Morgan's Canon: Animal Psychology in the Twentieth Century and Beyond

Morgan’s Canon instructs us that “in no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development”. In this paper, I survey, evaluate and also add to the growing number of critiques of Morgan’s Canon that now exist in the philosophical literature. The paper argues that Morgan’s Canon has been both misunderstood and inappropriately extended to contexts for which is was never intended; and moreover, that its widespread endorsement by animal psychologists has led to overly and provably perniciously conservative tendencies to interpret animal behaviour in unduly mechanistic ways.