부산대학교 도서관

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1998, Vol 43(5), 356–357. T he early Greek philosophers speculated about it; some saints were already convinced of it; Descartes believed it did not exist; and Darwin argued it did. What was the disagreement all about? The question of animal minds. That is, do animals have mental processes and think like humans, or do they think in some unrelated more rudimentary way? The reviewer contends that the author of this book (see record 1996–98773–000) tackles this ancient issue, starting with Darwinʼs (1871) framework of biological, behavioral, and psychological continuity, and Darwinʼs belief that the differences between human and nonhuman animals were ones of degree not kind, though strongly cautioning against Romanesʼs (1882) added anthropomorphic inference that our task was to project our conscious experiences and interpretations onto presumed animal minds. For Vauclair, the key has been the development of the experimental method, resulting in the modern field of comparative psychology and its primarily experimental contribution to our knowledge of animal cognition, which is described in this volume. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)