Ethology: The Narrative Turn

Distinguishing their work from the causalist approaches of objectivist ethology, sociobiology, or cognitive ethology, a growing number of ethologists lay claim to the possibility of describing what animals do through more or less complex narratives. Narration becomes a methodological tool in its own right. Animals thus become characters as in novels. This is an epistemological choice. Our capacity to perceive the complexity of animal lives is tied to our capacity to tell ourselves stories in which animals are the heroes. These animals are not robots. They are subjects, individuals, and even persons. From this results a new and transpecific form of third-person narration. This approach still relies, however, on a set of very carefully collected field data and requires a great familiarity with observed animals. It then becomes possible to concern oneself with the individual strategies of particular animals rather than solely with behaviors that would be common to all members of a given species. The recourse to narrative as a means of understanding animal intelligence is especially pertinent as we become increasingly aware that animals themselves tell stories and that our concepts of narrative must expand beyond the human. Knowing whether animals have narrative structures is a philosophical question before it is a biological one. The desire to extend narrativity to the animal necessarily modifies what narrativity signifies. We perceive in animals a processual narrativity, a behavioral narrativity, and a fictional narrativity. The study of animals forces to rethink what a fiction is and compels one to consider its phylogensis in a rigorous manner without locating its origins in Homo sapiens.

Bridging Captive and Wild Studies: Behavioral Plasticity and Social Complexity in Theropithecus gelada

Cognitive ethology explores the ability of animals to flexibly adapt their behavior to rapid physical and social environment fluctuations. Although there is a historical dichotomy between field and captive studies, recently, a growing interest in questions that sit at the intersection of cognitive and adaptive perspectives has helped bridge this divide. By focusing on Theropithecus gelada, we discuss the three main reasons why this hybrid approach is extremely successful. First, captive and wild studies provide data at different social, spatial, and temporal scales that can be synthesized to give a fuller picture of the behavior. Secondly, apparently conflicting results from captive and wild settings are powerful tools to explore behavioral flexibility and latent behavioral tendencies. Third, the different settings provide ways of validating and exploring behaviors that are noticed in the other setting. Although we were able to bring together our captive and wild research to demonstrate these ideas, we could have obtained a more integrated vision on the proximate and ultimate gelada behavioral and cognitive strategies if we had considered this hybrid approach from the beginning. We hope that this manuscript stimulates scholars in designing their studies by taking into account the incredible potential of a complementary captive-wild research approach.

Attributing Knowledge

The word “know” is revealed as vague, applicable to fallible agents, factive, and criterion-transcendent. It is invariant in its meaning across contexts and invariant relative to different agents. Only purely epistemic properties affect its correct application—not the interests of agents or those who attribute the word to agents. These properties enable “know” to be applied correctly—as it routinely is—to cognitive agents ranging from sophisticated human knowers, who engage in substantial metacognition, to various animals, who know much less and do much less, if any, metacognition, to nonconscious mechanical devices such as drones, robots, and the like. These properties of the word “know” suffice to explain the usage phenomena that contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists invoke to place pressure on an understanding of the word that treats its application as involving no interests of agents, or others. It is also shown that the factivity and the fallibilist-compatibility of the word “know” explain Moorean paradoxes, the preface paradox, and the lottery paradox. A fallibility-sensitive failure of knowledge closure is given along with a similar failure of rational-belief closure. The latter explains why rational agents can nevertheless believe A and B, where A and B contradict each other. A substantial discussion of various kinds of metacognition is given—as well as a discussion of the metacognition literature in cognitive ethology. An appendix offers a new resolution of the hangman paradox, one that turns neither on a failure of knowledge closure nor on a failure of KK.

Social Cognition in the Real World: Reconnecting the Study of Social Cognition With Social Reality

The scientific study of social cognition is a growing field which promises to deliver valuable insights into how the brain underpins human’s social success. However, the poor ecological validity of many popular paradigms constrains the progress of social cognitive scientists. Highly simplistic and contrived stimuli are commonplace, despite the complexity and unpredictability of real-world social experiences. A shift toward a cognitive ethology approach would allow us to determine if, when, and how specific cognitive processes contribute to real-world functioning. This shift would enable us to break new ground in our understanding of the cognitions which underpin so much of the human experience. To address these questions, we must innovate and test social cognitions in dynamic, multimodal, context-embedded, and interactive environments. Furthermore, measuring responses dynamically and in terms of accuracy (rather than based on arbitrary criteria defined by the experimenter), would improve ecological validity. Finally, researchers should take into account sample diversity and participants’ motivation to ensure the generalizability of findings to everyday interactions. This article considers these issues in turn and outlines recent research which demonstrates how they might be overcome.

Three levels of naturalistic knowledge

A recent naturalistic epistemological account suggests that there are three nested basic forms of knowledge: procedural knowledge-how, conceptual knowledge-what, and propositional knowledge-that. These three knowledge-forms are grounded in cognitive neuroscience and are mapped to procedural, semantic, and episodic long-term memory respectively. This article investigates and integrates the neuroscientifically grounded account with knowledge-accounts from cognitive ethology and cognitive psychology. It is found that procedural and semantic memory, on a neuroscientific level of analysis, matches an ethological reliabilist account. This formation also matches System 1 from dual process theory on a psychological level, whereas the addition of episodic memory, on the neuroscientific level of analysis, can account for System 2 on the psychological level. It is furthermore argued that semantic memory (conceptual knowledge-what) and the cognitive ability of categorization are linked to each other, and that they can be fruitfully modeled within a conceptual spaces framework.