Ivan Seeking
Dec13-04, 03:45 PM
Abstract:
Suggests that the issue of nonhuman agency may be resolved not through ontology but as a matter of social and descriptive practices. Analysis of behavioral scientist B.L. Whorf's paradox on the reflexive problems of description; Nonhumans capacity to render themselves in human language; Attribution/anthropomorphism quandary.
...The concern here is with what happens when ordinary people, as well as behavioral scientists, contentiously attribute to animals (machines, infants, and other Others) the kinds of mental states or competencies that they attribute to each other, and the grounds on which they do so. In the more serious literature, the prime topics are language and intelligence, and the objects in question are often apes, computers, or human infants. My aim is not to resolve the question of nonhuman agency in any of these cases but to examine some ways in which that issue is generally constituted and decided. The focus is on how various criteria of agency (or "human-ness") work, such as imitation, description, intentionality, attribution, and comembership. Although this might look like a side step, a focus on the debate in preference to its topic, the argument here is that the operation of these criteria, both in ordinary discourse and in the scientific literature, are the substance of it all. [continued]
http://www.cts.cuni.cz/~konopas/liter/Edwards_Imitation%20and%20Artifice%20in%20Apes%20H umans.htm
Suggests that the issue of nonhuman agency may be resolved not through ontology but as a matter of social and descriptive practices. Analysis of behavioral scientist B.L. Whorf's paradox on the reflexive problems of description; Nonhumans capacity to render themselves in human language; Attribution/anthropomorphism quandary.
...The concern here is with what happens when ordinary people, as well as behavioral scientists, contentiously attribute to animals (machines, infants, and other Others) the kinds of mental states or competencies that they attribute to each other, and the grounds on which they do so. In the more serious literature, the prime topics are language and intelligence, and the objects in question are often apes, computers, or human infants. My aim is not to resolve the question of nonhuman agency in any of these cases but to examine some ways in which that issue is generally constituted and decided. The focus is on how various criteria of agency (or "human-ness") work, such as imitation, description, intentionality, attribution, and comembership. Although this might look like a side step, a focus on the debate in preference to its topic, the argument here is that the operation of these criteria, both in ordinary discourse and in the scientific literature, are the substance of it all. [continued]
http://www.cts.cuni.cz/~konopas/liter/Edwards_Imitation%20and%20Artifice%20in%20Apes%20H umans.htm