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12 Being a Critter Psychologist Comparative researchers have never specified “the unique causal work” that representations about mental states do. —Derek Penn and Daniel Povinelli Problems with the Chimpanzee Theory of Mind Research Program I have argued that being a folk psychologist does not depend on having a theory of mind, and that, for the most part, we do not need the ability to attribute propositional attitudes to predict behavior. I have also suggested that the evolution of theory of mind in humans was not driven by a need to improve behavioral predictions. These views have implications for the ongoing research program on chimpanzee theory of mind. This research program, though moribund for twenty years after Premack and Woodruff first introduced the question, has seen an explosion of interest in recent years. However, it is not entirely clear what the current generation of researchers are after when they ask, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” As was discussed in chapter 2, Premack and Woodruff understood the term theory of mind to refer to the ascription of mental states to others to predict and explain their behavior. Premack made this definition explicit in 1988 when he said that he and Woodruff were originally interested in the question “Does the ape do what humans do: attribute states of mind to the other one, and use these states to predict and explain the behavior of the other one?” (Premack 1988, 160). However, given our discussion about the role of belief attribution in prediction and explanation so far, it is clear that Premack and Woodruff’s question itself conflates a number of issues, and the question requires some revision. First, we must address the false presuppositions in the question. In formulating it, Premack and Woodruff assumed that humans attribute 232 Chapter 12 mental states when both predicting and explaining behavior. We have seen that this is not necessarily the case. The question also fails to distinguish between prediction and explanation, and I have argued that it is more natural to find mental-state attributions in explanations than in predictions . Yet the research paradigms designed to test the question focus on prediction; to my knowledge, no one has studied chimpanzees’ social explanation-seeking behavior. I see this as an implicit endorsement of the symmetry thesis, which I rejected in chapter 3. Another problem with the question is that it is ambiguous. Theory of mind has meant both attributing mental states to predict and explain and more specifically attributing belief and desire to predict and explain. Worse, given the philosophical debates about the nature of belief, researchers may be working under different conceptions of what it is to have a belief. To avoid the ambiguity, some researchers have suggested that we understand the term as a “generic label” for a number of different cognitive processes involved in social cognition (Tomasello et al. 2003b, 239), a view that fits nicely into a PFP approach. Today the dominant view is that chimpanzees understand a variety of nonpropositional mental states, such as seeing (Hare et al. 2000; Plooij 1978; Goodall 1986; de Waal 1996; but see Povinelli and Eddy 1996), hearing (Melis et al. 2006), goals (Uller 2004), intentionality (Tomasello and Carpenter 2005; Warneken and Tomasello 2006), and even knowledge (Kaminski et al. 2008; Hare et al. 2001). However, even scientists who are happy to explain the behavior of chimpanzees in terms of sophisticated cognitive mechanisms show little willingness to see chimpanzee social cognition as mediated by concepts such as belief. For example, while they think that chimpanzees can ascribe perceptual states to others, Tomasello, Call, and Hare believe that “there is no evidence anywhere that chimpanzees understand the beliefs of others” (Tomasello et al. 2003a, 156). Even David Premack today admits that chimpanzees do not have a theory of mind in the sense of being able to attribute beliefs, because “creatures without language cannot attribute belief” (Premack and Premack 2003, 149). Not everyone agrees with this position. Some are boosters; given her decades of work with Kanzi and other symbol-trained chimpanzees and bonobos, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh writes, “There is no doubt that Kanzi attributes intentions and feelings to others and that he recognizes the need to communicate things about his own mental state to others” (SavageRumbaugh et al. 1998, 56). And some are critics; Daniel Povinelli and his colleagues think that all chimpanzee behavior can be accounted for without postulating that they understand anything about others’ mental states. [18.223.0.53] Project MUSE (2024...

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