Episode 22 - "Do animals have different emotions?"

For the episode this week, Steve and Christabel tackle a question from Steve’s daughter, who asked whether animals have different emotions (to those experienced by human beings). In answering this question, our hosts build on the material covered in episode 13, which wrestles with the immense difficulty of knowing (for certain) what it’s like to be a dog (or indeed, bat). But not to be put off, the duo leaves the clear skies of deductive inference to take a dive into the murky waters of abduction, which is a form of reasoning that finds the best explanation to fit the facts. Steve propels us along with a host of duck-based inference puns. But what are the facts? One kind of evidence for animal emotion might be thought to be the sentimental behaviour that they display. Christabel tells us of her dog’s separation anxiety, and introduces analytic behaviourism, one school of thought spawned by logical positivism. Sensing that the answers provided by this philosophical trend are a little too easily-won, they move onto another kind of evidence – that of neuroscience. They discuss Jaak Panskepp’s seven emotional ‘circuits’ and Christabel addresses the links between Panskepp’s posits and David Lewis’ causal role physicalism. Steve and Christabel then try to figure out if animals not only feel pain and pleasure, but also suffering and joy, drawing on Sean Power’s observation that these more sophisticated emotions plausibly require their subjects to possess temporal concepts. Bertrand Russell and Ludvig Wittgenstein both claim that the capacity to remember is the key to understanding what time is, so our hosts take a look at Ali Boyle’s research into episodic memory in non-human minds.  Though perhaps these more sophisticated feelings require a more sophisticated theory; the episode’s last port of call is the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett and her constructivist theory of emotions. Our hosts recognise that when it comes to the question of whether animals feel the same emotions, we may never know. However – as Steve points out – we’re no more certain on this question when it comes to the Danish, either. Email us the impossible questions children ask you at [email protected] Find Steve at https://drstevecross.squarespace.com Find Christabel at https://christabelcane.com/ Philosophy Playdate theme by Piers Cane