[New Entry by Richard Moore and Giulia Palazzolo on October 23, 2024.]
It is intuitive to think that animals communicate. This intuition shapes our everyday interactions with animals, and guides much empirical and theoretical research. Pet owners take their cats’ meows to be requests for food, and interpret their dogs’ play bows as invitations to play. Meanwhile, scholars argue that bees use their dances to communicate information about the location of food, and that the flashing behaviours of fireflies communicate sexual availability to potential mates. But what is animal communication?…

Read the full article which is published on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (external link)