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P S Y C H E: Blackmore |
 | | Although Blackmore is by training a psychologist I was struck by how so many of her chapters are anchored in a core philosophical puzzle. |
| | Here, Blackmore’s skepticism about imitative learning even in apes may suffer from confusing the existence of imitative learning with its efficiency (field reports seem clearly to confirm imitative learning in chimpanzees, but the chimps are slow on the uptake). |
| | Of course, Blackmore does not miss the opportunity to link what we know and what we speculate about animal minds to Nagel’s famous question about ‘what it is like to be a bat’ and the general issue of subjectivity and perspective at the heart of the problem of consciousness. |
| psyche.cs.monash.edu.au /book_reviews/blackmore (2203 words) |
