FOLK PSYCHOLOGY

Among the more remarkable qualities of human beings is that they describe and explain their own minds and behavior. People are self-explainers and self-understanders. By and large, though not invariably, of course, people's efforts to understand themselves are couched in a familiar language: the language of belief, desire, intention, hope, and so forth—the language of intentional mental states. Perhaps just as remarkable is that people are "mindreaders" (Nichols and Stich 2003). In everyday commerce people attribute—sometimes unself-consciously, sometimes painfully and with great difficulty—to others intentional mental states.

Humans are social creatures—competitive and cooperative—and the practice of attributing intentional mental states is, by and large, the vehicle whereby they come to understand others and others come to understand them, and so, this practice is fundamental to efforts to navigate the social world. One is often able to anticipate or to predict what another will do via the command of what one takes the other person to believe and to desire. Whether the arena is chess or rock-paper-scissors, arms negotiations or freeway driving, the human capacity to characterize others in terms of such intentional mental states is often what determines whether plans succeed or fail. Not surprisingly, this scheme of intentional characterization is applied retrospectively in the explanation of the behavior of others and in the explanation and, often, the justification of one's own behavior to others. So, for example, why did Achilles, after earlier refusing to return to the battle, suddenly rejoin it? One may say that Achilles wants desperately to avenge the death of Patroklos, and he believes that killing Hektor, and so reentering the fray, is the best way to accomplish this aim. In less lofty instances, one can explain why the dog lover ran upon seeing Fido (the dog lover believed the dog was rabid), and why a dear friend refused to return repeated phone calls (the dear friend is angry and wants to stew a bit longer). This commonsense framework of mentalistic understanding, this scheme of intentional description, explanation, and prediction, among many other uses, has come to be termed folk psychology.

Understanding Folk Psychology

An intuitively compelling and seductive understanding of the nature of folk psychology might be seen to be offered by René Descartes. At the end of the Second Meditation, he famously writes, "I know plainly that I can achieve an easier and more evident perception of my own mind than of anything else" (1988, p. 86). In short, nothing is more easily known by or to the mind than itself. Just by looking within, and by, as we say, introspecting, I can know that I believe certain things to be the case, that I desire this or that to be so, and that I behaved as I did because I believed and desired as I did. This mentalistic characterization, made manifest to me in the first person, is then applied to the characterization of the minds and behavior of others. One upshot of such a view is that the description and understanding of the mental and intentional action are unlike the efforts to understand other natural phenomena.

This view of the human capacity to describe and to understand the mental has proved exceedingly unpopular with both philosophers and psychologists over the past six decades or so. Wilfrid Sellars (1956) pioneered an alternative account of the mentalistic talk of human beings. Sellars tells a story, a myth, he terms it, according to which at a time in human prehistory people understood their conspecifics in purely behavioral or observational terms and without appeal to the language of intentional mental states. Then, something of a savant, named "Jones," came to posit unobservable theoretical entities that served to explain the behavior of others. Belief, desire, and intention, are explicitly introduced as theoretical terms to explain why it is that, for example, Tom is behaving as he is. Finally, this theory came to be applied in the first person, to oneself. The point of the myth is not, of course, that it is historically accurate; rather, the point is that people's mentalistic talk needn't be viewed, as it was on the Cartesian model, as picking out entities or states to which people have some special, privileged, access.

This Sellarsian picture has produced a conception of folk psychology that has come to be extremely influential: the "theory-theory" account of folk psychology. In part the result of dominance of functionalist accounts of the mental, the "theory-theory" has it that folk psychology is an empirical theory of mind and behavior (Lewis 1972, Morton 1980, Churchland 1981). And, in this way, folk psychology is "protoscience" (Rudder Baker 1999). Belief, desire, and intention are theoretical terms whose meaning and reference are secured by their place in a vast network of implicit folk psychological laws. One such law might be stated as follows: If S desires or intends that v, and believes that k is necessary for v, then, ceteris paribus, S tries to bring it about that k. Another such law might be: If S believes that p and believes that if p then q, then, ceteris paribus, S comes to believe that q. (The entry thus far has emphasized intentional mental states, but it should be noted that qualitative states—pains, itches, visual imaginings—fall within the purview of folk psychology.) The human capacity to engage in folk psychologizing points, then, to a constellation of psychological laws that relate behavior, internal states, and stimuli. Belief, desire, intention and the rest of the mentalist vocabulary are theoretical posits of a folk theory of mind.

In an important essay, "What Is Folk Psychology?" (1994) Stephen Stich and Ian Ravenscroft point out that there is a good deal of ambiguity in discussions of folk psychology. They characterize a sense of "folk psychology" according to which that term picks out a theory that is implicit in the everyday talk about the mental. This sense they term an "external account" of folk psychology, because such a view (largely the conception described above) carries with it no commitment to the claim that folk psychology is "an internally represented knowledge structure or body of information" (1994, p. 460). Folk psychology in this sense "ain't in the head" (p. 460), and so is not implicated in an informative account of just how it is that people in fact have the capacities to predict, to explain, or to describe the minds and behavior of their fellows. A second account of folk psychology Stich and Ravenscroft term internal. In this sense of "folk psychology," it is an internally represented theory that explains how it is that people predict, describe, and explain in the psychological realm. Stich and Ravenscroft go on to muster powerful arguments for the claim that this distinction has important implications for the eliminativist-vindicationist debate.

The Eliminativist Challenge

Historically, many of the chief philosophical issues surrounding folk psychology have been engaged in the effort to characterize the nature and status of folk-psychological explanation. For it is one immediate consequence of the theory-theory that folk psychology might be false in the way that any empirical theory might be false. Vindicationists argue that folk psychology is, in broad terms at least, a correct theory of mind and behavior. Eliminativists argue that folk psychology is plausibly a false theory. As a causal explanatory account of mind and behavior, folk psychology awaits replacement by some nonintentional robustly scientific account of behavior (Churchland 1981, Stich 1983). The theory of mind and behavior implicit in one's everyday talk is just false, the eliminativist alleges.

Thus the eliminativist-vindicationist debate hinges upon the anticipated relationship between folk psychology and scientific psychology/neuroscience. Because both of these aim to explain what is intuitively—though, controversially—the same class of explananda, if people are to regard folk psychology as, by and large, a correct account of human behavior, then they are presumably committed to thinking that the cognitive sciences will, in some way, serve to vindicate the ontology and explanations of folk psychology (Kim 1989).

A notable advocate of this brand of vindicationism, Jerry Fodor (1987), has argued that a scientific psychology will count as vindicating folk psychology just in case it postulates states that (1) are semantically evaluable; (2) have causal powers; and (3) are found to conform to the tacit laws of folk psychology. Each of these has given rise to eliminativist complaint.

Insofar as intentional content figures essentially in folk psychological explanation, it may seem a quick matter to demonstrate that such explanations are not respectable:

1. The causes of behavior supervene upon the current, internal, physical states of the organism.
2. Intentional mental content does not supervene upon such states.
3. The science of psychology is concerned to discover the causes of behavior.
4. Therefore a causal explanatory psychology will not trade in the intentional idiom.

If this argument were correct, folk psychological explanations would be deeply suspect, because appeal to such explanations would be irrelevant to the causal explanation of behavior. The argument is, however, suspect on many fronts. One might dispute the sense of "behavior" in (1) and with it the notion the respectable explanation must be "individualistic" (Burge 1986). In addition, one might grant that whereas truth-evaluable content is "wide," and so fails to supervene upon internal states of the subject, there is a kind of content, "narrow content," that respects individualist scruples.

Content-based objections such as those above focus upon the puzzling status of intentional properties in a physical universe; many theorists point to the allegedly irreducible nature of intentional mental content as a way of undermining the integrity of folk psychology (Churchland 1986). Another family of eliminativist worries points to matters structural. It is, for example, claimed that if certain connectionist models of humans' cognitive architecture are correct, then there will literally be no states or events that play the causal role intentional mental states are understood to play in folk psychology. Folk psychology appears committed to the view that mental states are "functionally discrete" internal states with a certain causal profile (Ramsey, Stich, and Garon 1991). Yet, on connectionist models there are no such discrete internal states with the causal roles that belief, desire, and so on are presumed to play in folk psychology.

If these objections are given some taste of the eliminativist assault, they serve as well to highlight an assumption held by many vindicationists and eliminativists alike: folk psychology possesses, in Fodor's terminology, "causal depth" (1987, p. 6). It posits unobservable states and events in aid of the causal explanation of observed phenomena. The explanations of folk psychology are, then, structurally informative insofar as they aim to offer information about the structure of causal relations that hold between behavior, stimuli, and unobservable internal states. Only on such a supposition is it plausible to suggest that folk psychological states and events will go the way of caloric and phlogiston. And this is why many vindicationists hold that the survival of folk psychology demands that there be some scientific level of the description of human cognitive architecture that mirrors the folk psychological one.

Much hinges upon the resolution of this dispute. If the eliminativist is correct, there are no beliefs and desires, and so no intentional actions. It is, for example, just false that human beings often intend to do what they most desire. Nothing would appear to remain of people's conception of themselves as deliberators and actors. While this may strike one as incredible, the eliminativist will insist that this is but another case in which what the folk have taken to be patently obvious turns out to be radically false.

Even so it has been argued that, more than incredible, eliminativism is self-refuting or pragmatically incoherent (Rudder Baker 1987). The charge here is not that the eliminativist thesis is self-contradictory or internally inconsistent. Rather the claim is that there is no perspective from which the doctrine can be coherently put forth. For if eliminativism is true, there are no actions. Yet the eliminativist asserts the truth of eliminativism, and assertion is certainly an action. Moreover, the eliminativist asserts eliminativism because she takes it to be a correct or true thesis, one amply supported by available evidence. But what sense can be made of the notion of justification or even truth without the intentional framework of folk psychology? This argument is sometimes developed in concert with the suggestion that folk psychological principles are not contingent regularities but are, rather, normative principles that are true a priori.

Folk Psychology Strikes Back

Whatever the merits of the foregoing lines of argument, the prima facie oddity that attaches to eliminativism suggests that whereas it is one thing to assert that intentional mental states will not figure in the ontology of some ideal cognitive science, it is another to assert that there are no intentional mental states. In hopes of saving the folk psychological phenomena, an alternative conception of the nature of folk psychology rejects the assumption that folk psychology does offer such informative causal explanations. Rather, folk psychological explanations are silent about the internal mechanisms and processes of cognition and behavior. Because its explanations are not informative in the ways that a cognitive science aims to be informative, folk psychological explanation is not in competition with a scientific psychology, and so folk psychology might be regarded as immunized against scientific advances.

In an extremely influential series of papers, Daniel Dennett (1987) advocates something like this view. According to him, folk psychological explanation and prediction proceeds via the assumption of rationality. When one predicts what an agent will do in various circumstances, the question asked amounts to: What is it rational for her to do, given that she believes and desires as she does? To be, in Dennett's terminology, an "intentional system"—to be such as to have beliefs truly attributable to one—is to be a system whose behavior is so predictable. Folk psychological description, then, does not aim at the description of internal processes and mechanisms. And, whereas an empirically informative cognitive science will reject the intentional idiom, folk psychological explanation is adequate in its own preserve. Even so, it is not easy to see how this brand of instrumentalism about the intentional makes folk psychological description anything more than a façon de parler.

Other philosophers who offer various versions of this approach emphasize that many of the folk explanations that people regard as true bear no easy relationship to science (Chastain 1988, Horgan and Woodward 1985, Horgan and Graham 1991). One may, for example, explain why Ajax slipped by the ramparts by pointing out that the ground was slimy. In such a case, one is in command of a tacit law to the effect that slimy surfaces are apt to produce slippings. But sliminess and slipperiness are certainly not scientific kinds; it seems likely that no science will make appeal to such kinds. Still, it would be mad to insist that such explanations are false, and that the description of surfaces as slimy is no more than a colorful way of speaking.

Such explanations can survive most any developments in the sciences. People, moreover, are likely to regard the more informative scientific account of the phenomena as a way of spelling out and so vindicating the folk "slimy/slippery" account. With such folk explanations all that is demanded is that there be some more basic account of the properties/processes one characterizes in terms of "sliminess" and "slipperiness." The source of the robustness of such explanations is precisely their relative uninformativenss. Indeed, folk recognize that sliminess and slipperiness do not play any deep or informative role in the causal explanations in which they figure. Rather, their role would appear to be something like the following: There's something about the surface picked out as "slimy" that causes events picked out as "slippings." So, just by virtue of their offering scant information about the relevant causal processes, they are insulated from any serious threat of elimination posed by developments in the sciences.

It is, then, urged that we adopt a similar position as to the status of folk psychological explanation. Just as there are slimy things, there are beliefs and desires. And just as it is true that Ajax slipped because the ground was slimy, so it is true that Achilles behaved so because he believed and desired as he did. It should, nonetheless, be noted that this appealing conclusion has been secured at some considerable price: folk psychological explanations, though serviceable for everyday purposes, are about as superficial as causal explanations can be. It is not all apparent that, for example, people's conception of ourselves as reasoners and actors—a conception that appears to implicate certain views as to the nature of mental processes—can withstand so deflationary a reading. One might well conclude that this gives everything to the eliminativist but what she wants.

Finally, Michael Bishop and Stephen Stitch argue that both eliminativists and vindicationists, in developing their arguments, make use of favored theories of reference to establish the conclusion that the terms of folk psychology either do or do not refer, and from this they draw the further conclusion that beliefs do or do not exist. Bishop and Stitch point out that neither the eliminativist nor vindicationist bothers to defend the claim that his or her favored theory of reference is the correct account, one that would sanction a transition from a claim about reference to a claim about existence or nonexistence. The upshot of this argument is that neither eliminativists not vindicationists have a right to make claims about the existence or nonexistence of folk psychological states and entities on the basis of the considerations they adduce.

Simulation versus Theory

In response to the unpalatable alternatives described above (folk psychology is gravely at risk of elimination, or folk psychology is exceedingly unlikely to be eliminated by virtue of its uninformativeness) some have suggested that it is the theory-theory account of folk psychology itself that demands reevaluation. This reevaluation of the nature and status of folk psychology can assume a number of different forms. By far the most influential of these accounts is the simulation account of folk psychology. Jane Heal (1986), Robert Gordon (1986), and Alvin Goldman (1989) have resuscitated the view that people's folk psychological capacities are mediated by the simulation of others. In the effort to understand others, people make adjustments for their cognitive and affective constitutions and, then, using these as inputs, allow their own psychological mechanisms to run "offline." In prediction, simulated beliefs and desires are attributed to the psychological subject of interest.

Advocates of the account claim that simulation is a far simpler and more psychologically plausible account of folk psychologizing. In this way, simulation is, in the language of Sitch and Ravenscroft, a response to an internal theory-theory account. What explains, according to simulationists, the human capacity to describe, explain, and predict the mental states and behavior of others is not an internally represented theory, but rather just the capacity to engage in simulation. In this regard, it is important to note the much of the original impetus behind the development of a competing simulation account of folk psychology was to blunt the force of eliminativist argument. For if psychology is not a theory it cannot be a false theory. So, it seems that on a simulationist account the eliminativist worry cannot be raised. But, as Stich and Ravenscroft (1994) point out, even if human folk psychological capacities may not be subserved by an internally represented theory, it may nonetheless be that eliminativism threatens folk psychology on an external reading.

See also Simulation Theory.

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