Mind-Brain Lecture: Daniel Povinelli (Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette)
On the 30th anniversary of the publication of Premack and Woodruff's (1978) seminal paper, "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?", prominent scholars declared the case closed: the answer was a definitive, yes. Chimpanzees were awarded at least a subset of the human capacity for reasoning about mental states. I describe the evidentiary basis on which this "award" was made. Further, I show why today, despite the award, there is no better evidence for theory of mind in chimpanzees (and, by extension, other animals) than there was in 1978.
Download:
Povinelli’s paper “Inferring other minds: Failure of the argument by analogy”, Daniel J. Povinelli & Steve Giambrone, Philosophical Topics 27 (1):167-202 (2000)
can be downloaded here:
http://ulceet.com/uploads/Povinelli_Giambrone_1999.pdf
