Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation

There has been a long-standing interest in the putative roles that various so-called ‘theory of mind’abilities might play in enabling us to understand and enjoy narratives. Of late, as our understanding of the complexity and diversity of everyday psychological capacities has become more nuanced and variegated, new possibilities have been articulated: (i) that our capacity for a sophisticated, everyday understanding of actions in terms of reason (our folk psychology) may itself be best characterized as a kind of narrative practice and (ii) that acquiring the capacity for supplying and digesting reasons explanations might (at least normally) depend upon having a special training with narratives. This introductory paper to the volume situates the claims of those who support the narrative approach to folk psychology against the backdrop of some traditional and new thinking about intersubjectivity, social cognition and ‘theory of mind’ abilities. Special emphasis is laid on the different reasons for being interested in these claims about narrative practice and folk psychology in light of various empirical and philosophical agendas.

I promote the view that our childhood engagement with narratives of certain kinds is the basis of sophisticated folk psychological abilities—i.e. it is through such socially scaffolded means that folk psychological skills are normally acquired and fostered. Undeniably, we often use our folk psychological apparatus in speculating about why another may have acted on a particular occasion, but this is at best a peripheral and parasitic use. Our primary understanding and skill in folk psychology derives from and has its primary application in special kinds of second-personal engagements.

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.

Philosophical Investigations, 2009

The nature of human social cognition has been the subject of one of the most contentious and interesting debates in psychology and philosophy of psychology of the past three decades. The central issue concerns how human beings manage to predict and understand each other's behaviour. All parties to the debate assume that interpreting human behaviour in terms of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes, i.e., the reasons that persons have for their actions, plays a central role in our socio-cognitive accomplishments. The key dispute concerns how human beings come to know the reasons for which others act, and how they infer future behaviour from such attributions of reasons.

2008

Grazer Philosophische Studien

The nature of human social cognition has been the subject of one of the most contentious and interesting debates in psychology and philosophy of psychology of the past three decades. The central issue concerns how human beings manage to predict and understand each other's behaviour. All parties to the debate assume that interpreting human behaviour in terms of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes, i.e., the reasons that persons have for their actions, plays a central role in our socio-cognitive accomplishments. The key dispute concerns how human beings come to know the reasons for which others act, and how they infer future behaviour from such attributions of reasons.

Unpublished manuscript. http://www. benbayer. com/ …, 2007

In this paper I consider one of the leading philosophic-psychological theories of "folk psychology," the simulation theory of Robert Gordon. According to Gordon, we attribute mental states to others not by representing those states or by applying the generalizations of theory, but by imagining ourselves in the position of a target to be interpreted and exploiting our own decision-making skills to make assertions which we then attribute to others as 'beliefs'. I describe a leading objection to Gordon's theory—the problem of adjustment—and show how a charitably interpreted Gordon could answer this objection. I conclude, however, that the best case for Gordon's position still runs into a new problem concerning basic folk epistemological knowledge. Identifying this new alternative helps undermine the simplicity of a theory based on simulation-based explanation.

In this paper we take issue with the belief-desire model of second- and third-person action interpretation as it is presented by both theory theories and cognitivist versions of simulation theory. These accounts take action interpretation to consist in the (tacit) attribution of proper belief-desire pairs that mirror the structure of formally valid practical inferences. We argue that the belief-desire model rests on the unwarranted assumption that the interpreter can only reach the agent’s practical context of action through inference. This assumption betrays a deep-seated bias towards disengaged, observational interpretation strategies. On our alternative picture, the interpreter can start off on the assumption of a shared practical context and proceed to reason discourse in those cases in which this assumption runs aground. Following Brandom’s non-formalist account of reason discourse, we suggest that interpreting other people’s actions in terms of reasons is not a matter of following the principles of formally valid practical syllogisms, but of endorsing practical material inferences that are correct in virtue of a shared practical world.

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.