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The changing concept of animal sentience

2006· article· en· W1997220394 on OpenAlexaff
I.J.H. Duncan

Bibliographic record

VenueApplied Animal Behaviour Science · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldVeterinary
TopicAnimal Behavior and Welfare Studies
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Guelph
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSentienceAnimal welfareEnvironmental ethicsEnlightenmentFeelingPsychologyEpistemologySociologyPhilosophySocial psychologyBiologyEcology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

A brief history of the concept of sentience is given. It is pointed out that the idea of sentience, at least in the mammals and birds, was accepted by lay people by the time of the Renaissance and before it was acknowledged by philosophers. It was not until the Enlightenment of the 18th century that philosophers started to accept the notion that animals have feelings. Towards the end of the 19th century, scientists and philosophers had developed a fairly sophisticated concept of sentience. Little consideration was given to sentience by scientists through much of the 20th century due to the inhibiting influence of Behaviourism. In the last quarter of the 20th century, there was a surge of interest in animal sentience, and animal welfare scientists quickly realised that welfare problems can be better tackled with an understanding of how animals feel. Methods to investigate indirectly how animals feel are described and areas requiring further elucidation are listed.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.022

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.003
Science and technology studies0.0020.015
Scholarly communication0.0050.008
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0030.008
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.029
GPT teacher head0.307
Teacher spread0.278 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations318
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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