La representation animale

La representation animale

88 based on a workshop on this An excellent patristic and avenues for future Hurlbert (1984) grated series of The tion of male quality of ...

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88 based on a workshop

on this

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and avenues

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volume $75)

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signals,

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Branch,

Museum

PO Box

3443,

Ottawa,

Ontario

of Nature,

Station

D,

Kl P 6P4,

Canada

La

Representation

Universitaires

This

book

‘Seminaire

papers, Representation, makes

an

interesting

by

13

Animal

of the language reading

Because cement

is

By

212

d’Epistemologie issued

quality

Animale.

de Nancy,

Jacques

summary

des Sciences

authors,

Gervet,

Pierre

Livet

and

Alain

T6te.

Presses

pp, 1992.

of

divided

Representation,

discussions

within

du Comportement into

three

Representation

has to be noted,

major

the

topics:

of

the

In includes

14

Representation

and Cognitive

and each chapter

framework

d’Aix-Marseille’.

offers

Sciences.

a bright

of the Firstly,

speech

the

which

a real pleasure.

of the ambition

the whole,

of the project

the reader should

and despite

the various

texts

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inserted

vision

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of the field.

to

This

89

volume, actually, does not avoid the main failure of that kind of collective work: the papers are very diverse, heterogenous, with large disparities. But it has, at the same time, the quality of its failure, i.e. a firework of often contradictory ideas, inviting the reader to weigh all the conceptual choices in an attempt to build up his own viewpoint. The title is partly unappropriate, as only the second part directly fits with it. No more than half of the papers deal with animal representation, and animal behviour specialists are a minority amongst the authors. A consequence is that many articles present general philosophical discussions about representation and cognition. It is not obvious how the more specific issues of animal representation could find their place. Petitot’s paper has to be signalled in this respect, as it nicely overcomes that difficulty. A second consequence of the specific interest of the authors is that some basic arguments from experimental data in ethology and animal psychology are rare and mostly missing. Again, the reader should not expect to find a large and complete view of the literature in that field. It was not the aim of the book. Particularly, since the classical ethology, which already dealt with these issues more than half century ago until the present period, the discussion of ethological arguments remains very superficial and mostly incomplete. Some papers are obviously based on ethologial data (Gervet or Vauclair, for instance), but only a few viewpoints are emphasized, preventing the reader from developing a powerful criticism. The contributions of the neurobiologists to the study of animal representation are also mostly absent. In this respect, Zayan’s paper deserves to be outlined, as a successful attempt to join psychological and neurobiological aspects of animal representation. In the same way, the contribution of the formal models approach and of artificial intelligence specialists is poorly represented. Finally, one could have expected new perspectives, methodological proposals and issues to be solved for the near future from such a book. But, despite the gap between possible expectancy, and the published result, this book, because of the many stimulating ideas totally deserves to be read, discussed and commented. Raymond Campan, Biologie du Comportement, Universite Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France

The Behaviour of The Horse. By Andrew F. Fraser. E.A.B. International,

228 pp.

The book is divided into 7 chapters: Basis of Behaviour, Inner Controls, Maintenance Behaviour, Reproduction, Developmental and Social Behaviour, Abnormal and Anomalous Behaviour, and Behaviour and Well-Being. The weakest portion of the book is that on the physiology and neurology, the first two sections of the book. The information is not based on the horse. Horses are too large, expensive and prone to infection to be good subjects for direct manipulation of their brains by injection or lesions. The reader would not be aware of this on the basis of the