What Is It Like to Be a Bird? Epistemic Humility and Human-Animal Relations

Abstract

Birds are everywhere. One of the reasons for this ubiquity is the power of flight, allowing the exploitation of a wide range of habitats which might be otherwise inaccessible. That they participate in so many domains and do remain relatively abundant, allied with at times breathtaking beauty, has meant that they have provided a rich source of aesthetic, cultural and scientific reflection. These deliberations can provide an opportunity for us to reflect on the very boundaries of our own human perspectives on the world. This diverse group of organisms may provide a heuristic device to think of ourselves as if from nowhere, freed from the entanglements of being human. In this chapter, we consider some of the ontological, epistemological and, ultimately, ethical issues thrown up by an attempt to become placed outside of ourselves, imagining the terms of other beings with very different lives to our own, lives largely indifferent to our own. We argue that the ‘difference’ of these winged creatures might help us, in this potential age of the Anthropocene, to develop a stance of ‘epistemic humility’. Such humility recognizes the limits of our knowledge in a way that enables us to become receptive to listening to nature’s story.