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Mapping Out the Landscape: A Multi-dimensional Approach to Behavioral Innovation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2022

Rachael L. Brown Open the ORCID record for Rachael L. Brown [Opens in a new window]
Rachael L. Brown*
Affiliation:
Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences School of Philosophy, RSSS College of Arts and Social Sciences Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
*
Email: rachael.brown@anu.edu.au
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Abstract

Transformations in the “behavioral innovativeness” of species—broadly, the capacity to generate new or novel behaviors—have been associated with significant evolutionary shifts in cognition by both philosophers and scientists. Whilst intuitively and theoretically appealing, this assumption lacks strong empirical support. One barrier is the absence of a good measure of behavioral innovation. This paper offers a solution to this problem by breaking down innovation into its components and presenting a novel multi-dimensional framework for characterising and comparing putative cases of behavioral innovation.

Information

Type
Symposia Paper
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 89 , Issue 5 , December 2022 , pp. 1176 - 1185
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Philosophy of Science Association

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