ABSTRACT
This is a tempting criticism; typically half truth and half error. Wittgenstein’s discussion is certainly not peppered with references to narrow-front migration, smoke-bathing, or Skinner boxes, (nor is that of Regan, Singer, Frey, or Midgley herself, come to that), since his concern is to clarify the implications of our everyday ways of attributing psychological concepts like hope, fear, belief, understanding, and so on. Unless we are clear about these, in the case of human beings, and then of the grounds for proceeding to apply them to animals, we will be ill-prepared to assess the claim of the scientist or other trained observer that a segment of observed animal behaviour is thoughtful, or intentional, or hopeful, or self-conscious. When the psychologist Donald Griffin describes the ability of great tits and chickadees to obtain milk from bottles by ‘pecking through their shiny coverings with the conscious intention of obtaining food’ (1984:35), it is obvious that were he not talking of a ‘conscious intention’, in the normal human acceptation of the phrase, he would fail to arouse the average reader’s curiosity and sympathies. Earlier Griffin has bemoaned the fact that ‘throughout our educational system
students are taught that it is unscientific to ask what an animal thinks or feels’ (1984:vii). It is philosophy’s task to bring to light the roles of these terms, embedded in our language-games used of animals. Good science does not necessarily make for good philosophy.
