Mistakes in action: From the normativity of goal-directedness to novel investigations of avian nest construction

The guiding questions for the project are:

1. Can goal-directedness be operationalized to be scientifically productive?
2. Does our normative framework for analysing goal-directedness make this possible? 

Our core proposal is that the actions of biological systems and organisms are subject to normative standards, such as whether they are directed correctly towards biological goals. Mistakes are departures from these normative standards. 

Nests are of central interest to philosophical and scientific enquiry for many reasons, including their critical role in reproductive fitness and the requirement that they be completed to a quality standard prior to production of live chicks. Zebra finches build nests in pairs, thus enabling us to examine the social organization of goal-directed behaviours.

We are using established experimental methods to examine the hypotheses that zebra finches compensate for variations in nest conditions consistent with their correcting departures from a standard for the nest, and that they show evidence of evaluating their mate’s nest building capacity based on both reproductive outcomes and how well they build.