ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the multidisciplinary science of comparative cognition and the current philosophical controversies in the field. The failure to take a comparative approach limits the generalizability of our findings to human cognition, human consciousness, and human neurobiology. It is only by situating the human case within a wider phylogenetic context that we can begin to draw broad lessons about the nature of mind and its evolution. While the inner lives of animals have interested philosophers and scientists for centuries, the systematic study of animal cognition did not begin in earnest until after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which unified the biological sciences under a single theoretical framework. The rise of behaviorism in early 20th-century psychology further solidified this interpretation of MC and moved yet another step away from the principle of evolutionary continuity. Behaviorism can be separated into two distinct positions: logical behaviorism and methodological behaviorism.
