Document type : article published in the Bulletin de veille of the Centre d’études et de prospective of the French Ministère de l’agriculture et de l’alimentation
Author: Florent Bidaud
Preview: The journal Zilsel has devoted a dossier of reports to the Human-animal relationshipsshipsship and its perception in the Social Sciences. The shared ambition of the researchers it brings together is to move beyond the generalisations that may be found in discussions among philosophers, psychologists and activists. To this end, they place the observation of situated interspecies interactions at the heart of their analysis. Thus, C de Mondémé (CNRS) critiques the artificial nature of laboratory experiments to measure animal intelligence, drawing on her own in situ observations of sequences of actions to argue for intentionality.
An article by D. Guillo (CNRS) suggests that researchers should engage with ethologists in order to "establish solid foundations for the modalities of animal agency". He reminds us that the strict division of nature and culture is in fact a recent invention by the Social Sciences, dating only from the middle of the 20th century. Following this, a review by A. Doré and J. Michalon (INRAE and CNRS), of a recent work by D. Guillo himself, Les fondements oubliés de la culture (Seuil, 2019), points out the limits of the convergence proposed by Guillo. In their view, his thesis is the consequence of a different overgeneralisation, the paradigm of interaction, which leads to an underestimation of the role of institutions and technological artefacts (see also an earlier reading note in La Vie des Idées by the same authors).
Turning to a different type of generalising discourse, that of anti-speciesist and vegan philosopher-militants, J. Porcher (INRAE) examines the registers deployed in justifications for in vitro meat, in order to highlight another issue ignored by the debate, that of animal labour.
