Humans and Other Animals - Are We Rational Enough to Know the Difference? | Dr. Daniel De Haan

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Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 13 December 2019

⏱️ 76 minutes

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Summary

This talk was given on November 20, 2019 at Baylor University.

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Dr. Daniel De Haan is a Research Fellow of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. He is working on the Renewal of Natural Theology Project directed by Professor Alister McGrath. Before coming to Oxford, De Haan was a postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge working on the neuroscience strand of the Templeton World Charity Foundation Fellowships in Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and the Sciences Project, directed by Sarah Coakley. During this postdoctoral fellowship, he conducted research on the intersections of theology, philosophy, and neuroscience in Lisa Saksida’s Translational Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you very much for having me. Can everyone hear me all right in the back?
0:03.0	It's very nice to be back in Baylor. I studied in Houston for a while,
0:06.0	and some of my best friends were here when I was in grad school,
0:08.0	and I used to come up to Baylor all the time, so it's a treat to be back.
0:12.0	This evening, we'll be talking about some specific experiments that have been done.
0:17.0	If any of you are in psychology, you might be familiar with some of them, both from developmental psychology as well as ethnology and comparative animal psychology.
0:29.6	What I'm going to first start talking about is ways of looking in what I'm going to argue
0:35.8	are looking in the wrong places.
0:42.7	And then we're going to look at some distinctions that I'll describe broadly under the heading of critical anthropocentism, and then some concluding remarks.
0:47.3	And what I want to cover is show that what happens in a lot of experimental debates in psychology
0:54.0	is that psychologists operationalize
0:57.1	certain definitions of memory, certain definitions of animal behavior, certain definitions about free will,
1:03.8	and they have to operationalize those in an experiment so they can find controlled, quantifiable
1:09.0	ways of measuring and testing certain psychological concepts. And that's
1:14.0	no different than the kind of cases of how do we talk about the differences between the
1:17.6	psychological abilities of humans and the psychological abilities of other animals. And we're going to
1:22.3	look at one particular area of inquiry that has been thought to be the major kind of psychological difference between humans and other animals.
1:30.3	And this debate has ended in a kind of stalemate. And I want to sort of diagnose part of the reason it's arrived at a stalemate is not because of problems with the experiments. It's problems with the psychological concepts that they're dealing with that are used in the experiments.
1:45.0	And I'm going to suggest an alternative set of psychological concepts for thinking about humans and other animals.
1:50.0	So we'll start with looking for certain kinds of approaches,
1:55.0	looking for differences, differences between humans and animals and the wrong places.
2:00.0	First I want to ask you to look at this for a bit. How would you describe differences between humans and animals and the wrong places.
	...

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