I don’t disagree in principle(but I also love unleashing the qualia zombies, so I’m probably not good advice on that score); but, as a matter of practice/for research purposes, it seems like it leads toward a morass that is worth pointing out as you pass it, for philosophy’s sake; but also worth passing, for research’s sake, by some variation of the “Ok, we don’t know if fireflies “lie” to one another in order to lure their victims to cannibalistic doom; so we’ll study “deceptive signalling” and call it a day, ok?” arrangement that animal behavior research tends to use.
The question of whether or not horses intend communication, may be lying to you; do humans actually intend much of what we usually think of as communication, etc. is interesting; but also kind of an intractable one(since you can’t interview the horse at all; and humans are unreliable narrators of their own introspective experiences(if those sneaky qualia zombies even have introspective experience; rather than just externally appearing to…)). Under those conditions; it seems much more practical to go with the “Hypothesis: horses leak state with their face; let’s find out!”
This ‘eh, ignore the troublesome metaphysics’ approach doesn’t, indeed, prove that a horse ‘intends’ or ‘communicates’ any more than a device failing at radio silence does; but that doesn’t make using easily accessible state leakage to analyze harder-to-read internal state any less interesting.
My skepticism was probably more about the BB entry rather than the study itself. Pescovitz refers to these movements as being communication, and it has communication and language tags. I don’t disagree that they were able to identify groups of equine facial movements
And none of this is really news to anyone who has spent significant time working with horses.
It’s less evident in the anthropomorphologising people do to the horses, than it is in the horses’ ability to read humans intentions and emotional states. They react differently, depending on everything from posture to, yes, facial expressions. It is hardly surprising (once you realise that) that we can successfully use horses in many of the same capacities that we use dogs.
