Peter Carruthers has a new book. Yes, you guessed right: the title ends with the word Mind, and you’ll probably disagree with the conclusion. The Architecture of the Mind concludes that the mind is massively modular (Carruthers 2006). The Opacity of Mind concludes that self-knowledge (of propositional attitudes) is unattainable (Carruthers 2011). The Centered Mind concludes that there’s no such thing as conscious thought (Carruthers 2015). Now, in Human and Animal Minds, Carruthers concludes that there’s no fact of the matter as to whether nonhuman animals are phenomenally conscious or not.
Even if you don’t like the final destination, reading a book by Carruthers is always a beautiful journey, owing to the arguments and pieces of evidence gathered along the way. Human and Animal Minds is no exception.
On this journey you’ll find Carruthers’s reflections on the current evidence for metacognition in nonhuman animals (chapter 2); his rebuttal...
