He emphasizes that these are challenges for the science, not challenges to the science.

Dacey argues that taking the challenges head-on can help build an even stronger, more vibrant science.

He discusses social reasoning in chimpanzees, foraging in honeybees, onsciousness in octopuses, and more.

Looking carefully at the challenges can help build a more personal understanding of the animals themselves.

There is wide-ranging and ever growing interest in the nature of animal minds, often cashed out as the cognitive and emotional lives of nonhumans. Queries center on a number of different issues including methods of study, why different studies offer different interpretations and explanations of available data and common sense, how do studies of captive animals jibe with those of free-ranging relatives (ecological validity), comparisons with humans, and is it possible to develop a unifying theory or different theories that tie together what we know.1

Studying animal minds and learning what's in them and how they work can range from being fairly easy to being incredibly difficult and for this other reasons I was pleased to learn of a recent book titled Seven Challenges for the Science of Animal Minds by Dr. Mike Dacey.2 Here's what he had to say about his detailed scrutiny centering on the study of nonhuman minds.

Marc Bekoff: Why did you write Seven Challenges for the Science of Animal Minds?

Mike Dacey: I’ve long been fascinated by animals, by science and how it works, and by the mind. Writing about how science approaches animal minds has allowed me to immerse myself in all three at once. As I’ve worked on these topics over the years, I noticed that there were some problems that kept coming up, no matter which species was being considered or what about them was being studied. These are the seven ‘challenges’ of the book: the scientific study of animal minds is difficult, and these are the most significant reasons why. I wanted to pull them together into one book, so they could be discussed together, and larger themes could emerge.

I wanted to write something that takes these challenges seriously while still giving reason for optimism. As I say in the introduction: these are challenges for the science of animal minds, not challenges to the science of animal minds.

MB: How does your book relate to your background and general areas of interest?

MD: It is, first and foremost, a work of philosophy of science, which is my main area. In particular, most of the book is asking how we can interpret evidence that we gather, and use it to evaluate claims about how animal minds work. It engages several areas of science, including psychology, neuroscience, ethology and evolutionary biology. The animals themselves of course star too, as I dive into some really fascinating research on a number of species.

MB: Who do you hope to reach?

MD: The book is written for anyone with a real interest in the science of animal minds. I wrote it in hopes to influence practicing researchers, students, and engaged readers in any relevant discipline. When writing for such a broad audience, it must be accessible as possible, since you never know which parts will be new and which familiar for a given reader.3

MB: What are some of the topics you consider and what are some of your major messages?

MD: Each of the seven main chapters addresses a different challenge. The core problem is that we can’t see what anyone is thinking, we have to infer it from indirect evidence. Conscious experiences are especially hard this way. Other challenges come from limitations and biases we have as human beings with the reasoning abilities and imaginations we have.

Still others come from practical and material limitations faced by researchers, and difficulties communicating across disciplinary boundaries or between the lab and the wild. Each chapter also focuses on a particular example research project to illustrate the point: from chimpanzee social reasoning to rat emotions, from learning in bees, to octopus consciousness.

I take the challenges to be pretty much baked-in to the project of understanding animals. The scientific study of animal minds is just difficult. This means there aren’t any neat or decisive solutions. Instead, I suggest ways of thinking about them that will be more productive. Overall, conclusions about animal minds should be based on gathering bits of evidence from anywhere we can get it, and assembling it into the picture that makes the most sense overall.

As a quick example, chapter two considers worries about anthropomorphic bias: a tendency to see animals as being like us. Researchers have long worried about this, and often employ a rule known as Morgan’s Canon intended to correct it by, to put it bluntly, preferring the explanation that makes the animal seem less intelligent. But if we think that human beings are biased by the ways we intuitively see and think about intelligence, we need to treat this like other cognitive biases. We need to study it rather than just assume we know what it will do. Indeed, it’s likely the case that intelligent behaviors that don’t match our intuitive expectations will be missed because of anthropomorphic bias. In these cases, Morgan’s Canon is missing the point entirely.

MB: How does your work differ from others that are concerned with some of the same general topics?

MD: Most of the challenges have been discussed on some level before. However, many are discussed only obliquely as ways to talk about some hypothesis under discussion. For example, anthropomorphism is too often raised simply as an attack on a hypothesis under discussion. Then anthropomorphism is treated as a cudgel rather than a subject worthy of its own consideration. This makes it seem as though the challenge must be a criticism, encouraging pessimism and discouraging careful, positive consideration of the real challenge.

Discussing these challenges explicitly is important for finding new ways to think about them. Doing so all together in one book allows me to make more general suggestions about the kind of science that seems best suited to meet them.

MB: Are you hopeful that as people learn more about these and perhaps other challenges they will come to appreciate the difficulties and the incredible importance of learning more about animal cognition and emotions?

MD: Yes! I hope the message comes across that we can look these challenges straight-on and still remain optimistic that we can come to know animals better. Sustained discussions of challenges like these can have an air of defeatism. Consciousness is so weird that it was studiously ignored for decades.

Those fixated with anthropomorphic bias sometimes conclude that we must give up talk of minds and only discuss behavior. Experimental studies with animals often use very small samples, which might lead some to conclude they are worthless; as some have concluded about social psychology based on replication problems there. But these challenges need not lead us to despair or abandon the project. In fact, I think looking careful at the challenges can help build a richer and more personal understanding of the animals themselves.

In conversation with Dr. Mike Dacey, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bates College in Maine. He received his PhD in 2015 from the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis. Mike has published widely in philosophy of cognitive science, the history of psychology, and especially philosophy of animal minds.

1) The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy―and Why They Matter; Animal Consciousness: Behavioral Flexibility Is Ubiquitous; It's Time to Celebrate Animal Sentience and Stop Squabbling; Mindful Anthropomorphism Works, So Let's Stop the Bickering; What Do All These Dog Studies Really Mean?"; How to Make Studies of Animal Behavior More Reliable.

I've been conducting research in these areas for decades and in an earlier book written with Dr. Colin Allen called Species of Mind: The Philosophy and Biology of Cognitive Ethology, in a collection of original essays in The Cognitive Animal: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives on Animal Cognition, and more recently in a greatly revised and updated edition of The Emotional Lives of Animals these and other concerns were addressed in considerable detail.

2) The challenges include: 1) underdetermination of theory by data, 2) anthropomorphic bias, 3) the difficulty of modeling cognitive processes, 4) integrating across disciplines, 5) ecological validity, 6) small sample sizes, and 7) measuring consciousness. Dacey stresses that the role of any individual piece of the science is limited and any individual experiment, model, claim, or argument can only tell us so much. When we are appropriately modest about each piece, conclusions about animal minds must be arrived at by holistically considering all the evidence we can get.

3) The book covers quite a lot of ground, which I hope gives readers a lot of potential ways in, depending on what interests them. I also wrote it so that the main chapters can be read in any order, or even alone, if one pleases.

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