Descripción del proyecto
La vida interior de los animales
¿Qué se siente al ser una abeja? ¿O un pez? ¿Un pulpo experimenta placer, miedo o dolor? Estas son solo algunas de las preguntan que se plantean hoy día los biólogos y los filósofos. El equipo del proyecto ASENT, financiado con fondos europeos, tratará de responder a estas preguntas al crear una metodología dedicada a la ciencia de la sensibilidad animal, es decir, la experiencia subjetiva de un animal con relación al mundo exterior y su cuerpo. En concreto, en ASENT se desarrollará un marco conceptual para conocer la variación de la sensibilidad en el reino animal. Diseñará además un método de pruebas experimentales para generar un perfil de sensibilidad emparejado al tipo de especie. El proyecto evaluará también las dimensiones de la sensiblidad en cuanto a relevancia para el bienestar y el estado ético de los animales.
Objetivo
The goal of ASENT is to construct solid conceptual and methodological foundations for the science of animal sentience.
The term sentience refers to an animal’s subjective experience of the world and of its own body. In recent years, an interdisciplinary community of animal sentience researchers, drawn from neuroscience, comparative psychology, evolutionary biology, animal welfare science and philosophy, has begun to emerge. However, the field is characterized by foundational controversy over the nature of sentience and the criteria for its attribution, leading to heated debate over the presence or absence of sentience in fish and in invertebrates such as cephalopods and arthropods.
ASENT aims to find ways to resolve these debates, enabling researchers to move beyond the impasses that result from deep foundational disagreement. What is needed is a conceptual framework for thinking about sentience as an evolved phenomenon that varies along several dimensions, a deeper understanding of how these dimensions of sentience relate to measurable aspects of animal behaviour and the nervous system, and a richer picture of the links between sentience, welfare and the ethical status of animals.
ASENT will answer this need by providing:
1. An account of the basic functional capacities involved in sentience, and an evaluation of which capacities justify us in regarding an animal as a sentience candidate.
2. An overarching conceptual framework for understanding the dimensions along which sentience varies across the animal kingdom, based on distinguishing multiple structural properties of sentience;
3. A scheme of proposed experimental tests for constructing a species’ most likely sentience profile with reference to these dimensions, implemented with scientific collaborators using bees as a test case.
4. An assessment of which dimensions of sentience are most relevant to animal welfare and to the ethical status of animals.
Ámbito científico
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-STG - Starting GrantInstitución de acogida
WC2A 2AE London
Reino Unido