All are invited to this Philosophy Department job talk from 16:30 to 18:30 on Tuesday 15 April in AC01 LR105. Drinks will be served.

Title: Do rats have tales? The nature and significance of narrative cognition across species

Abstract: We understand the world in large part through narratives.  Our understanding of ourselves, other people, our relationships, society, and even natural history and analytic philosophy, makes extensive use of representing specific stories. The very functioning of our memory is affected by how we integrate events we experience into narratives. Are humans unique amongst the animals in using narratives?  It may appear that other animals are incapable even of formulating narratives, marking a sharp and fundamental difference in our cognition.  However, I suggest that this appearance is misleading, and is largely driven by a failure to consider what lies at the core of narrative forms of representation.  Many of the most important uses of narratives do not inherently depend on language, but rather a kind of cognitive representation with certain distinctive features.  Considering such narrative representations in detail allows us to see how non-linguistic creatures could possess representations with many of the same features, and to appreciate why such representations would be beneficial even without language.  Indeed, we can interpret various findings concerning the brains and behaviour of rats and monkeys as tentatively supporting the hypothesis that they do have narrative representations, while opening up lines of empirical investigation that could confirm and deepen such hypotheses.  The possibility of narrative cognition in non-human animals has wide-ranging consequences for the science of animal minds, for our understanding of rationality, for our views on what it takes for a life to go well, and for animal ethics, which I close by sketching.  

Bio: Simon Brown is a Research Officer in Animal Sentience at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the UK, working as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded Foundations of Animal Sentience project led by Jonathan Birch. Previously, he did his undergraduate and masters degrees at Oxford, before spending 10 years in the USA, first earning his PhD in Philosophy at Columbia University, and then working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Foundations of Mind at Johns Hopkins University. His interests focus on understanding the minds of non-human animals, especially in their relationship to time: what kinds of temporal experience and representation do they have? How if at all do different species make decisions across time and plan for the future? How should we understand their memory? He is also interested in the implications of such questions for ethical issues concerning our treatment of other animals, and in using considerations about the dynamics of the mind to help understand consciousness. He has published in venues including Mind and Language, Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, and Consciousness and Cognition.