Talk:Morgan's Canon

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 4 September 2019 and 27 November 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): TOliver9712. Peer reviewers: Sydneyn23, Sjb165, Zh3538.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 04:27, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Needed Correction

The doubts stumbled upon below should be taken seriously. The Thomas piece expresses the Academic consensus on the issue. As Wozniak (2002) puts it, "Morgan's Canon is not a principle of parsimony, it was not formulated as a guide to the description of behavior, it does not dispense with mental faculties, it is not an appeal to the observable, and it is not meant to be specific to animal psychology."

Possible Doubts

I stubled upon the following paper on Morgans's Canon by Roger K. Thomas from the University of Georgia:

http://htpprints.yorku.ca/archive/00000017/

Thomas questions monst of the claims in this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.2.187.32 (talk) 07:48, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

I

I have doubts about the appropriateness of this capital "C". Why is it used, rather than lower-case "c"? Michael Hardy 02:01, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

That's how my sources give it. It's analogous, of course to "Whomever's Law"; Wikipedia seems to mostly use lowercase "l", but sometimes uppercase "L", in these titles. Is there a policy or consensus one way or the other? orthogonal 02:43, 24 Nov 2003 (UTC)

With Maxwell's theorem and lots of others like it you see "theorem" in lower-case and maybe a redirect page with upper case. Similarly de Morgan's laws, if I recall correctly. Michael Hardy 00:51, 25 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Comment

Per the request at WT:MED: I have read this article and think it's all right, but not great. The first two "fixes" I'd recommend are removing the duplicated material (the canon is quoted twice) and re-writing it so that it uses the third person (instead of "we").

If the information is readily available, it would be interesting to know another case or two. In particular, it would be interesting to read about a case in which Morgan's Canon was invoked by people other than Morgan (say, after his death) to choose between competing interpretations. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:12, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks very much - you are the first to respond. And really I have done no more to this one and the Morgan one than add pics and edit what was there. I happened on him by accident - he linked to Haeckel if I remember rightly - and it is left-field of my interest. Thanks for pointing out the rogue law, I had missed it or else pasted it in accidentally. Do you yourself know who best to link to in Wiki to make the story continue? Maybe there is already unlinked material. Redheylin (talk) 01:27, 17 June 2008 (UTC)

Well, my usual approach is to look through the editors who have previously worked on the article, and see whether any of them are willing and able to help out. A note left at WT:VET would also be appropriate in this case, since this isn't properly a human medical issue at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:44, 18 June 2008 (UTC)

Image

I find the new image (added here) confusing in conjunction with the caption. What is being described here? The old image was cute, but the new one doesn't add anything. — 184.32.43.63 (talk) 17:11, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

In what ways would the eye of a blue whale not be more appropriate for this article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 118.209.215.179 (talk) 11:22, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Agreed. And the fact that the photo is apparently related to corneal dystrophy could distract from the subject of this article. I understand the reasoning/sentiment to featuring an eye or some other easily anthropomorphized feature though. jrun (talk) 22:05, 20 May 2014 (UTC)

uncited opinion

Moving this here (from 'Context' section) for now: ..."the fact that Morgan was himself an acute observer of behaviour"...

Article has been tagged since June 2008 for its lack of citations, and this particular statement of opinion as fact desperately needs a citation.

--TyrS 02:43, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

Additional/potential references

Hi! I am a student editor working on the article for course credit. I am posting my current bibliography to this Talk page to show others which sources I am drawing/planning to draw my contributions from. These are the sources in question:

Browne, D. (2004). Do dolphins know their own minds? Biology & Philosophy, 19(4), 633–653. doi: 10.1007/sbiph-004-0928-1

Böhnert, M., & Hilbert, C. (2018). “Other minds than ours”: A controversial discussion on the limits and possibilities of comparative psychology in the light of C. Lloyd Morgan’s work. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 40(3). doi: 10.1007/s40656-018-0211-4

Elwood, R. W., & Arnott, G. (2012). Understanding how animals fight with Lloyd Morgan's canon. Animal Behaviour, 84(5), 1095–1102. doi: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.08.035

Fitzpatrick, S. (2008). Doing away with Morgan’s Canon. Mind & Language, 23(2), 224–246. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00338.x

Kimler, W. C. (2000). Reading Morgan's Canon: Reduction and Unification in the Forging of a Science of the Mind. American Zoologist, 40(6), 853–861. doi: 10.1093/icb/40.6.853

Mikhalevich, I., Powell, R., & Logan, C. (2017). Is behavioural flexibility evidence of cognitive complexity? How evolution can inform comparative cognition. Interface Focus, 7(3), 20160121. doi: 10.1098/rsfs.2016.0121

Starzak, T. (2016). Interpretations without justification: a general argument against Morgan’s Canon. Synthese, 194(5), 1681–1701. doi: 10.1007/s11229-016-1013-4

Takeuchi, T. (2016). Agonistic display or courtship behavior? A review of contests over mating opportunity in butterflies. Journal of Ethology, 35(1), 3–12. doi: 10.1007/s10164-016-0487-3 TOliver9712 (talk) 16:10, 12 October 2019 (UTC)