You can lead an ape to a tool, but: A review of Povinelli’s Folk physics for apes: The chimpanzee’s theory of how the world works.

Machado, A., & Silva, F. J. (2003). You can lead an ape to a tool, but…: A review of Povinelli’s Folk physics for apes: The chimpanzee’s theory of how the world works.. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 79, 267-286.

We reviewed Daniel Povinelli’s book, Folk physics for apes: The chimpanzee’s theory of how the world works. After a summary of the book's contents, we analyzed two sets of experiments on chimpanzees' folk psychology: one that explored whether chimpanzees understand that others see (i.e., that apes have internal visual experiences) and another that examined whether chimpanzees can distinguish intended from unintended actions. The conceptual scaffolding on which these studies were conceived was sufficiently faulty that their outcomes were virtually assured a priori. We then analyzed two sets of experiments on chimpanzees' folk physics, reinforcing our view that conceptual confusion guaranteed that certain key predictions about the outcome of these studies could not be supported. A unifying reason for this conceptual confusion is that the author devalues understanding that results from programmatic conditioning. We closed the review by relating Povinelli's findings and conclusions to behavior analysis and by explaining why behavior analysts should read this book.

Key words: conceptual analysis, tools, understanding, folk physics, folk psychology, chimpanzee