Lexicon of Arguments

 

I 378
Mind/Animal/Consciousness/Representation/Sterelny: what would show that an animal has a "theory of mind"?
>Theory of mind, >Animals, >Animal language.
Heyes/Whiten: Maybe the ability for a role exchange? Later Vs.
I 379
Premack/Woodruff: E.g. Chimpanzee Sarah sorted out photos that showed the solution of problems!
HeyesVs: every single case can be clarified.
Method/Heyes/Sterelny: however, it is little economical to "explain away" every single performance. One can see that there is no uniform "spoilsport theory".
>Method, >Theories, >Explanations.
Gorillas/Byrnes: gorillas do not learn by learning individual "chunks" of movement, but they capture a behavioral program.
>Learning, >Behavior.
Imitation/Sterelny: although there is a lot of anecdotal evidence about imitation in human beings, the experimental evidence for imitation is astonishingly narrow.
>Imitation.
I 380
But in the positive cases, it is impressive because it shows the ability of an observer to extract a program of motoric movements.
>Observation, >Generality, >Generalization.
HeyesVs: it doubts that the concept of a behavioral program is unclear. Delimitation to a series of movements or behavioral sequences are not clear.
Sterelny: but we should be able to distinguish something empirically:
1. If social learning consists in imprecisely imitating, different individuals should not commit the same errors. The errors would have to happen at random.
2. Imitation could be distinguished from other types of social learning if a result could be achieved in more than one way. If a model is needed, it should not only contain something about the objectives but also about the means.
>Models, >Goals, >Purpose-means-rationality.