Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- The philosophy of animal minds: an introduction
- 1 What do animals think?
- 2 Attributing mental representations to animals
- 3 Chrysippus' dog as a case study in non-linguistic cognition
- 4 Systematicity and intentional realism in honeybee navigation
- 5 Invertebrate concepts confront the generality constraint (and win)
- 6 A language of baboon thought?
- 7 Animal communication and neo-expressivism
- 8 Mindreading in the animal kingdom
- 9 The representational basis of brute metacognition: a proposal
- 10 Animals, consciousness, and I-thoughts
- 11 Self-awareness in animals
- 12 The sophistication of non-human emotion
- 13 Parsimony and models of animal minds
- 14 The primate mindreading controversy: a case study in simplicity and methodology in animal psychology
- Glossary of key terms
- References
- Index
10 - Animals, consciousness, and I-thoughts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgments
- The philosophy of animal minds: an introduction
- 1 What do animals think?
- 2 Attributing mental representations to animals
- 3 Chrysippus' dog as a case study in non-linguistic cognition
- 4 Systematicity and intentional realism in honeybee navigation
- 5 Invertebrate concepts confront the generality constraint (and win)
- 6 A language of baboon thought?
- 7 Animal communication and neo-expressivism
- 8 Mindreading in the animal kingdom
- 9 The representational basis of brute metacognition: a proposal
- 10 Animals, consciousness, and I-thoughts
- 11 Self-awareness in animals
- 12 The sophistication of non-human emotion
- 13 Parsimony and models of animal minds
- 14 The primate mindreading controversy: a case study in simplicity and methodology in animal psychology
- Glossary of key terms
- References
- Index
Summary
INTRODUCTION
I-thoughts are thoughts about one's own mental states or about “oneself” in some sense (Bennett [1988]). They are closely linked to what psychologists call “metacognition”: that is, cognitions about other cognitions or mental representations (Metcalfe and Shimamura [1994]; Koriat [2007]). There seems to be growing evidence that many animals are indeed capable of having I-thoughts as well as having the ability to understand the mental states of others (Hurley and Nudds [2006]; Terrace and Metcalfe [2005]).
There is also a relevant philosophical theory of consciousness: namely, the higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness which says that what makes a mental state conscious is the presence of a suitable higher-order thought about that state (Gennaro [2004a]; Rosenthal [2005]). For various reasons, such thoughts are typically understood to take the form “I am in mental state M now.” A higher-order thought, then, is a kind of metacognition. It is a mental state directed at another mental state. So, for example, my desire to write a good book chapter becomes conscious when I am (non-inferentially) “aware” of the desire. Intuitively, it seems that conscious states, as opposed to unconscious ones, are mental states that I am “aware of” in some representational sense (Lycan [2001]). In a case of subliminal perception, I am not aware that I am in that perceptual state. Thus, it is unconscious. However, when I become aware that I am having that perception, it becomes conscious.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Philosophy of Animal Minds , pp. 184 - 200Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
- 14
- Cited by