A Tactical Defense of Folk Psychology
Daniel D. Hutto
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Abstract
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.
Key takeaways
- For we must question that the eliminativist has correctly identified the commonsense psychologist's position by associating it with that of the classical cognitivist.
- The fact is that the eliminativist fails to realize that the commonsense psychologist does not postulate the existence of functionally discrete entities which play causal roles of a proximate or nomological variety.
- (6) Commonsense psychological descriptions yield an objective, real pattern in the world.
- For example, another favoured eliminativist critique of commonsense psychology stems from the simple thought that such as discourse is out of step with modern science.
- In conclusion, it would seem that the 'eliminativist' programme with regard to commonsense psychology cannot plausibly amount to anything more interesting that a sort of faith in the eventual vindication of (B ii ).
Related papers
John D. Greenwood, ed., The Future of Folk Psychology: Intentionality and Cognitive Science; Scott M. Christensen and Dale R. Turner, eds., Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind
Minds and Machines, 2000
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.
A Brickhouse Defence for Folk Psychology: How to Defeat 'Big Bad Wolf' Eliminativism
To appear in a forthcoming collection on Mental Fictionalism.
Eliminativists hold that folk psychology presents an inaccurate and misleading picture of what causes human behaviour – they regard its principles to be false and its ontology as an illusion (Churchland 1979, 1981, 1991). Even more to the point, given what we already know and are likely to discover they argue that folk psychology has no place in serious explanations of human action and behaviour. This paper aims to identify the scariest form of eliminativist threat and to show that there is a way not only to protect against it but, ultimately, defeat it. The action unfolds as follows. Section 1 provides an analysis of various eliminativist threats and identifies the scariest and most threatening version, dubbing it Big Bad Wolf Eliminativism. The rest of the paper then reviews three options that the friends of folk psychology have of potentially defusing the threat posed by Big Bad Wolf eliminativism. The first, explicated and examined in Section 2, proves woefully inadequate. The second, explicated and examined in Section 3, also proves inadequate. But the third, explicated and examined in Section 4, proves to be both secure and capable of not only protecting folk psychology but also of giving the means to defeat its opponent.
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.
'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.
Elimination, Enlightenment and the Normative Content of Folk Psychology
Journal for The Theory of Social Behaviour, 1988
Not long ago, philosophers ofscience in high standing considered it their task to eliminate theoretical terms in favor of non-inferential expressions of experience. Recently, however, intentional representations themselves have come to be viewed, in eliminative materialist circles, as the theoretical entities of an obsolete theoryfolk or common sense psychology. Eliminative materialism predicts the withering away offolk psychology, as we know it, by one ofroughly two means: retentive reduction, or reduction that retains the categories and generalizations of folk psychology, and gradual displacement, or reduction that displaces the categories and generalizations of folk psychology. This paper takes a guarded sympathetic approach towards the millenialist enthusiasm of two of the most optimistic and prominent eliminative materialists -Paul Churchland and Patricia Smith Churchland.' The work of Paul Churchland, although not overtly committed to retentive reductionism, gives more credence to this view than does the work of Patricia Smith Churchland, who fairly consistently predicts that folk psychology will be displaced by a coevolved theory from scientific psychology and neuroscience. The displacement view is more radical than the retentive view, since the former does not promise that our future understanding of human behavior will be recognizable from our present perspective. I wish to defend the conjunction of two claims that have hitherto been assumed to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, I wish to defend the radical revisability of folk behavioral theory. Thus, I accept most of the basic contentions of the displacement view. On the other hand, I will argue that folk behavioral generalizations and explanations are inherently normative as well as descriptive, and that the former feature of folk explanations is non-displacable.
Making Folk Psychology Explicit
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.
Related papers
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,
The Empirical Naivete of the Current Philosophical Conception of Folk Psychology
Mindscapes: Philosophy, science, and the mind, 1997
Lessons from Wittgenstein: Elucidating Folk Psychology
To the extent that psychologists are concerned to do more than collect raw data for possible interpretation, they cannot avoid interrogating the philosophical assumptions which inform their work. This paper argues that there is a vital need for conceptual clarification of many of the central topics studied by today’s sciences of the mind. Yet, rather than offering a comprehensive survey of these, this paper focuses on one illustrative, high profile case: the way in which our everyday understanding of reasons for action has been wrongly categorized in terms of ‘theory of mind’ abilities. Focusing on this example I show how it is possible to elucidate topics in the philosophy of psychology by relinquishing certain powerful explanatory temptations and by attending more closely to our everyday practices and activities.
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.
Cognitivism, Non-Cognitivism, and Skepticism about Folk Psychology
Philosophical Psychology 25.2 (April 2012): 165-185.
The dispute in metaethics between cognitivists and non-cognitivists appears to be a dispute over the correct way to characterize our psychology: are moral judgments beliefs, or a kind of pro-attitude? In this paper, I argue that this dispute comes to nothing; it dissolves in the light of a reasonable skepticism about folk psychology, and with it, the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism collapses. I begin by briefly reviewing some contemporary positions in metaethics on cognitivism and non-cognitivism that are intended to emphasize the supposed psychological differences between the two views. I show that the appearance of a clear difference between these views depends on one’s having a very strong commitment to the accuracy and completeness of certain concepts of folk psychology. I then argue for a moderate skepticism about folk psychology. I conclude that folk concepts like “belief” are not well-defined enough to settle this metaethical dispute.
Why cognitive science is not formalized folk psychology
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.
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...
Psychology Unified: From Folk Psychology to Radical Enactivism
A properly radical enactivism – one that eschews the idea that all mentality is necessarily contentful and representational – has better prospects of unifying psychology than does traditional cognitivism. This paper offers a five-step argument in support of this claim. The first section advances the view that a principled way of characterizing psychology’s subject matter is what is required if it is to be regarded as a special science. In this light, section two examines why and how cognitivism continues to be regarded as the best potential unifier for the discipline. But the third section exposes a serious scope problem that cognitivism encounters – a problem that stems from its reliance on folk psychological models of mental states. Although this gives cognitivism its intuitive appeal, it also makes it too limited to provide a general model of the mind. Radical enactivism’s way of understanding mentality as embodied activity, it is argued, avoids this and provides a more appropriate means of understanding basic forms of mentality. Against the charge that radical enactivism is also limited in scope, the final section argues that it is inclusive enough to allow for and recognize the emergence of sophisticated, folk psychological modes of mentality, thus making it the superior potential unifier for psychology.
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