It’s Like He’s Thinking or Something

One day, your dog starts to speak in what sounds like somekind of Scandinavian language. She looks at you, cocks herhead, and says, “Getum við farið í göngutúr?“

All of a sudden, the familiar has become monstrous. Youknew your dog well enough up till now; you looked into her eyesevery day and saw her loyalty and affection. But now you lookat her in horror. Animals aren’t supposed to talk! Worse yet,what is she thinking? What is her plan?

We usually feel as though we understand our friends, par-ents, co-workers, and partners. But when our friends act out ofcharacter, we tend to be temporarily baffled. We wonder whythey’re behaving that way. At least with such people we haverecourse to a shared language, which serves as a tool to try tocome back to a point of understanding. Without the luxury of acommon tongue, gaining understanding of people’s unexpectedacts is all the more difficult.

This problem is especially salient in the Planet of the Apesmovies. In the original film, for example, Charlton Heston’sTaylor tries to make friends with the mute humans, but inresponse to Taylor’s friendly greeting, they shrink back in ter-ror. Humans aren’t supposed to talk! Or in Rise of the Planet ofthe Apes, after Caesar exposes the apes in the San BrunoPrimate Shelter to ALZ 113, remember how they gathertogether in a kind of conference, systematically grunting to oneanother, planning their uprising? John Landon, the boss of thefacility, looks on bewildered. In our world, other apes aren’tsupposed to plot against us!

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1It’s Like He’s Thinking or SomethingKRISTIN ALEXANDRA ANDREWS

Planet of the Apes 1st_HIP HOP & philosophy 2/23/13 12:49 PM Page 3

When individuals act as they’re supposed to act, we feel asif we can understand them even without language. You under-stand your dog’s desire to go for a walk when she ambles up tothe door, cocks her head at you, and barks. But when she asksfor a walk in Icelandic, that’s when you start to worry. New par-ents carefully study subtle distinctions in the tonality of criesto figure out whether their babies want food, a diaper change,or sleep. Or they download the Baby Cry Translator app. Evenwith an iPhone, dealing with crying babies can be frustrating,but it is rarely scary. Talking babies, like babies with revolvingheads, are another matter all together.

Just as we can understand babies and dogs who can’t talk,little children can come to understand us. In this sense, humanchildren can mindread—they can predict what others are goingto do, and think about what others want and how others feel.Mindreading is especially handy when someone acts in a waywe wouldn’t expect, because a developed mindreading abilityallows us to figure out people’s reasons for acting. Why doesNova touch Taylor’s neck, the bruise on her own arm, and thenthe bruise on Taylor’s arm? Zira explains Nova’s pantomime byreading Nova’s mind: she remarks that Nova remembers theblood transfusion.

A lack of shared language is not the only impediment to ourcross-species mindreading success. We also often suffer from alack of familiarity with the normal behavior of the mindreadeein question. Cornelius first scoffs at Zira’s interpretation ofNova’s pantomime, and many of our attempts to mindreadother species are likewise controversial. For example, when vis-iting Samboja Lestari Orangutan Rehabilitation Center inBorneo, I got to know a young orphan male orangutan namedCecep, who spent his days in a forest school so he could learnthe skills he needed to live in the wild.

Cecep liked to play in the dirt, and the babysitters who tookcare of the orangutans would often use leaves to wipe the dirtoff his fur. One day I watched Cecep sit in front of Anne Russon,a psychologist who studies orangutan cognition. Cecep had dirton top of his head, and he picked up a leaf and handed it toAnne. She cleaned the dirt off his head with the leaf, just likethe babysitters often did. Then Anne dropped the leaf so Cecepgave her another. But this time Anne played dumb, and didn’tclean Cecep’s head. After a few seconds, Cecep took the leaf

4 Kristin Alexandra Andrews


back from Anne, rubbed it on his own head, and then gave itback to her. Anne got the message, so she cleaned Cecep’s headagain. Anne and I interpreted Cecep’s act of handing Anne theleaf as a request to clean his head; he was assuming that therewas a shared expectation about what to do with the leaf. Whenhe didn’t get what he wanted, Cecep had to elaborate, and pan-tomime what he wanted Anne to do with the leaf. Anne and Ilater wrote about this and other instances of orangutan pan-tomime in the journal Biology Letters.

Some scientists think we are unjustified in our interpreta-tion of Cecep’s behavior. They do not think that Cecep trulyunderstands the interaction; his behavior is mere mimicry, orcoincidence. Without controlled experimental studies, some sci-entists object, we can’t be sure what Cecep is thinking. (Wecan’t even be sure that he is thinking.) While some scientiststhink the problem of interpretation is an empirical problemthat could be investigated by different kinds of studies, it isperhaps more accurately described as a philosophical problem.This philosophical problem is that science alone cannot answerthe question of what Cecep is thinking, because animal cogni-tion research – like human psychology research – is groundedin folk psychology.

When philosophers speak of folk psychology, they mean ourunderstanding of others as people who act for reasons, whohave feelings and plans and moods and personalities. Folk psy-chology is the commonsense understanding of other minds thatemerges (in part) from mindreading. But how accurate is folkpsychology in the interpretation of other species? Are we rightto think that our dog is happy to see us, or that our cat thinksit is time for lunch? What exactly are we doing to other animalswhen we try to read their minds? And what makes us want tomindread another species in the first place?

It’s Like He’s Thinking or SomethingOne answer to the last question is that we want to mindreadother animals because we think they have minds. Philosopherslike René Descartes (1596–1650) and Donald Davidson(1917–2003) were never interested in asking what an animalthinks, because they believed that animals can’t think. Bothphilosophers argued that language is necessary for having

It’s Like He’s Thinking or Something 5


thoughts. After all, if someone doesn’t have words, how can wecharacterize what they are thinking using words? What arethey thinking in, if not in language?

There are a number of reasons to be unconvinced by thisline of thought. For one, some philosophers, such as JerryFodor, argue that animals might think in a language ofthought, while lacking an external language. We shouldn’tassume that because they don’t have the kind of language thatresults in blabber, animals don’t have language at all.Alternatively, it may be that animals—and humans—mightsometimes think in images, or diagrams, or some othermedium altogether; the assumption that humans think only inlanguage might actually be false, too. Indeed, if we accept thatbabies can think before they’re very good at using language, wehave to accept that thought without language is possible. Atthe end of the day, the arguments that language is required formind often come off as arguments from ignorance—’I can’timagine how someone can think without language, so it mustbe impossible’, the critic seems to say.

Sometimes we feel sure that someone has a mind eventhough they don’t talk. Consider how Taylor tries to show Zirathat he has a mind. Because he can’t talk at first, he has tomouth words in response to her questions. Zira is amazed byhis actions, and says to Dr. Zaius “Can you believe it? It lookslike he’s talking. . . . I could have sworn he was answering you.”Dr. Zaius, ever the good scientist, dismisses Taylor’s move-ments as nothing more than clever mimicry. Then when Zirawonders aloud how Taylor would do on the Hopkins manualdexterity test, and Taylor wiggles his fingers, she is astonished.. . . “Perhaps he understood.”

In this scene, Zira is trying to discern Taylor’s mind throughhis behavior; she’s mired in the problem of other minds.Philosophers have long grappled with the other minds prob-lem, which is a question about how we know that otherhumans have minds. I know that I have a mind, because Idirectly experience it—I feel my own pain and taste the foodthat goes into my own mouth. I think my own thoughts. But Ican’t taste the food you eat, or feel your pain, or think yourthoughts. At least not directly. Sure, you can tell me whatyou’re thinking, but maybe you’re just a cleverly designedrobot. Your speech isn’t direct evidence that you have a mind.



There are a couple ways philosophers have addressed theother minds problem. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) claimedthat he knows others have minds because he knows that he hasa mind, and that other people are like him in relevant ways.But for each similarity we find between two people, we can finda difference. I’m similar to you because I speak English. But Imight be different from you because I have a bad memory, orenjoy eating fried tempe, or am female. My physical body isprobably very similar to yours in a lot ways, but there are sub-tle differences between our bodies, including our brains.Because we might be different in important ways, we can’t usethe argument from analogy to defend our belief in other humanminds, much less other animal minds.

Another strategy for defending the existence of other mindsis to infer mind in order to explain behavior. If you don’t havea mind, I really don’t have a good explanation for why you’rereading this chapter right now. Just as Zira doesn’t have a goodalternative explanation for why Taylor is engaged in a conver-sational sort of give and take, or why he wiggles his fingerswhen she wonders aloud about his manual dexterity. Why doeshe do these things? He must understand! Nothing else makessense of his actions! The apes who want to figure out Taylorfinally conclude that he has a mind, because it’s the best wayto explain the sorts of things he does. Of course, once Taylorstarts talking, Caesar starts signing, and Koba writes Jacobs’sname on her tablet, others immediately accept that they haveminds, totally convinced by their use of language.

He Shows a Definite Gift for MimicryBut before Taylor uses language, not everyone is convinced byZira’s reasoning. What one person explains by appeal to mind,others explain in other terms. Dr. Zaius, for example, explainsthat Taylor, “shows a definite gift for mimicry”; and he at leastpretends to conclude that his explanation of Taylor’s tricks isbetter than Zira’s.

To decide whether Zira is justified in her interpretation ofTaylor’s behavior, or whether Anne and I were justified in ourinterpretation of Cecep’s, we have to do a little philosophy ofscience. When we explain something a human does (in theenterprise of either folk psychology or contemporary scientific



psychology), we often talk about what she thinks, or what shewants, or her emotions, moods, or personality traits. For mostof the twentieth century, the dominant way of thinking in psy-chology was behaviorism. Behaviorism avoided all talk aboutunobservable thinking processes or states of mind. For thebehaviorists, the idea that scientists could explain behavior interms of mental states such as wanting, hoping, or wonderingwas heresy.

Though behaviorism started losing traction for human psy-chology in the 1960s, it was still going strong in animal psy-chology. In the 1970s, the biologist Donald Griffin (1915–2003)challenged the behaviorist way of thinking in animal cognition,arguing that we need to talk about animals’ mental states toexplain some animal behavior. Today, while some use of folkpsychology is the norm in animal cognition research, thereremain questions about how far we can go.

Scientists are generally happy to say that many animalspecies do things because of what they perceive and what theyremember. Some animal species are thought to learn newthings by building associations, and can classify objects in waysthat makes some scientists think that they have concepts, evenif they don’t have words. Psychologist Sara Shettleworth, inher 2013 book Fundamentals of Comparative Cognition,reviews evidence for learning, concepts, mental maps, tool con-struction and use, problem solving, numerical understanding,and other interesting capacities in different species. But manyscientists deny that nonhuman animals, despite all of thesecapacities, are folk psychologists at all.

If these scientists are right, this would make all nonhumananimals radically unlike humans. From birth, human infantsrespond to social stimuli such as faces, and engage in the giveand take of social imitation. And by four years old, they’realready thinking about what other people are thinking! But it’sunclear whether other animals understand that there are otherminds, or minds at all! Knowing that there are other minds maybe important for being able to communicate—after all, whycommunicate if there isn’t a mind to communicate to? So per-haps when Zira thinks Taylor is trying to speak, and when Anneand I think that Ceceb was requesting to be cleaned, we’rethinking that our respective communicators are also able tomindread. And maybe that assumption is really the problem.



Why do we think young children can mindread? Develop-mental psychologists usually point to their ability to attributea false belief to a character in a story. The original false belieftask, invented by developmental psychologists Heinz Wimmerand Josef Perner, involves giving the child a puppet show: Maxithe puppet is holding a piece of chocolate, but he wants to saveit for later, so he hides it in a box and then leaves the room.While Maxi is out, his mother finds the chocolate in the boxand moves it to a cupboard. Maxi returns to the scene, the showis stopped, and children are asked to predict where Maxi willgo to look for his chocolate. Children who are able to say thatMaxi will look for the chocolate in the box, where he left it, aresaid to be mindreaders. But most children younger than fourpredict that Maxi will look for the chocolate in the cupboard,where it is now. The idea is that the children who predict thatMaxi will look for the chocolate in the box know that Maxi hasa false belief, and in order to be a folk psychologist, you need toknow that others have beliefs that can be true or false.

To try to find the same sort of evidence for mindreadingabilities in other species, psychologists have invented nonver-bal versions of the false belief task, with mixed results. In areview of all the mindreading experiments given to chim-panzees, the psychologists Josep Call and Michael Tomaselloclaim that there’s no evidence that chimps understand thatothers have false beliefs. Chimps do seem to understand whatothers can see, what others know, and what others’ goals andintentions are, according to Call and Tomasello. But if theydon’t understand that others can have beliefs that are false,then they cannot be full-blown folk psychologists. It followsthat Anne and I aren’t justified in interpreting Cecep’s behav-ior as a communicative pantomime. And Zira, without recourseto controlled experimentation on Taylor using a nonverbal ver-sion of the false belief test, isn’t justified in thinking Taylor istrying to communicate, either.

You Read Me Well EnoughBut this seems wrong. Remember how babies and their care-givers can come to understand one another, or how you andyour dog understand each other? There is some sort of commu-nication going on when your dog asks, in doggish, to go for a



walk. She communicates with a bark and a look. It is far tooconservative to dictate that communication requires min-dreading of the false belief sort. Consider the idea that belief issomething that is expressed in a full sentence: “I believe thatthe San Bruno Primate Center should be shut down”, or “Ibelieve that Charlton Heston is a lousy actor.” When childrenstart to speak, like when baby Caesar starts to sign, we alreadyknow that they’re trying to communicate, even though theycan’t communicate in sentences. The baby who reaches andsays “cookie” is making her desires pretty well known, and wecan translate her one word utterance into the sentence “I wanta cookie.” We don’t just communicate sentences, but also feel-ings and goals. A shared smile is communication. While Taylorand Nova can’t use language together, they can communicatethrough touch and eye contact. Nova wants to be with Taylor;she willingly goes with him to live in the Forbidden Zone. Theyunderstand each other without exchanging words.

The narrow focus on belief reading ignores all the other wayswe read minds. On a daily basis, we rarely think of the otherpeople in our lives in terms of what they believe. When we dowonder about what someone believes, it’s usually because we’retrying to explain some strange thing they did. This points to aproblem with the idea that we understand others by thinkingabout the contents of their heads. We do not, in fact, think ofothers as just the set of the sentences they are thinking. Ratherthan abstractly reading minds, we share minds and read peopleby doing things together and learning about one another’s nor-mal behaviors and personal idiosyncrasies. This understandingis built over time as we get used to doing things together, andlearn how to interact with one another.

In order to understand a new roommate or a new dog, youfirst have to get to know them. By cooking together, planningout how to pay the bills, going for walks, or playing fetch, wecome to learn how to co-ordinate with the other person we’resharing our space with, and to judge the right time to introducea kitten to the household, or suggest throwing a party. As Iargue in my 2012 book Do Apes Read Minds? Toward a NewFolk Psychology, we come to know others by interacting withthem, and moving together. Like a dance, we share our mindsthrough gestures, movements, facial expressions, gaze, andposture.



Anne and I don’t need to withhold judgment about whetherCecep was communicating because we know him, and we con-sider his pantomiming behavior in the context of the otherthings we know about him. When we make an inference to thebest explanation, we have to take all available evidence intoaccount. So let me tell you another story about Cecep.

He was one of the leaders of the little group of forest schoolorangutans, and the babysitters nicknamed him ThePoliceman because he often broke up fights and seemed towant to keep the peace. Aldrin, one of the other orangutans inthe group, wasn’t doing very well. Aldrin didn’t run around theforest with the other orangutans; instead he would sit and huga babysitter, and whimper if no one would cuddle him. He onlyonce climbed a tree when I was there, and the other orangutansusually ignored him. But one day things were very different:the babysitters found a turtle. Now, as a human reader, thismight not sound terribly exciting, but orangutans are terrifiedof turtles—something even Darwin remarked on. When theorangutans, including Aldrin, saw the turtle they all fled intothe trees in terror. Later that day when it was time to headback to camp, the babysitters realized that Aldrin wasn’t withthem. They never saw him come down from the tree. Then thebabysitters noticed that Cecep wasn’t around either. Whenthey went back to where the turtle had been, they found Aldrinand Cecep perched in different trees. Cecep was up in a tree infront of Aldrin’s, and he looked back at Aldrin, caught his eye,and then moved on to the next tree. Aldrin followed Cecep, wholed Aldrin from tree to tree until they reached the path back tocamp. Though Cecep had been looking back at Aldrin from timeto time, when he got down to the ground he just scamperedaway, joining the rest of the group. And Aldrin followed. That’sjust the kind of guy Cecep is.

When we see only one incident of a behavior that looks as ifit was done for a reason, a mentalistic explanation may not bevery well justified. But as we gather observations of incidentafter incident that cries out for an explanation in terms of rea-sons for action, we become more and more justified in our inter-pretation. While the mentalistic hypothesis is only weaklysupported by each individual incident, the overhypothesis thatexplains the large set of data is much stronger. As the philoso-pher Nelson Goodman defines it, an ‘overhypothesis’ is a



hypothesis used to justify a set of more specific hypotheses, andit is a basic tool in human reasoning that allows us to form gen-eralizations. It is one of the amazing features of human beingsthat we are able to learn so much starting from so little, andmuch of this ability is due to our powers of induction.

To justify the interpretation of a behavior via induction, weneed more information than just the description of the behav-ior. We need to know what happened before the behavior, andwhat happened after. It also helps to know the idiosyncratichistory of the behaving individual, as well as the normalbehavior of the relevant species. No behavior occurs outside ofa larger context. So we shouldn’t interpret any behavior with-out taking its context into account.

They’re All Tame Until They Take a Chunk Out of You

Context plays an especially important role in the interpreta-tion of behavior insofar as minds have evolved in—and are nat-urally designed to work within—particular contexts. If ourenvironment affects our minds, then in order to know the nat-ural ape mind, scientists need to gather inductive data aboutape behavior in natural ape environments. Most cognitionresearch is done with caged animals. Think about how unim-pressive Taylor is in his cage, or how well the scientists under-stand Caesar’s mother Bright Eyes in hers.

Now think about how much mental work you offload ontoyour environment, and imagine trying to get by without theinformation in your phone. Try doing your taxes without a com-puter or even a pencil and paper. We have good memoriesbecause we write things down in our calendars. We are orga-nized because we have to-do lists. We know how to do manythings, from getting to work to buying dinner, because we live inthe same kind of environment in which we learned these skills.Elderly people with dementia can often live surprising well intheir own homes, because they let the house serve as part oftheir mind. Take this person out of her home, and she oftendeteriorates quite quickly. We all need our environments to helpus think, and we all need familiar tools to show off our skills. Atailor is useless without thread and needle, just as an orang-utan may be useless without trees to climb and build nests in.



Experiments on great apes can help us find out what apescan do, but we can’t count on them to tell us what apes can’t do.We especially can’t let them tell us that apes can’t do some-thing when we have access to a body of observations thattogether force us toward an explanation in terms of that veryability. Imagine trying to understand what great apes can dowhile only studying the apes at the San Bruno Primate Center,or the apes at Gen Sys. Or imagine the intelligent simians ofPlanet of the Apes trying to learn about all the things twenti-eth-century humans can do by studying Taylor alone in a cagewithout clothes or a voice. When you’re in a cage, you act caged,and a tame animal is a compromised one. Since caging andtaming changes the individual, we need to study uncaged wildanimals if we really want to know what they’re thinking.



It’s Like He’s Thinking or Something

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