β Scribed by William Bechtel
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Animal Consciousness is really two books. One is situated primarily in the 17th century and sets out to declaw Descartes's thesis of the "beast-machine". The other focuses primarily on 20th century empirical research directed at the mental lives of animals and tries to defend attributions of consciousness to animals a la Griffin (1984). Both books are of much interest, but to my mind the first is clearly the superior.
The Radners' goal in the first book is to expose and discredit the unargued assumptions in Descartes's arguments against animal thinking. This is important since we still live in the shadow of Descartes, and his approach still defines many of the issues we consider. Moreover, on the question of animal thinking, Descartes's influence may still weigh on many who have repudiated his dualism. As the Radners make clear, the issue of whether animals can think can be argued whether or not one accepts that thinking requires an immortal soul. (The Radners do note, though, that for some 17th century thinkers the reluctance to attribute thinking to animals was precisely a theological concern that such attributions would also attribute a soul to them.) What is central to the Cartesian analysis of animal thinking is the question of consiousness. Thinking, for Descartes, is defined in terms of consciousness, while consciousness itself is left undefined.
Many contemporary thinkers are willing to attribute thought to animals, but not consciousness. This is because of the baggage consciousness seems to bring with it. If our thought is conscious, it seems to entail a kind of introspective awareness such that we know the contents of our thought and cannot be wrong about what these contents are. The Radners not only reject this view, but also deny that it was Descartes's. They make a distinction between a form of consciousness which takes a mental state as its object and a form of consciousness that inheres in the mental state itself. The former involves introspection and does not entail the existence of the mental state that is the object of introspection. The second form of consciousness, however, does entail the existence of the mental state since being conscious is here treated as part of having that mental state. They contend that it is the latter situation that Descartes has in mind when he contends that thinking is an activity of which we are conscious.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
## Abstract In the 1920s, Karl Popper wrote two large manuscripts on psychology that he never published. In his autobiography, __Unended Quest__, he attempts to reduce the importance of his work in psychology as much as possible, and in his philosophical work he is an antipsychologist. However, in