Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The best kitteh ever is, of course, Peyton, the philosophical cat, who has previously contributed to our discussions here at WEIT on morality, ethics, and epistemology. But, as a semi-regular contributor, she is ineligible for the Kitteh Contest, so readers should submit their nominees to Jerry by 5 PM December 1. Here again is Jerry’s picture of her
Peyton, the philosophical cat.
and some new video.
If she had not, once again, been displaying some of Pinker’s rudimentary moral sentiments, my foot would have been a bloody mess.
Peyton is a WEIT blog regular, who last appeared here in a post by Jerry. This is a picture of her taken by Jerry while visiting me in September. I put up a copy of this photo recently in Jerry’s lab, joining an illustrious group of cats that grace the wall outside his fly room.
When I visited Greg Mayer last week, he explained that his cat Peyton was a “philosophical cat.” I naturally asked why, and Greg explained:
Cats are realists
One of the oldest philosophical debates is between realism and idealism. Both come in several flavors, but the basic difference is between their views of the external world: according to realists there is an external world, while according to idealists, there really isn’t an external world beyond our minds. If a tree falls in a forest, and there’s no one around to see it or hear it or smell it, does the tree fall? To a realist, obviously yes: just because an event or object is outside my (or anyone’s) perception has no bearing on whether or not the event occurred or the object exists. Scientists are almost invariably realists of one sort or another. But a much more important question is: what about cats?
My cat, Peyton is a realist. She unambiguously continues to believe in the existence of objects even when she cannot perceive them. I might have inferred this from her ability to get around the house, and to find places and things that are outside her immediate perceptual purrview. (For example, at night, she knows the beds are upstairs, even when she’s downstairs, and thus goes upstairs to sleep.)
But the most striking demonstration of her belief in the continued existence of objects that she can no longer perceive comes when playing catch and chase with her. She will run after, catch in the air, and/or bat around some toy (whether a store-bought toy mouse or a crumpled piece of paper). If I hold the toy out in front of her, she will follow the movement of the object in my hand. If I make a sweeping motion behind my back with the toy, as though I am going to throw the object from my right to my left, say, she will not follow the hand/object around my right side. Rather she darts to the left, anticipating the trajectory of the object, even though she can no longer see the object (or my hand) once it passes behind my back. She does this even if I do not complete the motion and release the object. She clearly continues to believe in the existence of the now-unperceived object; and even more, she is able to estimate where it will end up if it continues the motion it had when last seen. This is clearly an adaptive way to view the world, especially if you depend for food on catching small animals in the underbrush that are trying to run away from you. It’s pretty adaptive for idealist philosophers, too. Here’s an incident from Boswell’s Life of Johnson:
“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it — ‘I refute it thus.'”
And a video clearly demonstrating feline epistemology:
And don’t forget that there’s a golden cat below the fold!
