Toward a science of other minds: Escaping the argument by analogy

Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of ot her species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific menta l states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psy chological causes were at work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flowed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of v isual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this ma nner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpre tation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage e volved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalist ic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive special ization for reasoning about such states.