Folk psychology and psychological science

Studia Philosophica Estonica, 2016

'Folk psychology' is a term that refers to the way that ordinary people think and talk about minds. But over roughly the last four decades the term has come to be used in rather different ways by philosophers and psychologists engaged in technical projects in analytic philosophy of mind and empirical psychology, many of which are only indirectly related to the question of how ordinary people actually think about minds. The result is a sometimes puzzling body of academic literature, cobbled together loosely under that single heading, that contains a number of terminological inconsistencies, the clarification of which seems to reveal conceptual problems. This paper is an attempt to approach folk psychology more directly, to clarify the phenomenon of interest, and to examine the methods used to investigate it. Having identified some conceptual problems in the literature, I argue that those problems have occluded a particular methodological confound involved in the study of folk psychology, one associated with psychological language, that may well be intractable. Rather than attempt to solve that methodological problem, then, I suggest that we use the opportunity to rethink the relationship between folk psychology and its scientific counterpart. A careful look at the study of folk psychology may prove surprisingly helpful for clarifying the nature of psychological science and addressing the contentious question of its status as a potentially autonomous special science.

In this paper, I seek to refute arguments for the idea that folk psychological explanation, i.e. the explanation of actions, beliefs and desires in terms of one another, should be understood as being of a different character than ordinary scientific explanations, a view defended most prominently in analytical philosophy by Donald Davidson and John McDowell. My strategy involves arguing both against the extant arguments for the idea that FP must be construed as giving such explanations, and also against the very notion of such a different kind of explanation. I argue first that the in some sense a priori and conceptual nature of folk psychological principles does not support the idea that these are other than empirical generalisations, by appeal to recent nativist ideas in cognitive science and to Lewis's conception of the meaning of theoretical terms. Second, I argue that there is no coherent sense in which folk psychological explanations can be seen as normative. Thirdly, I examine the putatively holistic character of the mental and conclude that that too fails to provide any cogent reasons for viewing folk psychological explanations as different from other kinds of explanation.

This paper argues that fictionalism about folk psychology is ill motivated in any domain. First, there is no advantage in trying to vindicate folk psychology by treating the constructs of classical cognitivism – viz. subpersonal mental representations – as useful fictions as opposed to serious scientific posits. Second, there is neither need nor justification for treating folk psychological explanations – those that feature in our non-scientific, narrative practices of explaining actions in terms of reasons – as fictions. Dennett-style rationales for adopting fictionalism about folk psychology based on worries about the indeterminacy of folk psychological attributions are considered and rejected.

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2006

This paper disputes the claim that our understanding of others is enabled by a commonsense or ‘folk’ psychology, whose ‘core’ involves the attribution of intentional states in order to predict and explain behaviour. I argue that interpersonal understanding is seldom, if ever, a matter of two people assigning intentional states to each other but emerges out of a context of interaction between them. Self and other form a coupled system rather than two wholly separate entities equipped with an internalised capacity to assign mental states to the other. This applies even in those instances where one might seem to adopt a ‘detached’ perspective towards others. Thus ‘folk psychology’, as commonly construed, is not folk psychology.

Folk Psychology Re-Assessed, 2007

Folk psychology does not exist "Guy was realising more and more that it wasn't just hard to put yourself in another's mind, but nearly impossible, although that was supposedly part of the acting profession. The truth was that you absorbed traits rather than mentality. In plays and scripts you always had tracks of cause and effect. But in life if you were dealing with people who didn't come from your own patch you weren't going to get it right. The answers came haphazardly, from the spinning wheel of a roulette table." Tibor Fischer 'Listed for trial'.

Review of General Psychology, 2005

Page 1. Why Psychology Is/Is Not Traditional Science: The Self-Referential Bases of Psychological Research and Theory Harry T. Hunt Brock University The hyperspecialization, fragmentation, curious faddishness of major research ...

2008

Mindscapes: Philosophy, science, and the mind, 1997

International Journal of Arts & Sciences, 2011

The nature and role of folk psychology is a very delicate issue within the philosophy of science. Although it is one of the main problems within the psychology of mind its status and usefulness is on the fierce debates. In the present paper intend to show that despite the progress of scientific psychology, or better, because of it, the nature of relationship of folk and scientific psychology will bring to the enhancement and evolution of both.

Folk psychology is under threat - that is to say - our everyday conception that human beings are agents who experience the world in terms of sights, sounds, tastes, smells and feelings and who deliberate, make plans, and generally execute actions on the basis of their beliefs, needs and wants - is under threat. This threat is evidenced in intellectual circles by the growing attitude amongst some cognitive scientists that our common sense categories are in competition with connectionist theories and modern neuroscience. It is often thought that either folk psychology or modern cognitive science must go. It is in these terms that the battle lines of today's philosophy of mind are drawn. If, as unbiased observers, we judge the progress of this war it becomes quickly obvious that the folk psychologists are consistently on the defensive. Ih light of this I sketch a general, but brief, strategy by which folk psychologists can, at the very least, protect some of their flanks and, at best, mount an offensive against the eliminativists.

Minds and Machines, 1995

It is often assumed that cognitive science is built upon folk psychology, and that challenges to folk psychology are therefore challenges to cognitive science itself. We argue that, in practice, cognitive science and folk psychology treat entirely non-overlapping domains: cognitive science considers aspects of mental life which do not depend on general knowledge, whereas folk psychology considers aspects of mental life which do depend on general knowledge. We back up our argument on theoretical grounds, and also illustrate the separation between cognitive scientific and folk psychological phenomena in a number of cognitive domains. We consider the methodological and theoretical significance of our arguments for cognitive science research.

Abstract The debates about the form of folk psychology and the potential eliminability of folk psychology rest on a particular view about how humans understand other minds. That is, though folk psychology is described as “ourcom monsense conception ofpsychological phenomena”(Churchland 1981, p. 67), there havebeen implicit assumptions regarding the nature of that commonsense conception. It has been assumed that folk psychology involves two practices, the prediction and explanation of behavior. And it has been assumed that one cognitive mechanism subsumes both these practices. I argue for a new conception of folk psychology, one which challenges these assumptions. There is reason to think that folk psychology is more diverse than is typically thought, both insofar as there are a heterogeneous collection of heuristics that are used, and as our folk psychological practices include more than prediction and explanation. While these practices remain central in the philosophical discussion...

2008

My purpose in this paper is merely to spell out just how the Narrative Practice Hypothesis, if true, undercuts any need to appeal to either theory or simulation when it comes to explaining the basis of folk psychological understanding: these heuristics do not come into play other than in cases of in which the framework is used to speculate about why another may have acted. To add appropriate force to this observation, I first say something about why we should reject the widely held assumption that the primary business of folk psychology is to provide third-personal predictions and explanations. I then go on to demonstrate how the NPH can account for (i) the structural features of folk psychology and (ii) its staged acquisition without buying into the idea that it is a theory, or that it is acquired by means of constructing one. This should expose the impotence of the standard reasons for believing that folk psychology must be a kind of theory. In the concluding postscript, I acknowledge that we need more than the folk psychological framework to understand how we understand reasons, but I deny that this something more takes the form of a theory about propositional attitudes or simulative procedures for manipulating them. For example, I claim it rests in part on a capacity for co-cognition, inter alia, since that ability is necessary for understanding another’s thoughts. Nevertheless, I deny that co-cognition equates to simulation proper or that it plays anything more than a supporting role in understanding reasons for action.