MindPapers: 7.1f.1. Animal Emotion

Aydede, Murat (2000). Emotions or emotional feelings? (Commentary on Rolls' The Brain and Emotion). Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23:192-194. (Google)

Abstract: It turns out that Rolls’s answer to Nagel’s (1974) question, "What is it like to be a bat?" is brusque: there is nothing it is like to be a bat . . . provided that bats don’t have a linguistically structured internal representational system that enables them to think about their first-order thoughts which are also linguistically structured. For phenomenal consciousness, a properly functioning system of higher-order linguistic thought (HOLT) is necessary (Rolls 1998, p. 262). By this criterion, not only bats, but also a great portion of the animal kingdom, perhaps all animal species except humans, turn out to lack phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, even human babies, and perhaps infants before the early stages of acquiring their first language, are likely to lack such consciousness, if one considers the level of conceptual sophistication required by the HOLT hypothesis. In order to have a higher-order thought, one needs to have the concept of a

Bekoff, Marc (2006). Animal passions and beastly virtues: Cognitive ethology as the unifying science for understanding the subjective, emotional, empathic, and moral lives of animals. Zygon 41 (1):71-104. (Cited by 1 | Google | More links)

Dixon, Beth (2001). Animal emotion. Ethics and the Environment 6 (2). (Google)

Abstract: : Recent work in the area of ethics and animals suggests that it is philosophically legitimate to ascribe emotions to nonhuman animals. Furthermore, it is sometimes argued that emotionality is a morally relevant psychological state shared by humans and nonhumans. What is missing from the philosophical literature that makes reference to emotions in nonhuman animals is an attempt to clarify and defend some particular account of the nature of emotion, and the role that emotions play in a characterization of human nature. I argue in this paper that some analyses of emotion are more credible than others. Because this is so, the thesis that humans and nonhumans share emotions may well be a more difficult case to make than has been recognized thus far

Panksepp, Jaak (2005). Affective consciousness: Core emotional feelings in animals and humans. Consciousness and Cognition 14 (1):30-80. (Cited by 31 | Google | More links)

Roberts, Robert C. (1996). Propositions and animal emotion. Philosophy 71 (275):147-56. (Cited by 5 | Google)

Helm, Bennett W. (1994). Significance, Emotions, and Objectivity: Some Limits of Animal Thought. Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh (Google)

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