On Sat, 13 Aug 1994, Dale Goble wrote:

> I have long thought that the most egregious form of anthropomorphizing is
> to deny that animals have any psychic life. Descartes (who brought us
> other wonderful dualisms) argued that animals were simply automatons
> incapable of any feelings. The extreme anti-anthropomorphizing position
> views humans as separated from <mere animals> by an unbridgeable chasm.
> This view is part of the more general presumption that we humans are not
> part of nature, etc.

I'd better clarify my position, to avoid any more unfortunate
misunderstandings. The comment that Dale is responding to was too brief,
and I have to explain better. My point is simply that people tend to
engage in naive anthropomorphizing that is dangerous and destructive.

No serious biologist can have a Cartesian view of the world. We naturally
take an evolutionary and ecological viewpoint, which shows that there is
no unbridgeable chasm between humans and other animals, and that humans
are intimately connected to the natural world. At the same time,
biologists know something about comparative anatomy of nervous systems and
about comparative ethology. This knowledge indicates that most animals
can hardly have psychic experience of the world that remotely resembles
human experience. (And, to avoid another misunderstanding, "psychic"
merely refers to the normal waking experience of the world that all normal
people have, not to the so-called extrasensory experiences that many
people claim.) Looking at vertebrates, however, and especially at birds
and mammals, we see increasing complexity of brain structure and more
instances of behavior that is not just a series of fixed-action patterns,
including greater ability to learn and, often, the development of real
personality in individual animals. Based on this evidence, we have to
believe that at least some birds and mammals have psychic experience that
approaches that of humans, but how much it is like ours we can only guess.
We don't know, for instance, just how important is the ability to use
language creatively in forming psychic experience. We humans live in a
largely linguistic world, shaped by named concepts and categories; our
lives are rich with feelings of beauty, love, empathy, ambitions,
memories, anticipations, longings, disappointments, and so on, but we
don't know how much these feelings depend on our linguistic abilities and
to what extent animals lacking these abilities can have the same feelings.

Now, my point is simply that a naive anthropomorphizing ignores these
difficulties and subtleties. It automatically assumes that the psychic lives
of all animals (well, at least birds and mammals) are like those of humans;
that, therefore, we ought to have the same concerns for their lives that we
do for human life, and that they ought to have the same rights that humans
have. I don't want to get into issues regarding pets and other domestic
animals, which are outside my interests and the interests of this discussion
group. But in ecological matters, this naive anthropomorphizing is
disastrous. It allows people to give feral cats equal weight with the wildlife
they destroy. It allows people to try to protect the poor little chickadee
from the sharp-shin and the poor little pigeon from the falcon.

I apologize to Tweeters for the long reply, but I couldn't let my earlier
remarks stand naked and defenseless.

> I am <not> arguing for the maudlin/romantic nonsense peddled by Disney --
> only that Descartes' position is more prevalent in our culture (it <is>
> reinforced by christian dogma and market economics) and that his position
> is one of the core ideological bases of the current environmental
> crises.

Ah, that's a point I can agree with!

Burt Guttman guttmanb at elwha.evergreen.edu
The Evergreen State College Voice: 206-866-6000, x. 6755
Olympia, WA 98505 FAX: 206-866-6794