I'm over the moon to finally be able to share my paper 'Death-feigning, animal concepts, and the use of empirical case studies in animal cognition' (co-written with @ldanon.bsky.social), out now in @thebjps.bsky.social. Perfect timing, too, as I can now write a thread on it! 🤩🧵👇 - ThreadSky

susanamonso.com • 112 days ago

I'm over the moon to finally be able to share my paper 'Death-feigning, animal concepts, and the use of empirical case studies in animal cognition' (co-written with @ldanon.bsky.social), out now in @thebjps.bsky.social. Perfect timing, too, as I can now write a thread on it! 🤩🧵👇

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stallfortime.bsky.social•112 days ago

New here at Bluesky. Refugee from the other app. How do we bookmark this? I want to save it.

susanamonso.com•112 days ago

Welcome! And unfortunately I don't think there's a bookmark feature for now. Or at least I'm not familiar with it. Maybe you can use your browser's bookmark option?

stallfortime.bsky.social•112 days ago

I'll find a way. Looking forward to reading the paper. Thank you!

richardmoore.bsky.social•112 days ago

omg

raereiway.bsky.social•112 days ago

Congrats on publishing your paper! The inner workings of the minds within other animals is an enigma and we as humans cannot help but anthropomorphize animals with our characteristics.

Your study will help us better understand animals outside our viewpoint. Good work!

susanamonso.com•112 days ago

This paper builds on an idea that @biotay.bsky.social and I first outlined in our paper: that the elaborate death displays of animals like the Virginia opossum reveal something about minds of the animals they target, namely, that the latter have a concept of death (which allows them to be deceived).

susanamonso.com•112 days ago

I developed this idea in some more depth in my book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death. The opossum is a protagonist here because she's one of the best pieces of evidence for a concept of death in nature. How the opossum 'plays possum' reveals how animals (her predators) understand death.

susanamonso.com•112 days ago

You can also read my thoughts on this in this Aeon piece:

susanamonso.com•112 days ago

So why the need for this paper then? Here we argue that the death displays of opossums and the like are not just evidence for a concept of death but for *conceptual abilities* in the deceived predators. This is thus mainly a contribution to the debate on concept possession in animals.

susanamonso.com•112 days ago

We defend a dimensional account of concept possession: animals have concepts to a bigger or lesser extent depending on whether they satisfy the requirements of distance, inferentiality, aspectuality, generality, and a semantic net. We argue that the predators targeted by death-feigning satisfy all.

susanamonso.com•112 days ago

This paper is also a methodological statement. We defend that debates on animal minds should proceed through the use of case studies. Instead of asking questions like "do animals have concepts?" we should be asking questions like "what does behaviour X tell us about the capacities of animal Y?"

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