Abstract
In this paper I critically discuss and, in the end, reject Morgan’s Canon, a popular principle in comparative psychology. According to this principle we should always prefer explanations of animal behavior in terms of lower psychological processes over explanations in terms of higher psychological processes, when alternative explanations are possible. The validity of the principle depends on two things, a clear understanding of what it means for psychological processes to be higher or lower relative to each other (1) and a justification of a general preference for explanations that refer to lower psychological abilities (2). However, I argue that we cannot spell out the idea of a psychological scale in a way that claim (2) is satisfied. I start with the discussion of different interpretations of the notion of a psychological scale (Sect. 2). In Sect. 3, I discuss different possible strategies to justify any of those interpretations and argue that all of them fail. Finally, in Sect. 4, I generalize the argument for all possible interpretations of Morgan’s Canon and propose an alternative strategy: We should base our interpretations of animal behavior on more general principles such as evidential support and explanatory power, as followed in other scientific domains.
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Notes
This is also what Morgan had in mind as becomes clear in the following passage: ,,[T]o assume [...] complexity of mental nature on grounds other than those of sound induction, is to depart from the methods of scientific procedure“ (Morgan 1894, p. 54, my italics).
Interestingly, Morgan himself was one of he first to describe the Baldwin effect (Morgan 1896).
In this paper I am interested in the question whether the principle Morgan’s Canon can be justified under any interpretation (including views Morgan did not consider). To answer this, the question which interpretation is historically most accurate is of minor importance. For a good discussion of Morgan’s view of the different methods see Sober (1998). A very good discussion of Morgan’s Canon from a historical point of view can be found in Thomas (2001).
It should be mentioned that the conceptions discussed in the following sections do not constitute an exhaustive list of all suggestions for how one can understand the notion of a psychological scale.
Note that although according to Karin-D’Arcy higher (derived) psychological processes are additional processes, the notion of causal priority is also consistent with lower (ancestral) processes evolving into higher ones. In this case the higher process would substitute the lower one, a possibility that will play a role for the question of justification.
Thanks to Hans-Johann Glock for pointing this possibility out to me. For his own view see Glock, Animal Minds—Conceptual Problems (2016).
In fact this is close to Morgan’s original idea that the method we use in animal psychology is based on double induction. See also Sect. 3.3.1.
This is not a purely theoretical objection. The nature of concepts, beliefs, theory of mind, causal understanding etc. is subject of ongoing debates in philosophy.
Obviously there is also the possibility that the behavioral output of a psychological process doesn’t even overlap with the output of another. But in this case, the two processes can’t be rival explanation for one and the same behavior and thus this case is irrelevant for the present discussion.
For instance it has been argued that false explanations don’t really explain anything.
I can’t defend this claim in this paper. But it can be read as a concession to Morgan’s Canon because it opens the possibility that Morgan’s Canon picks out better explanations even if it turns out that these explanations are not more likely to be true than alternatives.
It should be noted, however, that both Morgan, and Povinelli and Vonk (2006) don’t interpret that as speaking in favor of higher-level explanations, but rather for discarding this kind of simplicity (cognitive salience) as relevant, since it ,,is no necessary criterion for it’s truth“ (Morgan 1894, p. 54). This supports the claim that it’s in terms of truth, not explanatory power that Morgan’s Canon should be justified, as I argue below.
The term likeliness is used in its ordinary usage in the English language as a synonym for probability. It refers to the probability of an explanatory hypothesis in the light of the evidence (Pr(H|E)). This is not to be confused with the technical term likelihood which refers to “the probability that the [hypothesis] confers to [the evidence]” (Sober 2009, p. 120). In other words, the likelihood of an explanatory hypothesis H on evidence E expresses “the degree to which the hypothesis predicts the data given the background information” (Joyce 2008) and it is represented by “Pr(E|H)”.
Here I am following Fitzpatrick (2008) with his assumption that parsimony is a special kind of simplicity.
Strictly speaking, this is only true if the probability of both conjuncts is \(>\)0 (if it wasn’t, they couldn’t be alternative explanations that call for Morgan’s Canon) and the probability of the conjunction is \(<\)1.
This example fits both the scale of causal priority and the scale of conceptual entailment.
This is just to say that ontologically more parsimonious explanations are not more likely to be true in virtue of being ontologically more parsimonious. In the next section I’ll discuss whether these probabilities change if we assess them on the basis of our empirical knowledge.
In fact this seems to be true for every conception of a psychological scale, since what is being ranked are types of processes rather than tokens.
There is a debate whether this is true for the question of ToM in animals. Some argue that mind-readers exploit the same behavioral cues as behavior readers and thus the learning history must be the same and cannot be used to determine which ability underlies an animal’s behavior (Penn and Povinelli 2007; Penn et al. 2008). This view has been challenged by others who argue that the benefit of mind-reading is precisely that it allows a subject to interpret behavioral cues on the basis of inference rather than merely from previous experience with the same cue (Buckner 2014; Sober 2015). In this case, mind-readers would have to learn different things than behavior-readers to produce similar behavior and this difference in learning trajectories could be exploited to determine which abilities underlie a behavior in question. I am sympathetic to the second view.
Although it’s true that lower psychological processes are more likely to be found in animals than higher processes according to the scales based on causal priority and (because of its implicit evolutionary claim) conceptual entailment, as I argued in Sect. 3.3.2 these are the wrong probabilities to compare.
This probably also corresponds to the view of Shettleworth (2013).
Alternatively, it might be argued that all species are relevant, but to different degrees. In this case, our knowledge concerning closely related or behaviorally similar species would carry more weight than that of others. The conclusion, however, would still be the same.
Cladistic parsimony can even be assessed without looking at behavior: all we have to look for is whether the most closely related species have a certain property/ability or not.
Note that this is not only a problem for my position, but for every position including Morgan’s Canon. Showing that it picks out better explanations presupposes being able to identify better explanations.
Inconclusive evidence just means that the available evidence doesn’t make one explanation more likely than an alternative. Thus, cases where we lack any evidence also count as cases where the evidence is inconclusive.
Not only do we not have to believe in the hypothesis we are testing to continue scientific investigation, the hypothesis we should choose will often be the higher-level explanation. A good example from comparative psychology can be found in Fitzpatrick (2008, p. 236). There he argues that von Frisch ’s (1967) working under the hypothesis that honeybees communicate with each other made him investigate the topic and discover the communicative function of the bee-dance. More generally, if we adopt Sober’s conception of higher and lower psychological abilities, what we should do in cases where we can explain a certain behavior with two different psychological processes is to check whether we also find behavior that is not in the overlap of the two processes (Sober 1998, p. 238). If there is a behavioral inclusion relation, this will always be the higher process.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been generously supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung. I’d also like to thank Albert Newen, Hanjo Glock, Cameron Buckner, Peter Brössel and Markus Werning for discussion, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism and their extremely helpful comments on the manuscript.
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Starzak, T. Interpretations without justification: a general argument against Morgan’s Canon. Synthese 194, 1681–1701 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1013-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1013-4