I hesitated a
little bit about writing this post because it is a quite controversial subject.
In fact, part of the beliefs that seen dog as a mere machine to categorize
stimulus-response are being reviewed.
This idea is the
basis of Behaviorism, a model of
psychology in which part of the idea that individual are a passive receiver that works as an automaton
and what is studied is what you see, i.e., the behavior, not "what
happens inside".
Let us take an
example:
- My dog is very smart, it knows when we are going to leave by itself at
home, so it become sad.-the mechanistic explanation is that there are a series
of stimuli or absence of them giving rise to an event or a set of events (for
example taking the keys of the house, but not its leash, would be an example).
But there was
always something that didn't fit in the mechanistic explanation. In psychology
as in any scientific discipline, we have to apply the Ockham´s razor or
parsimony principle which says that "In equal conditions, the simplest
explanation tends to be the correct". And here we enter into the debate:
- My dog sees something new when I go walking with it. I look, groans, but if we don’t give it any attention, until
it captures my attention toward the new object you're viewing-what happens
here?
A teacher and a
really good friend told me once: "any washing machine made by man was
smarter than a dog". I know you said it; every day the gap that we thought
between humans and other animals is smaller. Dogs give us no room to believe
they are nor intelligent, and they make us think we are not as special as we
thought, . Thus in the previous example, can we speak of meanings and shared
intentions? If so, we would have to speak of intersubjectivity and therefore of
a theory of mind, primitive, but existing what leads us to make the leap from
the Behaviorism to the revolution cognitive animal.
This was a good
reason to Brian Hare, who founded the Canine Cognition Center at the Duke
University and introduced Dognition which
is term that mixes the words cognition and dog. He has written a book
"The genius of dogs: How dogs are smarter than you think" and
developed an application that allows you to measure the cognitive abilities of
dogs. Hare tells us that they can read our gestures and make inferences about
what are trying to communicate to them.
I leave a couple
of links so that you may know more about the topic:
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