Commentary: Interpretations without justification: a general argument against Morgan's Canon

A commentary on Interpretations without justification: a general argument against Morgan's Canon by Starzak, T. (2016). Synthese. Morgan's Canon has been touted as " the most awesome weapon in animal psychology, " (Wynne and Udell, 2013, p. 14). The enemies that this century-old principle is usually employed to destroy are explanations of behavior that potentially exaggerate the cognitive capacities of nonhumans. Often, the battle is between explanations based on associative learning and explanations that invoke other " more sophisticated " psychological processes (Shettleworth, 2010; Heyes, 2012; Smith et al., 2012), where more sophisticated typically means evident in adult humans. Given the longevity and apparently foundational importance of Morgan's Canon, some comparative psychologists might be surprised to learn that philosophers have recently argued that this principle is illegitimate as a basis for choosing between competing explanations of animal behavior in particular, suggests that Morgan's Canon should be jettisoned in favor of more general scientific principles shared by all disciplines. This commentary considers the merit of Starzak's argument against Morgan's Canon. Morgan's (1903, p. 59) Canon states, " In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes, if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development. " Historically, this statement has been For instance, Morgan's " lower " and " higher psychological processes " have been portrayed as corresponding to simpler vs. more complex cognitive abilities, implicit vs. explicit memory capacities, reflexive vs. volitional processes, etc. Similarly, because the phylogenetic scale that Morgan envisioned is archaic, modern interpretations of Morgan's Canon often adopt alternative evolutionary continua. Shettleworth (2010, 2013), for example, describes cognitive capacities demonstrated in many species (and therefore presumed to be phylogenetically older) as " lower processes, " reserving the higher end of the scale for evolutionarily younger, species-specific specializations (see also Sober, 1998, 2005; Karin-D'arcy, 2005). The crux of Starzak's (2016) argument against Morgan's Canon is that regardless of which interpretation of the principle one favors, there is no justification for assuming that explanations emphasizing processes at one position along any particular " scale of psychological evolution and development " are better than other explanations that emphasize processes at other positions along that scale. By analogy, systematic rankings of human beauty vary across different cultures and generations such that an individual may be ranked high on one scale and low …