The author questions whether Morgan's canon is genuinely parsimonious on the ground that

parsimony has been abandoned as a criterion in the natural sciences.

the canon was formulated before modern learning theory existed.

one general capacity may be a simpler theory than many separate associations.

simpler explanations are more often false than complex ones.

The passage indicates that the ranking of faculties from lower to higher

has been confirmed by comparative studies of vertebrate brains.

derives from a nineteenth-century picture of evolution that its modern users rarely examine.

was introduced into the field long after Morgan's canon was formulated.

applies to birds but not to mammals.

The author objects that applying the canon strictly amounts to

adopting a position rather than a neutral starting point.

ignoring evidence from experiments on wild populations.

requiring more controls than most studies can afford.

treating all animal species as cognitively equivalent.

It can be inferred that the author would regard a study whose results are equally consistent with both explanations as

grounds for accepting the associative account, since it invokes a lower faculty.

evidence that the animal possesses the higher capacity in some degree.

poorly designed, because a well-designed study can always discriminate.

establishing neither account, and therefore not yet evidence for either.

The passage identifies each of the following as a feature of strong current work in the field EXCEPT

transfer tests using problems the animal has not encountered before.

a stated preference for the explanation invoking the lower faculty.

predictions on which the competing explanations differ.

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Morgan's Canon and the Study of Animal Minds

PRACTICE

100:00+4 −1MCQ Single Answer

Reading Passage

A crow presented with food in a narrow tube bends a straight piece of wire into a hook and lifts the food out. It is difficult to watch without concluding that the bird grasped what the problem required. Comparative psychology has long guarded against exactly that conclusion by way of Morgan's canon, formulated in 1894: no animal behaviour should be explained as the outcome of a higher psychological faculty if it can be explained by one lower on the scale. For most of the twentieth century the canon functioned as the discipline's default setting, and an explanation invoking insight or understanding carried a burden that an explanation invoking association did not. The canon has usually been defended as a form of parsimony, but it is not obviously parsimonious. Parsimony is a preference for the simpler theory, and a theory crediting a crow with one general capacity to reason about physical problems may well be simpler than one that posits a dozen separately acquired associations, each tuned to a particular task. The canon also carries an assumption its modern users rarely examine: that psychological faculties can be ranked from lower to higher at all, a ranking inherited from a nineteenth-century picture of evolution as a ladder. Applied strictly, the rule does not merely counsel caution — it tilts every ambiguous case toward denial, which is a position rather than a neutral starting point. The response has been to stop treating the canon as a verdict and start treating it as a demand. What distinguishes strong work in the field now is not which explanation it favours but whether its experiment can tell the two apart: controls that rule out prior associative learning, transfer tests on problems the animal has never met, and predictions on which the competing accounts actually differ. Where a study cannot discriminate between them, the disciplined conclusion is not that the simpler account wins by default but that the behaviour is not yet evidence for either.

The passage is primarily concerned with