth surface or just vividly imagining a smooth surface, seeing a smooth surface or just touching a smooth surface, and seeing a smooth surface or just believing a smooth surface is there (see, Searle, Citation2015, pp. 60–62). Arguably, we could not make such distinctions introspectively if our acts of seeing were transparent to introspection. For the sake of argument, we are assuming here that seeing is transparent to introspection – that, as Burge notes, our focus is on the object we are seeing, not on our seeing the object. Our point is that the assumed fact of transparency is quite consistent with our having first-person privileged access to own acts of seeing and is, thus, quite consistent with animals and infants having first-person privileged access to their own acts of seeing.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Robert Lurz
Robert Lurz is Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His research interests are on theoretical and empirical issues about animal minds and social cognition in great apes.
Vincent Andreassi
Vincent Andreassi is a student in the Philosophy Department at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His research is in animal cognition, the neural basis of pitch perception, and mathematical cognition.