Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I'm your host, Julia Galeff, and with me is today's guest, Professor Colin Allen.

He is a provost professor at the University of Indiana, Bloomington, where he has joint appointments

in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine

and the program in cognitive science.

So, as you can guess, his work spans the intersection of many fields.

He has published many books and edited many books and is also the associate editor of the Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

One of the primary areas of

focus of his work is philosophy of animal behavior and cognition. And that's what we're going to be

focusing on in today's episode. Professor Allen, welcome to the show. Thanks, Julia. Please be here.

And call me Colin. Colin, great. So the specific question that motivated me to reach out to you and invite you to the show

was a much narrower slice of animal behavior and cognition. I was specifically interested in

fish and in whether fish, A, are conscious, and B, can feel pain or suffer, which are distinct but related questions.

And I guess to kick things off, I'll just explain why I found this question interesting and important.

And then I'd love to hear how you got interested in this topic in the first place and why you think it's important.

Sure.

So for me, it was, there are two things, basically.

First, I think fish occupy an interesting position in this sort of loose spectrum of non-human

animals, where on the one end, we have, say, great apes that most people would agree that great apes have have a kind of moral status

...