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Jakob von Uexk<78>ll<6C>s Concept of Umwelt as an Account of the Mental
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 The worlds of others
In the <20>rst decade of the 20th century, a horse named <20>Clever Hans<6E> captured the international attention of scientists and the public alike (K<>chy 2020: 1-5, Crawford 2021: 1-4). Its owner Wilhelm von Osten had made remarkable claims about the horse<73>s cognitive abilities, claiming to have trained it to be able to perform basic arithmetic, recognize people in photographs, and indicate the values of playing cards and coins. All of this, the horse allegedly indicated by tapping out the answers with its hoof (K<>chy 2020: 2). Clever Hans attained considerable international celebrity, with a New York Times headline calling him <20>Berlin<69>s Wonderful Horse; He Can Do Almost Everything<6E> (Crawford 2021: 1). A <20>rst commission of experts found no signs of scienti<74>c deceit or circus tricks and could provide no alternative explanation for Clever Hans<6E> performance than the attribution of considerable cognitive abilities which so excited the public (K<>chy 2020: 3). A second, smaller committee made up of the renowned psychologist Carl Stumpf and his assistants Erich von Hornborstel and Oskar Pfungst was <20>nally able to dispel the mystery scienti<74>cally: Pfungst devised experiments in which the humans interacting with the horse did not know the correct answer themselves and Clever Hans was completely unable to answer questions correctly under these conditions (ibid. 3-4). The explanation that Pfungst provided for the impressive previous performances was that the horse was picking up on very subtle behavioral cues from its handler and adjusting its hoof-taps to those cues rather than to any question presented (ibid. 4).
While less sensational than the original reports, the story of Clever Hans and the eventual debunking of his alleged intelligence has itself become a popular anecdote for illustrating the di.iculties we humans face when studying minds di.erent from ours, and our propensity to project anthropomorphic psychological categories on subjects or systems very di.erent from ourselves. This is the function the anecdote of Clever Hans plays e.g. as the opening section to two very di.erent books, Kristian K<>chy<68>s (2020) Beseelte Tiere: Umwelten und Netzwerke der Tierpsychologie [Ensouled Animals: Environments and Networks of Animal Psychology] and Kate Crawford<72>s (2021) Atlas of AI Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Arti<74>cial Intelligence. In the case of AI, the name Clever Hans has been used to highlight a problem otherwise known as data leakage, where a machine learning (ML) system returns the outputs we want but for the wrong reasons (Crawford 2021: 4). For example, a classi<73>er trained to identify which images from a CT scanner are likely to show the body of a patient with cancer can achieve high precision by simply classifying all images with a higher resolution and image quality as likely to indicate cancer. This works because patients only get scanned in the more expensive machines when their doctors have other reasons to believe that their chance of having cancer is particularly high. The ML classi<73>er seems to perform well, but is actually generating no new information at all nor picking up on how a tumor looks on a CT scan. With the dramatic recent rise of ML in science, data leakage has become a widespread problem (Kapoor and Narayanan 2023). Both in the case of ML and in animal psychology, our scienti<74>c interpretation of a system can be gravely mistaken if we fail to investigate carefully which parts of the information available to a system or subject actually guide its behavior. We often fail to do so because we project our own perceptions and evaluations of a task or situation onto those systems and subjects which are very di.erent from us. This insight, and a dissatisfaction with the anthropomorphic animal psychology of the turn of the century, drove Jakob von Uexk<78>ll to develop a new conception of biological research centered around the term Umwelt. An Umwelt is the world experienced by an animal a
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