Heyes C M
Department of Psychology, University College London, United Kingdom.
Behav Brain Sci. 1998 Feb;21(1):101-14; discussion 115-48. doi: 10.1017/s0140525x98000703.
Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked "Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?," it has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts, such as "want" and "know." Unlike research on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no substantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of imitation, self-recognition, social relationships, deception, role-taking, and perspective-taking suggests that in every case where nonhuman primate behavior has been interpreted as a sign of theory of mind, it could instead have occurred by chance or as a product of nonmentalistic processes such as associative learning or inferences based on nonmental categories. Arguments to the effect that, in spite of this, the theory of mind hypothesis should be accepted because it is more parsimonious than alternatives or because it is supported by convergent evidence are not compelling. Such arguments are based on unsupportable assumptions about the role of parsimony in science and either ignore the requirement that convergent evidence proceed from independent assumptions, or fail to show that it supports the theory of mind hypothesis over nonmentalist alternatives. Progress in research on theory of mind requires experimental procedures that can distinguish the theory of mind hypothesis from nonmentalist alternatives. A procedure that may have this potential is proposed. It uses conditional discrimination training and transfer tests to determine whether chimpanzees have the concept "see." Commentators are invited to identify flaws in the procedure and to suggest alternatives.
自从普雷马克和伍德拉夫（1978年）在《行为与脑科学》上发表文章，提出“黑猩猩是否具有心理理论？”这一问题以来，人们不断宣称，有观察和实验证据表明猿类具有诸如“想要”和“知道”等心理状态概念。然而，与儿童心理理论发展的研究不同，对非人类灵长类动物的这项研究并未取得实质性进展。一项对模仿、自我识别、社会关系、欺骗、角色扮演和换位思考的实证研究调查表明，在每一个将非人类灵长类动物行为解释为心理理论标志的案例中，其行为都可能是偶然发生的，或者是诸如联想学习或基于非心理范畴的推理等非心理主义过程的产物。那种认为尽管如此，心理理论假设仍应被接受的观点，理由是它比其他假设更简洁，或者因为它得到了趋同证据的支持，但这些观点并不具有说服力。此类观点基于关于简洁性在科学中的作用的不可支持的假设，要么忽略了趋同证据应源于独立假设这一要求，要么未能表明它支持心理理论假设而非非心理主义的替代假设。心理理论研究的进展需要能够区分心理理论假设与非心理主义替代假设的实验程序。本文提出了一种可能具有这种潜力的程序。它使用条件辨别训练和迁移测试来确定黑猩猩是否具有“看见”这一概念。欢迎评论者指出该程序中的缺陷并提出替代方案。
