Folk Psychology Does not Exist
Adam Morton2007, Folk Psychology Re-Assessed
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Abstract
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'.
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'Folk Psychology' is Not Folk Psychology
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.
Fictionalism about Folk Psychology
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.
Folk Psychology is Here to Stay
The Philosophical Review, 1985
Folk psychology is a network of principles which constitutes a sort of common-sense theory about how to explain human behavior. These principles provide a central role to certain propositional attitudes, particularly beliefs and desires. The theory asserts, for example, that if someone desires that p, and this desire is not overridden by other desires, and he believes that an action of kind K will bring it about that p, and he believes that such an action is within his power, and he does not believe that some other kind of action is within his power and is a preferable way to bring it about that p, then ceteris paribus, the desire and the beliefs will cause him to perform an action of kind K. The theory is largely functional, in that the states it postulates are characterized primarily in terms of their causal relations to each other, to perception and other environmental stimuli, and to behavior. Folk psychology (henceforth FP) is deeply ingrained in our common-sense conception of ourselves as persons. Whatever else a person is, he is supposed to be a rational (at least largely rational) agent-that is, a creature whose behavior is systematically caused by, and explainable in terms of, his beliefs, desires, and related propositional attitudes. The wholesale rejection of FP, therefore, would entail a drastic revision of our conceptual scheme. This fact seems to us to constitute a good prima facie reason for not discarding FP too quickly in the face of apparent difficulties. Recently, however, FP has come under fire from two quarters. Paul Churchland (1981) has argued that since FP has been with us for at least twenty-five centuries, and thus is not the product of any deliberate and self-conscious attempt to develop a psychological theory which coheres with the account of homo sapiens which the natural sciences provide, there is little reason to suppose that FP is true, or that humans undergo beliefs, desires, and the like. And Stephen Stich (1983) has argued that current work in cognitive science suggests that no events or states posited by a mature cognitive psychology will be identifiable as the events and states posited by FP; Stich maintains that if this turns out to be the case,
When Does ‘Folk Psychology’ Count as Folk Psychological?
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.
The Empirical Naivete of the Current Philosophical Conception of Folk Psychology
Mindscapes: Philosophy, science, and the mind, 1997
The Enforced Brotherhood of folk and clerk Psychology
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.pdf
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.
Folk-Psychology as Reconstruction
Many of our social-cognitive processes are not reflectively conscious; they are, as it is often called, ‘implicit’. The question I will be concerned with in this paper is what this lack of conscious reflection implies about the nature of implicit social cognitive processes. Do they differ from reflectively conscious ones only insofar as they ‘need not make it to the conscious level’ because they are fast and relatively simple? Or is it possible that there are structural differences on the level of cognitive processing as well? Explicit social cognitive processes are usually taken to consists of our wielding a ‘theory of mind’, usually referred to as ‘folk-psychology’. The question, then, is whether our implicit social cognitive processes should be taken to consist in the implicit, unreflective and/or unconscious use of such a theory of mind. Despite a strong tendency towards an affirmative answer in the contemporary literature, I will argue that a closer look at the nature of our explicit use of folk-psychology will reveal that it is plausible that implicit processes are not structurally isomorphic or homomorphic to explicit folk-psychological reasoning processes or some simplified variant thereof. I will argue that the main use of explicit folk-psychology is to reconstruct our implicit assessments of others for social purposes: offering excuses, giving testimonies in trials, explaining one’s own actions, etc. Folk-psychology, in other words, does usually not describe the processes by means of which we assess others; it articulates or reconstructs them. This allows for the possibility that the implicit processes we actually employ do not exactly match their folk-psychological rendering. I will discuss reasons for thinking this is in fact more than just a possibility: it is a plausible option that fits well with facts about the nature and use of folk-psychological vocabularies and that leaves us much more freedom in interpreting the neural processes at play in implicit social cognition.
There Are No Folk Psychological Narratives
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, 2009
I argue that the task of describing our so-called ‘folk psychology’ requires difficult philosophical work. Consequently, any statement of the folk view is actually a debatable philosophical position, rather than an uncontroversial description of pre-philosophical commonsense. The problem with the current folk psychology debate, I suggest, is that the relevant philosophical work has not been done. Consequently, the orthodox account of folk psychology is an uninformative caricature of an understanding that is implicit in everyday discourse and social interaction, and also in literary narratives. I conclude by considering two recent departures from it, so-called ‘experimental philosophy’ and Daniel Hutto’s ‘narrative practice hypothesis’. Both, I claim, take steps in the right direction but retain unhelpful assumptions that they inherit from the orthodox view.
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Mind-making practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility
Philosophical Explorations, 2015
This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a "regulative view" of folk-psychology as against the "standard view" (encompassing both theorytheory and simulation theory, as well as hybrid variations). On the regulative view, folk-psychology is conceptualized in fundamentally interpersonal terms as a "mindmaking" practice through which we come to form and regulate our minds in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms. It is not, as the standard view maintains, simply an epistemic capacity for coming to know about the mental states and dispositions already there. Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view: (1) the problem of "firstperson authority"-accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and (2) the problem of "reactive responsiveness"-accounting for our deep concern with calling one another to account for normatively untoward behaviour, both generally and in the moral domain.
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A Tactical Defense of Folk Psychology
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.
Folk psychology and psychological science
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-
Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation
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.
Folk Psychology Revisited: The Methodological Problem and the Autonomy of Psychology
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.
Is folk psychology different?
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.
The Functions of Folk Psychology
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...
The Ethical Dimension of Folk Psychology?
Inquiry an Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 2009
Abstract Participants in the debate about the nature of folk psychology tend to share one fundamental assumption: that its primary purpose consists in the prediction and explanation of another person's behavior. The following essay will evaluate recent challenges to this assumption by philosophers such as Joshua Knobe who insist that folk psychology and its concepts are intimately linked to our ethical concerns. I will show how conceiving of folk psychology in an engaged manner enables one to account for the evidence cited in favor ...
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