Mindreading in animals

Mindreading, or Theory of Mind (ToM), is the ability to attribute mental states like knowledge and belief to others. It is the foundational ability helping people to understand, explain, and predict other’s behaviour. It had been thought to be a uniquely human ability, separating human beings from other creatures. However, the question of whether animals have a ToM has been debated since it was first bought forward by Premark and Woodruff (1978). In this thesis, I will argue that some animals, at least some nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees, and some birds, namely corvids (also known as the crow family, which includes birds like ravens, crows and rooks) possess a ToM, which enables these animals to attribute mental states like intentions, perceptions, and beliefs to other animals or to humans. I have called this position the mindreading account in this thesis. To justify my account, I have compared it with the three most important alternative accounts. The first alternative account is the behaviour reading theory. Advocates of this theory, like Penn and Povinelli (2007b), argue that animals are using behaviour rules to understand and predict behaviour instead of ToM. But I argue that the behaviour reading theory itself is ill-defined, that it should not be treated as the default theory to explain animal behaviour, and that at least for the animals noted earlier, ToM provides a better account than the behaviour reading theory. The second alternative account is the minimal theory of mind account proposed by Butterfill and Apperly (2013). This account holds that animals can attribute mental states but disagrees with the ToM account on what mental states they can attribute. In particular, this account wants to keep these states as minimally mentalistic as possible. But I argue that this approach of deflating the kinds of mental states that are attributed is problematic. The minimal theory is neither good enough to explain animals’ behaviour in real cases, nor simple enough to claim to be a minimal theory. The third alternative account is the knowledge attribution theory (KAT) supported by such theorists as Phillips (2021). This theory agrees with the standard mindreading theory that animals can attribute mental states like perception and knowledge but disagrees with the ToM account with respect to belief attribution. I argue that the evidence given in favour of the theory is flawed, and that the continuing positive false belief test results in animals undermines KAT. After arguing why none of these proposed alternatives can replace the mindreading theory account, I turn to focus on the experimental evidence for ToM in non-human primates (especially chimpanzees) and in corvids. In each case, I provide carefully selected evidence to show that the animals in question have ToM. By investigating the experiments in both chimpanzees and corvids, I conclude that theory of mind is not uniquely human: it is present in at least two further types of animals—nonhuman primates and corvids.