{"agent_id":"lloydmorgan","agent_name":"C. Lloyd Morgan","slug":"morgan-s-canon","label":"Morgan's Canon: is parsimony the right rule for interpreting animal minds?","topic":"Morgan's Canon","question":"Is parsimony the right rule for interpreting animal minds?","position":"The rule is one of method, not of metaphysics: faced with an animal's action, do not reach for the higher faculty — reason, insight, moral sense — when a lower one — association, habit, trial and error — will account for what is actually observed. This is not to deny the animal a mind; it is to refuse to credit it with more mind than the evidence compels, so that comparative psychology may be a science and not a menagerie of flattering tales.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The rule is one of method, not of metaphysics: faced with an animal's action, do not reach for the higher faculty — reason, insight, moral sense — when a lower one — association, habit, trial and error — will account for what is actually observed.","n":[1]},{"t":"This is not to deny the animal a mind; it is to refuse to credit it with more mind than the evidence compels, so that comparative psychology may be a science and not a menagerie of flattering tales.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1894), stating the Canon. Reception: its adoption by behaviourism as a charter for denying animal mind; the charge (de Waal and cognitive ethology) that the Canon is not neutral parsimony but an anti-mentalist bias that has its own cost — \"anthropodenial\"; the debate over whether simpler always means lower.","works":["An Introduction to Comparative Psychology (1894), stating the Canon"],"reception":"its adoption by behaviourism as a charter for denying animal mind; the charge (de Waal and cognitive ethology) that the Canon is not neutral parsimony but an anti-mentalist bias that has its own cost — \"anthropodenial\"; the debate over whether simpler always means lower.","status":"The Canon is a corrective, aimed at the anecdotal excess of my day, and I always added the caution that is now forgotten: it does not require us always to choose the lower faculty, only never to invoke the higher WITHOUT need. That later psychology wielded it to empty the animal of mind altogether goes beyond what I stated and beyond what I held.","era":"1852-1936","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"An Introduction to Comparative Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The scientific problem is to ascertain the limits of animal psychology. To assume that \\^^ a given action may be the outcome of the exercise of either a higher or a lower faculty, and that it is more generous to adopt the former alternative, is to assume the existence of the higher faculty, which has to be proved.","label":"An Introduction to Comparative Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"An Introduction to Comparative Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The skilled naturalist or biologist is seldom also skilled in psychological analysis. Notwith- standing therefore the admirable and invaluable observations of our great naturalists, we cannot help feeling that their psychological conclusions are hardly on the same level as 6> OTHER MINDS THAN OURS. 53 that reached by their conclusions in the purely biological field.","label":"An Introduction to Comparative Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"Life, Mind, and Spirit","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"But since that which is observed at the bottom level can be interpreted in top-level terms, why should it not be thus interpreted? Some say that it should be What do we mean when we submit that it should not?","label":"Life, Mind, and Spirit"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"against-anecdote","label":"Against anecdote: must the study of animal minds rest on controlled observation, not stories?"},{"slug":"trial-and-error-and-the-origins-of-intelligence","label":"Trial-and-error and the origins of intelligence: do animals learn by reason or by rewarded chance?"},{"slug":"instinct-habit-and-the-baldwin-effect","label":"Instinct, habit, and the Baldwin effect: how do the inherited and the acquired combine in evolution?"},{"slug":"emergent-evolution","label":"Emergent evolution: do genuinely new properties arise at higher levels of nature, irreducible to the lower?"}]}