On Readings in Animal Cognitions: The Myth of Anthropomorphism

And so begins some notes and responses from a book called Readings in Animal Cognition. This particular article, Chapter 1, is called The Myth of Anthropomorphism by John Andrew Fisher.

First of all, as I read this, I am beginning to crystalize part of why I think the exploration of animal intelligence is so interesting, and of course it selfishly has to do with what it, by proxy, says about human intelligence. I was listening to Radiolab in the car the other day (I don't remember which one. . . maybe the Animal Minds one? Maybe Emergence?) and they were talking about a case where a woman lost the ability to see motion, so when she is pouring tea, for example, she gets a still image of the tea cup and then like 15 seconds later, gets another image (my friend said his psychology professor described this condition like a strobe light, which I think is a fantastic illustration of it). Anyway, they made the point that rare cases of . . . . disability isn't the right word . . . but you get the idea . . . like this show, for instance, how amazing healthy people's ability to have coordinated thoughts or coordinated perception really is. In a larger way, I think these fascinating cases where something doesn't work sheds light on how amazing it is that those things do work in the rest of us, and end up teaching us a lot about what capacities we take for granted in "normal" brains or people. And I think, in the same way, comparative study of animal intelligence, animal emotions, and animal minds offers a lot of insight into the things about human capacities that we take for granted or don't understand.

That ramble out of the way, here are some quotes from the actual article:

First, the author makes the distinction between forms of anthropomorphism, namely, the "Imaginative" version (like when we create talking rabbits, for instance) and "Interpretive" in which we use behaviors or other indicators and interpret the origins of those behaviors to be similar to human thoughts/feelings etc. His contention is that the "imaginative" version is not particularly dangerous or bad and is properly a part of fiction, but that many people refer to interpretive anthropomorphism in a derogatory way (imply or outright state that all anthropomorphism of this kind is a "categorical" mistake and shouldn't be done.) This paper actually just addresses that issue, of whether or not it is a categorical mistake, and basically supports the idea that dismissing all anthropomorphism is too broad and not necessarily automatically wrong. He points out that there might be situational mistakes (like mis-interpreting a monkey showing it's teeth as anger when it really was a friendly greeting) which might be wrong, but not categorically inappropriate to that species, since both are likely actually possible, and there might be categorical mistakes for certain species (attributing emotions to an earthworm might be categorically wrong, but not so when talking about a dolphin).

Fisher does allow, though, that this idea of imaginative anthropomorphism may undermine our inferred or interpretive anthropomorphism.

Anthropormorphic Inference Has Suspect Origins
10
Children invest dolls and other objects with personalities as part of normal cognitive development. They see personalities everywhere. Even when we grow up, we still easily see human forms in clouds, cracks, cars, etc.; indeed, much visual art is based on our ability to see human forms in vague lines and shapes. Clearly, humans have a capacity to perceive objects as having personalities. It is not just a capacity to imagine; it is a sort of imaginative representation of a perceived object. As children, we often accept these representations as real.

further down the page, he states that in order to have these imaginative representations, people don't actually have to believe that these things really ARE persons.

Even children know that raisins are not really like the California Raisins, and that trains are not alive. Spectators are guilty of anthropomorphism only when they accept that the false nearness to humans is possible. When dogs talk in The Plague Dogs this is anthropomorphic, but viewers are not taken in. In Bambi most of the other details of forest life, in contrast to The Plague Dogs, are entirely misrepresented. . . .

I point that out because I have these pieces with the Bambi backgrounds in them, and that is a random but interesting connection point to me. Further down the page, it says

Our general capacity to understand stuch anthropomorphic representations makes suspect the way we understand real animal behavior. What is at stake here is the validity of commonsense explanations of animals and their behavior. . . . Just as we can easily imagine Bambi on screen as a preadolescent human child, so when we see a real deer there probably is a certain amount of imagination going on in how we relate to and understand the deer.

On 13, it talks about "projecting" ourselves onto animals (the possible "sin" of projecting), though it makes the argument that projecting our own thoughts onto another is basically how we understand or form empathy with other human beings, so maybe that isn't an all-together inappropriate response (plus, we don't really project our OWN personal ideas onto other humans or animals because we are capable of making allowances for things like gender, age, etc. so why not species differences?)

And that's all for notes on this chapter. Generally, it seems like a really helpful basis for further discussions on anthropomorphism and might be useful in a classroom someday too . .. hmm.