Consciousness
Animal sentience: concepts, evidence, methods
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Surveys broad versus valenced sentience, fish and invertebrate controversies, and theory-light empirical strategies.
Key findings
Valenced experience is treated as a (often the) ground of moral status; fish generalisations are weak beyond a few teleosts; cephalopod sentience is widely accepted while decapods remain more controversial; disentangling conscious from unconscious affect has no analogue of backward masking.
Methodology
They clarify broad phenomenal versus narrow valenced sentience, show why valence matters for ethics and welfare law, review evidence debates about fish and invertebrates, and recommend a middle-path 'theory-light' research strategy.
Limitations
The article reports no new experiments and does not settle which invertebrates are sentient; fish pain work is concentrated in species such as rainbow trout and zebrafish.
How this study connects
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