environment is strongly redolent of the Hans” phenomenon. Anecdotal reports of “Clever amazing animal feats of memory, judgment, and so on are just that, occasional and generally unrepeatable incidents that are merely aberrant rather than indications of significant “hidden assets” inherent in animal and just waiting to be liberated and expressed by a “intelligence” human researcher who has found the magic key needed to access them. This is not to deny that animals exhibit remarkable, if limited, abilities to navigate through the world, respond to environmental challenges and to simulate complex social and even engineering behavior as result of mere evolutionary conditioning, such as those exhibited by spiders and bees. The point is simply that these feats are neither the product of intelligence or evidence of it. Animals do not As such, we have to understand their apparently intelligent think. behavior on the basis of other principles than those that would be used to interpret the behavior of a self-conscious rational agent like a human being. Human beings can learn from and appreciate the beauty, efficiency, and complexity of a beehive or a spider’s web; bees and spiders do not and cannot since their behaviors and the complex structures they build are purely the result of instinct produced by natural selection. As Descartes and Malebranche point out, our natural tendency toward anthropomorphism makes it almost impossible for us not to suppose that dogs have beliefs (“Master is home”), know things, reason, and both recognize and have affection for their owners of a sort analogous (and in the eyes of many, superior) to that of which rational beings are capable in relation to each other. For the same reason, it is very difficult for us not to be misled by anecdotal evidence into supposing that non-human animals have much more interesting and complex inner lives than they actually do, rather than one that simply subserves the stereotypical, limited stock of standard life-tasks that one sees endlessly repeated in nature documentaries on PBS and Animal Planet.
environment is strongly redolent of the “Clever Hans” phenomenon. Anecdotal reports of amazing animal feats of memory, judgment, and so on are just that, occasional and generally unrepeatable incidents that are merely aberrant rather than indications of significant “hidden assets” inherent in animal “intelligence” and just waiting to be liberated and expressed by a human researcher who has found the magic key needed to access them. This is not to deny that animals exhibit remarkable, if limited, abilities to navigate through the world, respond to environmental challenges and to simulate complex social and even engineering behavior as result of mere evolutionary conditioning, such as those exhibited by spiders and bees. The point is simply that these feats are neither the product of intelligence or evidence of it. Animals do not think. As such, we have to understand their apparently intelligent behavior on the basis of other principles than those that would be used to interpret the behavior of a self-conscious rational agent like a human being. Human beings can learn from and appreciate the beauty, efficiency, and complexity of a beehive or a spider’s web; bees and spiders do not and cannot since their behaviors and the complex structures they build are purely the result of instinct produced by natural selection. As Descartes and Malebranche point out, our natural tendency toward anthropomorphism makes it almost impossible for us not to suppose that dogs have beliefs (“Master is home”), know things, reason, and both recognize and have affection for their owners of a sort analogous (and in the eyes of many, superior) to that of which rational beings are capable in relation to each other. For the same reason, it is very difficult for us not to be misled by anecdotal evidence into supposing that non-human animals have much more interesting and complex inner lives than they actually do, rather than one that simply subserves the stereotypical, limited stock of standard life-tasks that one sees endlessly repeated in nature documentaries on PBS and Animal Planet.