Course Blog

These posts are in reverse-order, so the newest posts will always be at the top. The dates are when the post was first made.

Readings are in a restricted part of this site. The username and password for these will be announced in class and on Canvas.

Here is a sparser evolving index of all the handouts, webnotes and readings we’ve used during the course. Or you could look under the Canvas “Modules” tab.

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Mon Feb 2

Another class canceled because of weather. I’ve updated the due dates for the readings in the entry below. We’ll probably have another out-of-class quiz due the end of this week.

Tue Jan 27

Here is the plan, assuming that we’ll still be having class tomorrow.

We’ll do this week’s quiz outside of class. It’s due by the end of the day Wednesday. I sent you an announcement about that through Canvas.

The readings that were assigned for Monday will be discussed tomorrow (and are addressed in the quiz). I’ve shifted some of the upcoming scheduled readings and topics forward. Here is what you should read for next Monday, Feb 2 Wed Feb 4:

Here is what you should read for next Wednesday, Feb 4 Wed Feb 11:

That’s a lot of reading for next week, so give yourself enough time for it.

The following Monday, Feb 9, we again have no class (Well-Being Day). For Wednesday of that week Mon Feb 16, our reading is:

Fri Jan 23

I posted your quiz grades and some model answers to the quiz. (See link under yesterday’s entry.)

I just saw on alertcarolina.unc.edu that Monday classes are cancelled. Do what you can to do the reading I assigned for Monday before our next meeting, whenever that is. (I suppose there’s some chance that Wednesday classes will end up getting cancelled too.) Also check in here and I’ll most likely add some additional reading. I may make next Wednesday’s quiz one you can complete online outside of class, even if we meet on Wednesday.

If you get stuck in some situation like a power outage where it’s not feasible for you to keep up with the coursework, just deal with your situation as best you can, and let me know about it when you have the opportunity to do so. I know we’ll need to accommodate each other.

Thu Jan 22

  1. I will post some notes summarizing yesterday’s discussion of animal mentality:

    Those pages also have some optional links if you want to dig further into details.

  1. Here are some model answers to the the quiz. I’ll post your grades Friday afternoon. new

  1. For Monday, please read these selections:

    • Leiber textbook (Can Animals and Machines Be Persons?: A Dialogue, available at bookstore) Chapter 1, also bottom p. 34–top p. 39
    • Colin Allen, “Star Witness”

    Here are some notes on these readings:

    For the “Star Witness” reading, the “Reader Assignment” at the end is just part of the original text. It’s not a written assignment for our course. Also, for our purposes, we don’t need to sort out the legal issues discussed in the text, such as whether witnesses need to be cross-examinable. We’re reading and discussing this text just to get leverage on questions about what cognitive abilities it’s reasonable to think a parrot might have, and why.

    The Leiber textbook is one of the three you need to purchase for the course: it’s available in the bookstore, or you can find links on the front webpage. If you had trouble acquiring it, email me. There’s part of this reading selection that I think is more complicated than it needs to be. Here’s some context and explanation to help you track what’s going on:

    One of the people taking part in that dialogue is named Mary Godwin. Some back-history: William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were philosophers in late 1700s. They had a daughter Mary Godwin (the mother Mary Wollstonecraft then died shortly after childbirth) who grew up, got involved with the poet Shelley and wrote Franksentein. The mother was born with the name Wollstonecraft but took her husband’s name Godwin on marriage; the daughter was born with the name Godwin but took Shelley’s name when she eventually married him. The dialogue refers to the mother as “Mary Godwin” and it’s a story about her that’s discussed in the first chapter.

    Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man in 1791, arguing (in defense of the French Revolution) that all citizens (not just aristocrats) had “natural rights,” and that they can/should revolt when their government doesn’t protect these rights. Paine also argued for education and welfare reforms. Around the same time, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (that is, the mother) wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, arguing that women deserved “rational education” (versus just “domestic education”), and that they had the same natural rights as men.

    Thomas Taylor then wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes in 1792; this was meant to be a satire of Paine’s and Godwin’s arguments. Taylor thought that the absurdity of counting animals as persons (as he pretended to argue for) implied it was also absurd to count poor servants and women as equals to their superiors.

    Our dialogue invokes this historical exchange for several purposes: (1) to remind us that Paine and (the historical) Godwin had to argue that all men, and women, deserved the same rights as others — it took work to overcome people’s doubts about this; (2) to remind us that the arguments Paine and Godwin offered had to do with reason and intelligence, which as Taylor observed, are present to some degree in animals too; (3) the (future, in-the-book) Godwin agrees with Taylor that there’s a “slippery slope” from the arguments of Paine and (the historical) Godwin to accepting that animals also have rights. Taylor thought therefore those arguments must be wrong (hence his satire). The future Godwin instead endorses the arguments and this further conclusion.

  1. On Monday — if we’re able to meet, either in person or by Zoom — we’ll discuss further how to interpret “outer” phenomena like animals’ behavior as evidence for “inner” mental states, processes, and abilities.
Tue Jan 20

Sorry it took me a while to prepare these notes, but have a look at these pages before class tomorrow. It’s just a few pages. We’ll talk through the concepts at the start of class. Some of the fundamental ideas from these notes will be on the quiz, along with an invitation to describe interesting and surprising facts about what you learned from reading about animal mentality.

I also updated the review sheet.

Fri Jan 16

I posted your quiz grades. These were graded to a relaxed standard, and by that measure, everyone did reasonably well. The grades ranged from B+ to A. You all made a few mistakes, but I gave partial credit if, for example, you marked the correct answer for a question but also marked an incorrect answer. An A- grade roughly corresponds to getting between one and two full questions wrong. Here is a set of model answers to the quiz, which I encourage you all to review. I hope that even if you were still somewhat confused about a concept while taking the quiz, the process of comparing the model answers to your own will help improve your understanding.

On Wednesday, I explained two ways of categorizing mental states that philosophers find helpful. The first distinguishes between the state’s being an occurrent episode or happening and its being more dispositional. The second distinguishes between representational states and states that have a subjective feel. I’ll post notes about these contrasts later today or tomorrow. Have a look at those notes for our next meeting on Wednesday, along with continuing to browse videos or article about animal mentality.

Mon Jan 12

Here is the review sheet of material that’s candidates for being on our quizzes or finals. It was part of the one handout distributed in class today. As the course progresses, I will add more material to the review sheet.

For quizzes and the final, you’ll have the option to complete them handwritten, or using a lockdown browser on your laptop or tablet. That’s an exceptional situation, when devices are allowed. Either way you proceed, you’ll be allowed to consult any printed or written notes during the exam, but not any device (and if you’re using the lockdown browser, it won’t allow you to switch to a different app or window). Note that the time to complete the quiz will be limited.

On Wednesday, we’re going to take up our first main topic, that of animal mentality or cognition. We’ll get to some philosophical readings on this. (I have them on the Calendar for Mon Jan 26, but we may end up adjusting that.) Before we do that, it will be helpful for you to learn about surprising things that some animals can do, and things they can’t do. The exact details here aren’t going to matter so much for our discussion. But it still will be helpful to have a rough feel for the details.

There are different ways to do this.

Here is a page of links to popular science and news articles and videos about animal mentality. (You can also search on your own on YouTube or Google for keywords like “animal cognition” or “intelligent animals.”)

I don’t expect anyone to try to read/watch all of those. But I do ask you to make a good faith effort to spend time browsing some of them, or doing your own research, over the next week or so. I will be inviting you to summarize and react to some of what you learn on our second quiz (on Wed Jan 21).

Another option is to read some of this selection from a book about animal cognition in general, and their linguistic abilities and limitations in particular:

That PDF looks long, but if you go through it there’s a lot of partial pages. It looks to me to sum up to about 85 pages altogether. I think it’s a useful overview of the kind of information we want to be drawing on. But as I said, we don’t need to master the exact details. You’re welcome to read all of that selection, but I’m not requiring or expecting that you will do so.

And I don’t mind if some of you choose to skim the whole Dr Dolittle selection quickly; while others get interested in some of the details in one section and read there more closely, never making it through the whole text; and others instead just watch a handful of YouTube videos. Browse through these links and see what catches your attention. For this initial reading about animal mentality, I’m just going to trust that you’ll each put in good faith efforts to read/watch/learn some more about the surprising things some animals can and cannot do. We can share highlights with each other in class.

Our later reading assignments won’t be so free-form as this. We’ll generally all want to be looking and talking about the same texts. But this seems to me a useful and interesting way to start off.

Tue Jan 6

Our first class meeting is on Wed Jan 7. I’ll introduce you to our course topics and talk about what philosophical activity looks like — what kinds of tools and strategies philosophers use for answering questions.

There is no reading assigned before our first meeting. But there is a chunk of reading you should do afterwards, and be ready to discuss/ask questions about in our subsequent meetings. That starts with the group of web pages at this link:

That link leads to a list of five pages; the most important for now are the first three. Skim the fourth too, but it may be harder and we’ll come back to it and discuss it more carefully in a few weeks. The last page is a Glossary that I hope will be useful but isn’t important for you to memorize.

Those pages already have developed explanations of many of the concepts we’ll be relying on this semester, and I’m not planning to repeat/summarize them in class. But I will take questions about the material on Monday, and we’ll talk through the Review lists at the end of the pages. Come to class next week with ideas and questions about what you find confusing or would be helpful to explore further.

The first of our Wednesday quizzes, on Wed Jan 13, will cover those materials.

For Monday, also read this brief selection:

(“Pojman” is the author’s family name.) Pages with a “restricted” URL like that one need a username/password, which will be announced in class and on Canvas. You should only need to enter it once per device.

Have a look also at this short page:

It will help you with the kind of task described in the Pojman reading.