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Belief Attribution in Animals: On How to Move Forward Conceptually and Empirically

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Abstract

There is considerable debate in comparative psychology and philosophy over whether nonhuman animals can attribute beliefs. The empirical studies that suggest that they can are shown to be inconclusive, and the main philosophical and empirical arguments that purport to show they cannot are shown to be invalid or weak. What is needed to move the debate and the field forward, it is argued, is a fundamentally new experimental protocol for testing belief attribution in animals, one capable of distinguishing genuine belief-attributing subjects from their perceptual-state attributing and behavior-reading counterparts. Such a protocol is outlined and defended. The rest, it is argued, is in the hands of experimentalists.

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Notes

  1. There is a vocal dissenting minority, however, who maintain that these animals are at best gifted behavior-readers (Heyes 1998; Povinelli and Vonk 2006; Penn and Povinelli 2007).

  2. These ideas have an obvious affinity to Wittgenstein’s solution to the paradox of rule following, which Davidson states his indebtedness.

  3. Quite independent of the question of language, it seems rather unlikely that animals would have such objectively normative ideas of truth and falsity. Animals, after all, are practical beings that are concerned with, and arguably only with, doing the ‘right’ things (i.e., doing what will maximize their own well-being or fitness, and perhaps that of their kin, too), not with doing the right thing for the objectively true reasons. It is difficult to see how a distinction between a true belief and a subjectively useful one, or the idea of getting things right because one’s belief is true, period, would have any value within the animal kingdom. See Putnam (1992) for a similar argument.

  4. The philosophical roots of this distinction can be traced back at least as far as Frege (1918/1977). According to the OED, the distinction in English can be traced back at least to the 13th century. Also see the entries on ‘belief’ and ‘judgment’ in Honderich (1995), as well as Thau (2002), for more contemporary uses of the distinction in philosophy.

  5. In his critique of Descartes’ beast-machine argument, Norman Malcolm (1977) once made a similar point. He argued that while Descartes was correct in holding that animals were unable to have thoughts in the object sense (i.e., entertain propositions), he was mistaken in thinking that this meant that they could not have thoughts in the act sense (i.e., think or believe things). My point, though similar to Malcolm’s, is against Davidson’s argument and at the level of concepts of belief, not beliefs themselves. My claim is that although animals may be incapable of having the concept of belief in the object sense (i.e., a concept of something like a proposition that can be true or false), as Davidson purports to show, it does not follow that they are incapable of having the concept of belief in the act sense (i.e., a concept of believing something).

  6. The issue, recall, is not whether animals have beliefs—it is assumed they do—but whether they attribute beliefs.

  7. This is surely the case, though of no help for my purpose, if animal desires take propositions as objects, too, for these would be represented proposition of which the animal does not believe.

  8. The main alternative interpretations of the data here are that the animals solve the problems by trial and error or by generalizing from similar problems solved in the past. However, in most of these studies, these interpretations are ruled out by the novelty of the problem itself and by the non-incremental manner in which the animals solve the problem.

  9. Discrepant belief attributions are often called “false” belief attributions in the developmental and comparative literature. Despite its connotation, the term does not mean that the attributor applies the concept of falsity in his representation of another’s belief. Four-year-old children are taken to pass standard false-belief tests (see Wimmer and Perner 1983), for example, not by answering a truth-value question regarding the protagonist’s belief (e.g., is his belief about the chocolate bar’s location true or false?) but by correctly answering questions about where the protagonist will look for the chocolate bar, or where he thinks it is located. The answers that the children give are taken as indicating a capacity to attribute “false” beliefs merely in the sense that they indicate the children’s ability to attribute beliefs (about the chocolate bar’s location) that they themselves do not have—not that they are able to attribute beliefs that they describe or represent as being false. The same is true for the few “false” belief studies with animals. At most what they are designed to show is that the animals can attribute beliefs to others (e.g., that the experimenter believes that the food is in the right-hand bucket, since that is the one he last saw baited) which they do not themselves have (e.g., the food is in the left-hand bucket, since the buckets have been switched). They are clearly not designed to test whether the animals represent the experimenter’s belief as being false.

  10. Children younger than 4 years also seem to be introspectively unaware of their own occurrent thoughts. In a series of studies by Flavell and colleagues (1993, 1995), sixteen 5-year-olds were presented with a problem while sitting in a particular location that required them to think of or make a judgment about a target object. Immediately after making their judgment, the children were asked to change locations. While sitting in their new location, they were asked by the experimenter whether they had been thinking about anything (and if so, what) while they were sitting in the first location. Only 19% of the children, when asked this question, said they had been thinking about the target object. Similar results were achieved in the follow-up studies that were designed to eliminate confounding variables, such a memory constraints. From the results of their studies, Flavell and colleagues conclude that “preschoolers have very limited introspective skills” of their occurrent thoughts (Flavell et al. 1995, p. 76). If Flavell and colleagues are correct in what their studies show about normal 5-year-olds, then it seem very unlikely that children of this age or younger are capable of entertaining thoughts consciously, holding them in mind so as to consider and evaluate how they relate to each other logically and evidentially, as Bermúdez’s model of belief attribution requires.

  11. ‘H’ and ‘F’ here are understood by the attributing animal to be contraries.

  12. In an earlier study that did not involve the unknown-shift condition, subject chimps were shown to prefer the cup on the table that the competitor had not seen baited (compared to the cup on the table that the competitor did see baited) only when the subject chimp was required to choose a cup after the competitor had made its choice. The rationale here is that since the competitor is likely to choose the cup that it saw baited rather than the one it did not see baited, the subject chimp should, in choosing second, choose the cup that the competitor did not see baited; but when the subject chimp is allowed to choose first, it really does not matter which cup it chooses, since it knows that both cups are baited and both available to choose. Kaminski and colleagues took the results of this study as indicating that their subject chimps had an understanding of knowledge and ignorance in the competitor. The results from their second study (the false-belief study discussed above) would appear to belie this interpretation, however. For in that study, the subject chimps chose the higher-quality baited cup on the table more often in the unknown-lift condition (see above) than in the known-lift condition (i.e., the condition where both the subject chimp and the competitor chimp observe the food being lifted out of a cup and then replaced underneath it). But in both of these test conditions, the competitor chimp knew (having had seen) where the baited cup was. Thus, a subject chimp capable of discriminating between knowledge and ignorance in its competitor should have responded to these conditions in the same way (e.g., selecting the low-quality, guaranteed baited cup in each case).

  13. Gil Harman (1978) once made a similar point regarding Premack and Woodruff’s (1978) original discriminatory mindreading tests.

  14. It is possible that the fact that the chimps look at the not-chosen cup more often in the false-belief trials than in the true-belief trials is neither evidence of an implicit understanding of false belief (as Krachun and colleagues hypothesize) nor evidence of a feeling of uncertainty over which container is baited (as I hypothesize). However, I am not aware of a viable alternative to these two explanations. As way of proposing such an alternative, one referee suggested that the chimps’ differential looking behavior on the true- and false-belief trials might be explained on the hypothesis that the animals simply kept track of the food. I quote: “In the true belief condition the chosen cup [i.e., the cup the competitor reaches for] equals the cup with food whereas in the false belief condition the chosen cup and the cup with food are not the same, evoking looking toward the not-chosen cup.” But I do not see how this hypothesis can explain the chimps’ selection of cups in the false-belief trials. For the hypothesis appears to claim that the chimps in these trials actually know that the chosen cup is empty—it is, after all, this knowledge (and not the chimps’ feeling of uncertainty, as I propose) that is supposed to cause the animals to look longer at the not-chosen cup. But if the chimps possess this knowledge—if they know that the chosen cup is empty—why do they select it? Why don’t they select the not-chosen cup? It is not as if chimps are incapable of reasoning by exclusion (see Beran 2010). So the hypothesis makes it a bit mysterious why the chimps would select the chosen cup on these trials. However, it may be that I do not fully understand the hypothesis. Be this as it may, it is important to point out that even if the hypothesis can be made to explain the chimps’ selection of cups on the false-belief trials, the hypothesis is quite consistent with my general complaint against Krachun and colleagues’ bait-and-switch test. For the hypothesis attempts to explain the performance of the chimps on the test trials, not in terms of their failing to understand false beliefs, but in terms of their misunderstanding the tests as a discrimination task involving the selection of a baited cup rather than as a task requiring them to predict the competitor’s behavior in terms of what the competitor believes.

  15. It may be wondered whether children show a similar line of development. Do they first come to discriminate appearance and reality and then use their understanding of appearances to represent how the world appears to others (though they know the world is not that way)? Given currently available evidence from developmental psychology, one might think that it is actually the other way around for children. Baillargeon and colleagues (2010), for example, have shown that children well before their second birthday appear capable of attributing false-perceptions and false-beliefs to others, but Flavell and colleagues’ (1986) classic appearance-reality discrimination studies appear to show that children younger than 4 years have great difficultly with discriminating appearance from reality (cf. Sapp et al. 2000). From these studies, it would appear that children first come to attribute false-perceptions and false-beliefs and then come to discriminate appearance and reality. But it is just as plausible that children younger than 4 years of age are capable of discriminating appearance and reality, but they have not yet been given the right sort of test that would allow them to manifest this ability. After all, the reason why Baillargeon and colleagues were able to show that infants before their second birthday were capable of attributing false-perceptions and false-beliefs was that they used a violation-of-expectancy (VOE) protocol—a type of spontaneous-response task—that did not require the children to respond to the verbal requests or instructions of an experimenter (which would make it an elicit-response tasks). Traditional false-belief protocols (e.g., the Sally-Anne task) are all elicit-response tasks and are known, for this very reason, to be difficult for children under 4 years of age to pass (see Baillargeon et al. 2010, p. 113–114). Interestingly, Flavell et al. (1986) appearance-reality tasks are also all elicit-response tasks. And so it is quite possible that children will show earlier signs of appearance-reality discrimination (perhaps, even before their second birthday), as they have for false-perception and false-belief attribution, when they are tested with the appropriately designed spontaneous-response VOE protocol. In section 4.1 I describe just such a protocol that can be used on children as well as with chimpanzee and other primates.

  16. Actually there is more than just this one way presented here. In Lurz (forthcoming), I present another way to understand the difference between belief attribution and perceptual-state attribution in animals which appeals to the notion of ‘abstractness’ rather than ‘revisibility.’

  17. The notion of ‘revisability’ here is similar to Jonathan Bennett (1976) notion of ‘educatability,’ which he also took to be the distinguishing mark of beliefs vis-à-vis perception. See also Fodor (1983, 1990).

  18. The term is from Kanizsa (1979). Kanizsa distinguished two kinds of filling-in illusions. In some instances, the visual system fills in the missing shape of an occluded object without filling in other properties characteristic of the sense modality of vision, such as color and brightness. The represented part of the occluded shape, in such cases, is amodally filled in. The black bar in Fig. 3a, for example, is seen as complete but the visual system does not fill in the color or brightness of the occluded section of the bar. In other cases of filling in, however, the color and brightness of the illusory shape are filled in as well, such as in Kanizsa triangle illusion (not shown here). In such cases, the illusory object is represented with all of the properties (e.g., color, brightness, shape, etc.) associated with the modality of vision. Thus, Kanizsa described the illusory object in such cases as being modally completed by the visual system.

  19. Krachun et al. (2009) received positive results with an appearance-reality (AR) task using magnifying/minimizing lenses similar to one outlined in Lurz (2009). Their results, however, do not bear directly on the AR task here, since they do not involve the use of occluded objects. More important, Krachun et al.’s study faces problems that the above AR task avoids. In their study, chimpanzees were trained to request (by pointing to) the larger of two grapes that were presented to them. In the lens-test, the animals watched while a small grape was placed behind a magnifying lens and a big grape was placed behind a minimizing lens. The researchers discovered that more than half of their chimps in the test condition requested the grape behind the minimizing lens over the grape behind the magnifying lens. The results of the study clearly show that these chimps understood that a larger grape was behind the minimizing lens, but they do not show that the chimps grasp an appearance-reality distinction with respect to the grapes behind the lenses. Rather, the chimps may have simply come to treat the distorted images projected on the lenses as just that, images, and not as real grapes behind the lenses that appear to have size properties that they do not really have. The chimps may have learned that when a large grape is placed behind a lens, the lens presents on its surface an image of a small grape behind it, which the chimps subsequently use as a way to keep track of which lens the large grape was placed behind. Chimpanzees, after all, are known to use images on surfaces, such as those on mirrors and videos as well as photographic images, to locate hidden objects (see Gallup 1982; Menzel et al. 1985; Boysen and Kuhlmeier 2002; Poss and Rochat 2003). Unfortunately, the reverse-contingency tests that Krachun and colleagues use do not control for this possibility, since they do not test for whether the chimpanzees are able to use an image of a small grape to keep track of the container that contains the large grape. The AR task described in this section avoids this problem, since it does not involve the use of distorted images on the surface of lenses. Moreover, the task is ecologically more plausible since chimpanzees (and their evolutionary ancestors) are much more likely to have encountered amodal completion illusions in their natural habitats than illusions produced by magnifying/minimizing lenses.

  20. In humans, amodal completion of partially occluded objects has been observed to require between 200–400 ms of attention to the stimulus (see Sekuler and Palmer 1992). I assume that the same holds for chimpanzees, but this will need to be tested.

  21. Neuroscientists routinely present video displays of occluded objects to animal and human subjects while recording their neurological activity with fMRI scans or single-cell recording techniques. Using these methods, researchers have located the cortical areas in the monkey and human brain (V2 and lateral occipital complex, respectively) where amodal completion takes place (see Bakin et al. 2000; Weigelt et al. 2007). It may eventually become possible to do the same with chimpanzees. If so, the above AR test can be administered to the chimp while it undergoes an fMRI scan. The recordings can be used to determine whether the animal did in fact see the partially occluded stimulus (e.g., third frame in Fig. 4) as complete, as well as to map those regions of the animal’s brain that were involved in its distinguishing the apparent properties of the stimulus from its real properties (i.e., provided that the animal’s looking-time responses in the test conditions indicate that it made an AR distinction regarding the occluded stimulus).

  22. Such methods are routinely used by magicians to evoke surprise in their audience, as in Goldin’s box sawing trick. So one can think of the AR test that I am proposing here as a kind of magic trick for animals. It is not entirely surprising, then, that when I showed my 3 year-old the actual video sequence illustrated in Fig. 4a, he exclaimed “Daddy, that’s magic!”

  23. Follow-up tests can be run using a set of different types of objects, both familiar and unfamiliar to the animal, as well as different types of occluders and settings (e.g., vertical as opposed to horizontal occluders, three-dimensional backgrounds as opposed to two-dimensional or blank backgrounds).

  24. Chimpanzees and other primates have been trained to use joysticks to manipulate objects on computer screens in a number of studies (see, e.g., Hopkins et al. 1996; Beran and Rumbaugh 2001).

  25. To make it understandable to the test animal why the CGI chimp might be repelled by banana pieces, the pieces can be made to look strange or unappealing by (say) giving their ends unusual shapes or colors, as I have tried to do here. If this proves to be unfeasible—if the testing animal simply cannot comprehend why any creature might be repelled by banana pieces no matter how unusual or unappealing they may appear—then other stimuli can be used. For example, the stimuli may be, respectively, an attractive-looking ball (attractive stimulus) and a ball with a jagged, triangular wedge cut out to make it look like an open mouth with sharp teeth (repulsive stimulus).

  26. If there is a concern that the test animal might not understand that when the CGI chimp is off screen it does not “see” what is happening on screen, then a barrier can be placed between the entering CGI chimp and the apparent whole banana. The CGI chimp can then be shown to move around the barrier (or the barrier removed) before moving toward the apparent whole banana or exiting the screen. This goes for the familiarization phase as well. See Surian et al. (2007) for a similar use of a barrier structure in their experiment.

  27. Could the behavior-reading animal mistakenly take the aligned banana pieces to be a whole occluded banana? After all, that is how they visually appear to the animal. Perhaps, it might be suggested, the test animal simply cannot discriminate between the way the aligned banana pieces look to it and the way the pieces really are, and simply takes them to be as they perceptually appear (as a whole banana behind the bar). But if the test animal is incapable of making such an appearance-reality distinction with partially occluded objects, then it is unlikely to have passed the AR screening test described above. And if it didn’t pass the AR screening test, it would not have been allowed to participate in the belief-attribution test here. Hence, the only behavior-reading animal that would likely pass the AR test and, thus, participate in this belief-attribution test would be one that would likely take the CGI chimp in test (II) to have a direct line of gaze to what is in fact (contrary to visual appearances) banana pieces. And such a behavior-reader, as argued above, would be expected to predict that the CGI chimp will leave the scene in this test video, which is different from what its belief-attributing counterpart is expected to predict.

  28. Obviously ‘ignorance’ here does not mean having a mistaken belief, since the knowledge-ignorance attributing animal, by hypothesis, lacks an understanding of belief. Rather, ‘ignorance’ here simply means not knowing.

  29. After all, it’s false that the CGI chimp in the familiarization videos knew that the whole banana on the screen was not a whole banana; so it is true that it did not know that it was not a whole banana. By generalizing from the familiarization videos, then, the CGI chimp can be understood by the knowledge-ignorance attributing animal as being attracted to stimuli of which it doesn’t know are not whole bananas.

  30. Of course, the CGI chimp has reason to believe that the stimulus isn’t banana pieces but a whole occluded banana, since it looks to be a whole occluded banana to the CGI chimp, and the CGI chimp has no reason to believe things are other than they appear, given that it did not see the banana pieces fitted to the bar. However, the knowledge-ignorance attributing chimp cannot appeal to this fact, since it lacks an understanding of beliefs in others.

  31. Again, it’s false that the CGI chimp in the familiarization videos knew that the banana pieces on the screen were not banana pieces; and so is true that it did not know that the banana pieces were not banana pieces. So by generalizing from the familiarization videos, the CGI chimp can be said to be repelled by stimuli of which it does not know that they are not banana pieces.

  32. This is very much in line with Ruth Millikan’s (2006) “pushme/pullyu” theory of mental representations in animals, as one referee kindly pointed out. On Millikan’s theory, animals’ cognitive states (e.g., states of perception and perceptual belief) function not only to ‘say’ how the world is but to provide the animal with a motivation to act on the world. “These are representations,” Millikan writes, “that are undifferentiated between being indicative and being imperative, between describing and directing” (p.119). What I am suggesting above is that animals ought to be interpreted as attributing such hybrid cognitive-motivational states when they are interpreted as attributing beliefs. Would this mean that such attributions are not strictly belief attributions? I do not see that it does—at least, not immediately. Kantians and other anti-Humeans have provided a number of intuitively plausible cases of beliefs that motivate much in the way that desires do but are beliefs nonetheless—see Price (1989) and Weintraub (2007), as well as Lewis (1988) for an opposing view. If Kantians can attribute beliefs that function as desires, I see no reason why animals could not as well.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Peter Carruthers, Marietta Dindo, Tad Zawidski, Francys Subiaul, Claudia Uller, and two anonymous referees for their very helpful advice on earlier drafts of this paper.

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Lurz, R.W. Belief Attribution in Animals: On How to Move Forward Conceptually and Empirically. Rev.Phil.Psych. 2, 19–59 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-010-0042-z

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