ABSTRACT
Ever since George Romanes came under heavy criticism for his anecdotal approach to animal mind, the capacity to learn has been presented by psychologists as a deflationary alternative to the attribution of higher cognitive capacities. The capacity to learn – i.e., to alter behavior as a function of experience – is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, leading theorists from Conwy Lloyd Morgan to Edward Thorndike to B. F. Skinner and beyond to consider learning explanations of complex behavior to be preferable to cognitive alternatives, which posit inner representational states of unknown structure and provenance.
