Abstract
Morgan’s canon is one of the most influential methodological principles in comparative psychology. It states that one should always abstain from explaining animal behavior with reference to any “higher” psychological faculties than absolutely necessary. In the contemporary literature, this principle is interpreted in terms of simplicity or parsimony. However, its original intent was not to advocate for simple explanations, but to avoid them. It was meant as an antidote to the anthropomorphic explanations of anecdotal cognitivism. The simplest explanation of why a dog avoids eye contact after you caught it chewing your shoe would be, according to Morgan, that it “knew that he shouldn’t have done so and when caught felt ashamed.” Morgan insisted that we should instead seek more complicated explanations that do not invoke human psychological characteristics. In this symposium, we revisit Morgan’s Canon and the related debates over anthropomorphism and anthropodenial. The talks grapple with the mental continuity thesis and the question of gradualism in accounts of the evolution of mind. They consider how best to understand the notion of parsimony at play in Morgan’s Cannon, what it is to explain or understand minds in non-humans, and what role folk psychology should play in such explanations.
