I am a little surprised to find I am the first one to point it out, but dogs absolutely understand pointing, and have a very strong sense of shared agency. All pack animals seem to. Anything that hunts as a group has to have a level of shared agency, if they are to succeed. Difficulties arise from the communication medium, which is why so many animals respond very well to body cues, like pointing, where someone is looking, etc.
Not trying to be argumentative, but I have always read that social animals do not have shared agency. Pretty sure I could find quotes from Tomasello and Suddendorf that validate this. The idea is that they succeed through the accumulation of self-focused actions (along with selection for kin) that are coordinated with others. Indeed, most other species have an extremely limited sense of agency in others at all. Theory of Mind research reveals that even the brightest social species have an extremely restricted view of what others are thinking or perceiving.
If an animal lacks the imagination sufficient to grasp another individual’s perspective, I don’t see how they can have either shared agency or any type of group perspective.
I expect that one can massage the definition of "shared agency" to be roughly something like "something only humans have", but I think that at the end of the day animals have a lesser version of the same thing we have. It is limited by communication abilities, brain capacity, what have you, but I think it is much more a difference in amount than in kind.
Personally, I think we have a strong tendency to over sell what we do, especially in so far as it seems to distinguish us from animals. We find over and over that not only do animals do a lot of things we thought only we did (e.g. tool manufacture and use) but that our own behaviors are a lot less high minded (for lack of a better word) than we believe. Economies are a great example of that: getting people to understand that all our wealth and stuff is not the result of a central plan but a distributed network of many tiny plans that all kind of link together is like pulling teeth. As a species we really hate to think in terms of emergence, and much prefer it to be something grand and special. (As though emergence isn't grand!)
This was my immediate thought as well. In fact, my dog will "point" to things when it determines that _I_ have failed to direct my attention to something it thinks I should be interested in.
I would love to see a review of Tomasello's book by primatologist and animal behavior expert Frans de Waal, author of <i>Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?</i>.
I recall reading that only humans and dogs will follow a point--and that it's because of unintentional breeding to be helpful to humans, not from being a pack animal. Is that wrong? Also that most animals won't respond to "where someone is looking, etc".
In a videoed experiment, humans pointed to a cup with a treat under it. Dogs understood. Chimps did not. I think you are correct that it is not an attribute of pack animals. I'm not as certain whether it is intentional breeding.
I would bet that ravens and crows could figure out pointing but that's just a guess.
I recall seeing a video of experiments with wolves spotting points and figuring out that it was meant to focus attention. When one looks at pack hunters on the hunt, the biggest challenge is singling out one target (typically from a herd). All pack hunters solve this, although communication is always the hard part. That species can communicate a focus target across species, eg human to dog, is amazing, and suggests it is deeply rooted in the relevant species.
"Britain was a sea empire, which enabled it to be both a tyrant in Asia and a liberal democracy at home,"
Yes, Britain had rule of law, the serfs had been freed, and prime ministers as far back as 1720 but did they have a democracy? I read that in 1832 voting increased slightly beyond major landowners but still less than 10% of men. In 1876 more like a third of men could vote. What is the threshold for calling it a democracy?
I think the problem is not so much that school districts are so big as that school boards have so little power. State laws and regulations tell you what the qualifications of your teachers must be and what must be taught K-12. They tell you how long the school year must be and how many "instructional hours" it must contain. Regional accreditation agencies enforce more sameness, as does the plethora of federal laws.
A school board can decide to build a new school and what to name it, though state law will constrain what it must contain and how much of the cost local taxpayers will have to pay. The board negotiates teacher contracts, but again within substantial constraints, both of law and of the market. It is hardly surprising that lots of people who might want to practice local self-government don't run for school board.
Schrager: I suppose they are operating on the assumption that we can get back to target inflation with full employment _with correct policies. What other assumption should the be working from?
Trivia: In the mid-1990s I visited a Baptist church in New Bedford, MA for a conference. The person representing the congregation proudly announced that the person who wrote Robert's Rules of Order, Henry Martyn Robert, had done so at their church. Robert had an exemplary career in the late 19th century as an army engineer. The church had asked him to run a church meeting, and he had no idea how to proceed. So he did some research and wrote the first draft of RROO.
The presenter also mentioned that the congregation had not so long ago dwindled to ten. I wondered whether that was related to RROO and the multitudinous further bureaucratic procedures layered onto churches and denominational structures, and whether these were continually strangling the church. After all, "the wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit." John 3:8.
"Through practical experience, nineteenth-century Americans realized that formality was an important tool of self-rule."
I don't think this is quite right. It is not strict adherence to formal documentation that is the basis of self-rule. The documentation was created to provide a record that a defined and formalized process was followed to generate a specific outcome that was not predetermined. To take a case of instant note, Alvin Bragg has been following all the proper formalities of generating an indictment of Donald Trump, producing all the proper paperwork and holding all the right meetings. However, even some of Trump's staunchest critics recognize that this is merely artifice as Bragg literally campaigned on the promise of generating an indictment of Trump. We are losing self-government because we are turning forms and processes into hollow shells that demagogues fill as they wish.
Re Tomasello, I generally like him, but he tends to make things more abstract than they need to be. When you say, "Look to your left," you are attempting to impose a boundary condition on my degrees of freedom, i.e., to alter my trajectory. One does not need to posit "agency" in order to understand what is going on.
Under most circumstances I would probably allow my trajectory to be so constrained, but that is by no means certain. As ethologist Stuart Altmann wrote (way back in 1967):
“At any one moment, the behavior of an individual is not a determined process. Rather, each of the responses of which the individual is capable has a certain likelihood of occurring, depending on numerous conditions, past and present. If the behavior of another individual produces any change in these likelihoods, then communication has taken place. Thus, when we say that, in a communication process, the behavior of one individual affects the behavior of another, we mean that it changes the probability distribution of the behavior of the other."
I am a little surprised to find I am the first one to point it out, but dogs absolutely understand pointing, and have a very strong sense of shared agency. All pack animals seem to. Anything that hunts as a group has to have a level of shared agency, if they are to succeed. Difficulties arise from the communication medium, which is why so many animals respond very well to body cues, like pointing, where someone is looking, etc.
Not trying to be argumentative, but I have always read that social animals do not have shared agency. Pretty sure I could find quotes from Tomasello and Suddendorf that validate this. The idea is that they succeed through the accumulation of self-focused actions (along with selection for kin) that are coordinated with others. Indeed, most other species have an extremely limited sense of agency in others at all. Theory of Mind research reveals that even the brightest social species have an extremely restricted view of what others are thinking or perceiving.
If an animal lacks the imagination sufficient to grasp another individual’s perspective, I don’t see how they can have either shared agency or any type of group perspective.
I expect that one can massage the definition of "shared agency" to be roughly something like "something only humans have", but I think that at the end of the day animals have a lesser version of the same thing we have. It is limited by communication abilities, brain capacity, what have you, but I think it is much more a difference in amount than in kind.
Personally, I think we have a strong tendency to over sell what we do, especially in so far as it seems to distinguish us from animals. We find over and over that not only do animals do a lot of things we thought only we did (e.g. tool manufacture and use) but that our own behaviors are a lot less high minded (for lack of a better word) than we believe. Economies are a great example of that: getting people to understand that all our wealth and stuff is not the result of a central plan but a distributed network of many tiny plans that all kind of link together is like pulling teeth. As a species we really hate to think in terms of emergence, and much prefer it to be something grand and special. (As though emergence isn't grand!)
Great comment. I was thinking about the emergent economy point too.
Thanks :) I always have a high five for people thinking about emergence! :D
This was my immediate thought as well. In fact, my dog will "point" to things when it determines that _I_ have failed to direct my attention to something it thinks I should be interested in.
My cat points to the door when she wants to be let out. She apparently perceives my agency.
I would love to see a review of Tomasello's book by primatologist and animal behavior expert Frans de Waal, author of <i>Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?</i>.
I recall reading that only humans and dogs will follow a point--and that it's because of unintentional breeding to be helpful to humans, not from being a pack animal. Is that wrong? Also that most animals won't respond to "where someone is looking, etc".
In a videoed experiment, humans pointed to a cup with a treat under it. Dogs understood. Chimps did not. I think you are correct that it is not an attribute of pack animals. I'm not as certain whether it is intentional breeding.
I would bet that ravens and crows could figure out pointing but that's just a guess.
I recall seeing a video of experiments with wolves spotting points and figuring out that it was meant to focus attention. When one looks at pack hunters on the hunt, the biggest challenge is singling out one target (typically from a herd). All pack hunters solve this, although communication is always the hard part. That species can communicate a focus target across species, eg human to dog, is amazing, and suggests it is deeply rooted in the relevant species.
"Britain was a sea empire, which enabled it to be both a tyrant in Asia and a liberal democracy at home,"
Yes, Britain had rule of law, the serfs had been freed, and prime ministers as far back as 1720 but did they have a democracy? I read that in 1832 voting increased slightly beyond major landowners but still less than 10% of men. In 1876 more like a third of men could vote. What is the threshold for calling it a democracy?
I think the problem is not so much that school districts are so big as that school boards have so little power. State laws and regulations tell you what the qualifications of your teachers must be and what must be taught K-12. They tell you how long the school year must be and how many "instructional hours" it must contain. Regional accreditation agencies enforce more sameness, as does the plethora of federal laws.
A school board can decide to build a new school and what to name it, though state law will constrain what it must contain and how much of the cost local taxpayers will have to pay. The board negotiates teacher contracts, but again within substantial constraints, both of law and of the market. It is hardly surprising that lots of people who might want to practice local self-government don't run for school board.
Schrager: I suppose they are operating on the assumption that we can get back to target inflation with full employment _with correct policies. What other assumption should the be working from?
Trivia: In the mid-1990s I visited a Baptist church in New Bedford, MA for a conference. The person representing the congregation proudly announced that the person who wrote Robert's Rules of Order, Henry Martyn Robert, had done so at their church. Robert had an exemplary career in the late 19th century as an army engineer. The church had asked him to run a church meeting, and he had no idea how to proceed. So he did some research and wrote the first draft of RROO.
The presenter also mentioned that the congregation had not so long ago dwindled to ten. I wondered whether that was related to RROO and the multitudinous further bureaucratic procedures layered onto churches and denominational structures, and whether these were continually strangling the church. After all, "the wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going; so is everyone who is born of the Spirit." John 3:8.
If you want to continue the deep dive into shared agency, this is a philosopher's view:
Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together
by Michael E. Bratman (Author)
https://a.co/d/1dOPeFn
"Through practical experience, nineteenth-century Americans realized that formality was an important tool of self-rule."
I don't think this is quite right. It is not strict adherence to formal documentation that is the basis of self-rule. The documentation was created to provide a record that a defined and formalized process was followed to generate a specific outcome that was not predetermined. To take a case of instant note, Alvin Bragg has been following all the proper formalities of generating an indictment of Donald Trump, producing all the proper paperwork and holding all the right meetings. However, even some of Trump's staunchest critics recognize that this is merely artifice as Bragg literally campaigned on the promise of generating an indictment of Trump. We are losing self-government because we are turning forms and processes into hollow shells that demagogues fill as they wish.
Re Tomasello, I generally like him, but he tends to make things more abstract than they need to be. When you say, "Look to your left," you are attempting to impose a boundary condition on my degrees of freedom, i.e., to alter my trajectory. One does not need to posit "agency" in order to understand what is going on.
Under most circumstances I would probably allow my trajectory to be so constrained, but that is by no means certain. As ethologist Stuart Altmann wrote (way back in 1967):
“At any one moment, the behavior of an individual is not a determined process. Rather, each of the responses of which the individual is capable has a certain likelihood of occurring, depending on numerous conditions, past and present. If the behavior of another individual produces any change in these likelihoods, then communication has taken place. Thus, when we say that, in a communication process, the behavior of one individual affects the behavior of another, we mean that it changes the probability distribution of the behavior of the other."