• DOI:10.1162/POSC.2006.14.3.354
• Corpus ID: 145128785

Animal Consciousness: Paradigm Change in the Life Sciences

@article{Schnfeld2006AnimalCP,
  title={Animal Consciousness: Paradigm Change in the Life Sciences},
  author={Martin, Ph. D Sch{\"o}nfeld},
  journal={Perspectives on Science},
  year={2006},
  volume={14},
  pages={354 - 381}
}

• M. Schönfeld
• Published 11 December 2006
• Psychology
• Perspectives on Science

��� This paper is a review of the breakthroughs in the empirical study of animals. Over the past ave 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 quantiaable 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. Empirical trials to substantiate such claims were nipped in the bud, since it appeared that such inquiries would unduly humanize nonhuman beings. Scientists are not supposed to project their own intuitions, feelings, or thoughts on objects of their investigation. Studying the afanities of humans and animals would appear to violate this well-established rule, and would risk sliding down the slippery slope from fawns to Bambi, from rabbits to Thumper, and from science to myth. The task of science in the past four centuries had been to demythologize the past. Erasing myths had been the hallmark of progress; it turned astrology into astronomy, alchemy into chemistry, and natural philosophy into natural science. Naturalists, aeld workers, and experimenters who disagreed or who resisted the reduction of life to