Animal Consciousness: Paradigm Change in the Life Sciences

摘要

This paper is a review of the breakthroughs in the empirical study of animals. Over the past five years, a change in basic assumptions about animals and their inner lives has occurred. (For a recent illustration of this paradigm change in the news, see van Schaik 2006.) Old-school scientists proceeded by and large as if animals were merely highly complex machines. Behaviorism was admired for its consistently rigorous methodology, mirroring classical physics in its focus on quantifiable observation. In the old analytic climate, claims that animals are sentient raised methodological and ideological problems and seemed debatable at best. Bolder claims, that animals are intelligent, or even self-aware in a way that is for all practical purposes human, were regarded as unfounded.