A tension is built into the pursuit of knowledge about animal life, for it is heir to both the Cartesian verdict of an unbridgeable hiatus between humans and animals and the Darwinian affirmation of evolutionary continuity. The consequence of an intellectual and cultural heritage of opposed visions of the relationship between animals and humans is that the problematic of animal mind—whether affirmed or refuted, celebrated or doubted, qualified or sidestepped—is ever present, perhaps even the heart of the matter, in behavioral writings. Representations of animal life, whether intentionally or not, are always addressing what is for Western thought...

Charles Darwin’s work was of pivotal significance for the biological study of behavior. His arguments for evolution established the phylogenetic continuity between humans and animals, thereby irreparably undermining the credibility of the religious doctrines of the fixity of species, of special creation, and of the unique status of human beings. The link between human and animal worlds made possible by the notion of common ancestry, accepted widely as an incontestable fact shortly after the publication of Darwin’sOn the Origin of Species, opened the twin conceptual possibilities of naturalist approaches to human behavior and of inquiry into phenomena of mind,...

In this chapter I turn to naturalists’ portrayal of animal life. In the naturalist genre, I argue, the understanding of animals is coextensive with the approach to human action that social scientists have called “Verstehen” (Weber 1947; Schutz 1962).Versteheninvolves the understanding of action from the actor’s point of view; it pursues the subjective import of action. Applying theVerstehenapproach to animals has striking epistemic and visual effects on their portrayal. Here I elucidate these effects by examining the writings of the renowned turn-of-the-century naturalists George and Elizabeth Peckham and Jean Henri Fabre.

Naturalist writing about animals may...

I now turn to the writings of the chief founders of classical ethology, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen. In contrast to their naturalist predecessors’ representation of animal life as immanently meaningful, ethological accounts are external to any possible vantage point of animals, deriving their meanings from models that are theoretical and technical. From naturalist studies to classical ethology, the form of knowledge of animal behavior shifts radically, from an interest in understanding animals’ experience within their world to the task of arriving at a theoretical comprehension of their behaviors. With ethology, then, the depiction of animal behavior becomes epistemologically equivalent...

In the analysis of the behavioral writings of Darwin, Fabre, and the Peckhams, I argued that the affirmation of a subjective perspective in the animal world precedes the possibility of a compelling acknowledgment of mental phenomena, namely, phenomena of intention, memory, understanding, thinking, and emotion. Knowing animals as subjects, that is, with an experiential perspective and with authoring force, assembles a world within which inner life has a part to play and is scenically present. A subjective viewpoint becomes accessible in the presentation of observations in the language of the lifeworld—the shared language of objects and events, actions and...

Central to the question of animal mind, and the perplexities it presents to behavioral investigators, is that mental phenomena are not a homogeneous ensemble of “objects” united by a common essence. As the philosopher Stanley Cavell aptly puts it, “We don’t know whether the mind is best represented by the phenomenon of pain, or by that of envy, or by working on a jigsaw puzzle, or by a ringing in the ears” (1976: 265). With respect to both their detection and ascription, mental phenomena tend to be heterogeneous and complex, and thus they can be neither offhandedly denied nor simply...

My aim in this work has been to show the powerful role of language in the portrayal of animals. Beginning with the observation that animal life is represented in profoundly divergent ways by different authors and schools of thought within behavioral science, I have explored the formative import of all aspects of language use in the portrayal of animals. My project has been comparative in elucidating how knowledge about animals is differently construed through the use of alternative linguistic maps. The distinction between technical and ordinary language has served as a springboard to consider the effects of various linguistic features:...