AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

The distribution question about animal consciousness concerns which animal species are conscious. Philosophers and scientists alike have been hung up on the idea that we must first define consciousness if this question is to be answered. Examples in the history of science suggest, however, that this may put the conceptual cart before the empirical horse. Inspired by Hasok Chang's work on inventing temperature, I will argue that answering the distribution question requires the invention of better measures before a good enough theory to support a consensus definition can be developed. To this end, I will extend the ""signature approach"" to comparative animal cognition, developed by Alex Taylor, Amalia Bastos, Rachael Brown and myself. The signature approach applied to comparative studies of animal consciousness shares some affinities with ""marker"" approaches to animal consciousness offered recently by philosophers including Jonathan Birch, Kristin Andrews, and Albert Newen. But whereas marker approaches seek to build dimensional profiles of different species according to the degree to which they display various capacities thought to be related to consciousness, the signature approach is better suited to developing reliable measures that support detailed comparisons of the processes underlying these capacities, and ultimately better theories.