Why cognitive science is not formalized folk psychology

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.

In this essay we would like to answer the question whether – and if so, in what sense – folk psychology explains human behavior and how such explanations differ from those provided by psychological and neuroscientific theories. We begin with a short characterization of folk psychology, distinguishing between its two levels: phenomenological and architectural. Next, we attempt to show that while the architectural level of folk psychology is biologically determined, the phenomenological level crucially depends on culture. We also propose a theory of explanation which postulates continuity between concrete, non-deductive, causal explanations on the one hand, and abstract explanation-as-unification on the other. Finally, we come to the conclusion that the explanations of human behavior supplied by folk psychology are genuine, but more concrete than their scientific counterparts.

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.

Mindscapes: Philosophy, science, and the mind, 1997

British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

It has commonly been argued that certain types of mental descriptions, specifically those characterized in terms of propositional attitudes, are part of a folk psychological understanding of the mind. Recently, however, it has also been argued that this is the case even when such descriptions are employed as part of scientific theories in domains like social psychology and comparative psychology. In this paper, I argue that there is no plausible way to understand the distinction between folk and scientific psychology that can support such claims. Moreover, these sorts of claims can have adverse consequences for the neuroscientific study of the brain by downplaying the value of many psychological theories that provide information neuroscientists need in order to build and test neurological models.

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2004

Analytic philosophers have long used a priori methods to characterize folk concepts like knowledge, belief, and wrongness. Recently, researchers have begun to exploit social scientific methodologies to characterize such folk concepts. One line of work has explored folk intuitions on cases that are disputed within philosophy. A second approach, with potentially more radical implications, applies the methods of cross-cultural psychology to philosophical intuitions. Recent work suggests that people in different cultures have systematically different intuitions surrounding folk concepts like wrong, knows, and refers.

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.

Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 1999

Writers of psychology textbooks, consistent with mainstream opinion in psychology, are fond of asserting the Primacy of science and scientific method over the claims and Standards of untutored common sense or folk psy-

Philosophical Studies, 1990

Philosophia, 2012

One of the central explananda in the debate on social cognition is the interpretation of other people in terms of reasons for action. There is a growing dissatisfaction among participants in the debate concerning the descriptive adequacy of the traditional belief-desire model of action interpretation. Applying this model as an explanatory model at the subpersonal level threatens to leave the original explanandum largely unarticulated. Against this background we show how Brandom's deontic scorekeeping model can be used as a valuable descriptive tool for making folk psychology explicit. Following Brandom's non-formalist and nonmentalistic account of reason discourse, we suggest that the process of making sense of others is best captured as proceeding from a 'factive' baseline. According to this picture the ascription of beliefs and desires is not the default interpretation strategy, but rather the result of prior scaffolding of the agent's deontic score. We close by discussing Brandom's model in the light of empirical findings on the ontogeny of reason attribution.

Almost fifty years ago, Wilfrid Sellars first proposed that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts. Since then, several different research programs have been based on this conjecture. This essay examines what his original claim really amounted to and what it was supposed to accomplish, and then uses that understanding of the original project to investigate the extent to which the later research projects expand on it or depart from it.

Psychological Review, 1989

A central aspect of people's beliefs about the mind is that mental activities--for example, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving--are interrelated, with some activities being kinds or parts ofothers. In common-sense psychology, reasoning is a kind of thinking and reasoning is part of problem solving. People's conceptions of these mental kinds and parts can furnish clues to the ordinary meaning of these terms and to the differences between folk and scientific psychology. In this article, we use a new technique for deriving partial orders to analyze subjects' decisions about whether one mental activity is a kind or part of another. The resulting taxonomies and partonomies differ from those of common object categories in exhibiting a converse relation in this domain: One mental activity is a part of another if the second is a kind of the first. The derived taxonomies and partonomies also allow us to predict results from further experiments that examine subjects' memory for these activities, their ratings of the activities' importance, and their judgments about whether there could be "possible minds" that possess some of the activities but not others.