Mindreading Animals · The Debate over What Animals Know about Other Minds

Animals live in a world of other minds, human and nonhuman, and their well-being and

survival often depends on what is going on in the minds of these other creatures. But do animals

know that other creatures have minds? And how would we know if they do? In Mindreading

Animals, Robert Lurz offers a fresh approach to the hotly debated question of mental-state

attribution in nonhuman animals. Some empirical researchers and philosophers claim that some animals

are capable of anticipating other creatures' behaviors by interpreting observable cues as signs of

underlying mental states; others claim that animals are merely clever behavior-readers, capable of

using such cues to anticipate others' behaviors without interpreting them as evidence of underlying

mental states. Lurz argues that neither position is compelling, and proposes a way to move the

debate, and the field, forward.

Lurz presents a new approach to understanding what

mindreading in animals might be, offering a bottom-up model of mental-state attribution that is

built upon cognitive abilities that animals are known to possess rather than on a preconceived view

of the mind applicable to mindreading abilities in humans. Lurz goes on to describe an innovative

series of new experimental protocols for animal mindreading research that overcome a persistent

methodological problem in the field, known as the "logical problem" or "Povinelli's challenge."

These protocols show in detail how various types of animals -- from apes to monkeys to ravens to

dogs -- can be tested for perceptual state and belief attribution.