Folk Psychology Re-Assessed PDF
Preview Folk Psychology Re-Assessed
FOLK PSYCHOLOGY RE-ASSESSED FOLK PSYCHOLOGY RE-ASSESSED Edited by DANIEL D. HUTTO UniversityofHertfordshire,U.K. and MATTHEW RATCLIFFE UniversityofDurham,U.K. AC.I.P.CataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheLibraryofCongress. ISBN978-1-4020-5557-7(HB) ISBN978-1-4020-5558-4(e-book) PublishedbySpringer, P.O.Box17,3300AADordrecht,TheNetherlands. www.springer.com Printedonacid-freepaper AllRightsReserved ©2007Springer Nopartofthisworkmaybereproduced,storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted inanyformorbyanymeans,electronic,mechanical,photocopying,microfilming, recordingorotherwise,withoutwrittenpermissionfromthePublisher,withtheexceptionnl ofanymaterialsuppliedspecificallyforthepurposeofbeingenteredandexecuted onacomputersystem,forexclusiveusebythepurchaserofthework. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Contributors vii 1. Introduction 1 Matthew Ratcliffe and Daniel D. Hutto Part I. Emotion, Perception, and Interaction 2. Expression and Empathy 25 Dan Zahavi 3. We Share, Therefore We Think 41 R. Peter Hobson 4. Logical and Phenomenological Arguments against Simulation Theory 63 Shaun Gallagher 5. Persons, Pronouns, and Perspectives 79 Beata Stawarska Part II. Reasons, Norms, Narratives and Institutions 6. There are Reasons and Reasons 103 Peter Goldie 7. Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation 115 Daniel D. Hutto 8. The Regulative Dimension of Folk Psychology 137 Victoria McGeer 9. Folk Psychology: Science and Morals 157 Joshua Knobe 10. Folk Psychology and Freedom of the Will 175 Martin Kusch Part III. The Fragmentation of Folk Psychology 11. Critter Psychology: On the Possibility of Nonhuman Animal Folk Psychology 191 Kristin Andrews v vi TABLE OF CONTENTS 12. Folk Psychology does not Exist 211 Adam Morton 13. From Folk Psychology to Commonsense 223 Matthew Ratcliffe Name Index 245 Subject Index 249 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Kristin Andrews is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at York University, Canada. Shaun Gallagher is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Central Florida, USA. Peter Goldie is Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, UK. PeterHobsonisProfessorofDevelopmentalPsychopathologyattheInstituteof Child Health, University College London and the Tavistock Clinic, London, UK. Daniel D. Hutto is Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Joshua Knobe is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, USA. Martin Kusch is Professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK. Victoria McGeer is Lecturer in Philosophy and a member of the Research Faculty, University Center for Human Values, at Princeton University, USA. Adam Morton is Canada Research Chair in Epistemology and Decision Theory at the University of Alberta, Canada. Matthew Ratcliffe is Reader in Philosophy at Durham University, UK. Beata Stawarska is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon, USA. DanZahaviisProfessorofPhilosophyandDirectoroftheCenterforSubjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. vii MATTHEW RATCLIFFE AND DANIEL D. HUTTO 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1. FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, THEORY OF MIND AND SIMULATION Thetaskswefaceinourdaytodaysociallivesarequiteheterogeneousbutmanyof themmakeacommondemanduponus.Theyrequireustounderstandandinteract with other people and, in most social encounters, we exhibit a special sensitivity to our fellow human beings that is quite different from the way we respond to inanimate objects and most other species of organism. Social life is dependent, to aconsiderabledegree,onourabilitytounderstandwhatisdistinctiveabouthuman behaviour and to successfully apply that understanding in all manner of situations. What is central to our ability to interpret one another? A great deal of work in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, anthropology, developmental psychology and a host of other disciplines assumes that, at root, interpersonal interpretation is accomplished through the employment of a ‘commonsense’ or ‘folk’ psychology, meaning an ‘everyday’, rather than ‘scientific’, appreciation of mindedness. Although there is considerable debate over which cognitive processes support our folkpsychologicalabilitiesandhowthoseabilitiesdevelopduringchildhood,there is a remarkable degree of consensus concerning what folk psychology consists of. Almost all discussions of the topic begin by stating or presupposing that it is the ability to attribute intentional states, principally beliefs and desires, to other people and perhaps also to oneself, in order to predict and explain behaviour. Davies and Stone’s (1995a p. 2) assessment is typical: we “deploy psychological concepts such as belief and desire in predictions and explanations of the actions and mental states of other members of the species”. Beliefs, desires and most of the other mental states assigned are taken to be ‘propositional attitudes’. In other words, they have the form ‘X believes that p’ and ‘X desires that q’, where p and q are propositions that can have any intelligible content you like, such as ‘it is raining’, ‘Paris is the capital of France’, ‘the cat is under the table’ and so forth.Itisgenerallyagreedthatthe‘folk’arerealistsaboutpropositionalattitudes, taking them to be internal states that knit together in complex ways so as to cause actions,althoughthereismuchdisputeconcerningwhat,precisely,such‘intentional realism’ amounts to and whether it is defensible.1 Propositional attitudes are said to come in two principal types; ‘beliefs’, which carry information about the world and thus guide action, and desires, which are motivational states that specify goals for action. Only confusion abounds if we fail to define terms. The most neutral, anodyne definition of ‘folk psychology’ equates it to the way – whatever it turns out to be – that social beings manage to conduct interpersonal relations (Hornsby 1997, pp. 4–5). As a working definition, this is far too encompassing; nothing useful 1 D.D.HuttoandM.Ratcliffe(eds.),FolkPsychologyRe-Assessed,1–22. ©2007Springer. 2 MATTHEW RATCLIFFE AND DANIEL D. HUTTO could answer to such a description. At the other end of the spectrum, perhaps the tightest definition of folk psychology would be the practice of making sense of actions in terms of the core propositional attitudes, beliefs and desires, alone. For many, this excludes too much even from our ordinary practice of making sense of one another in terms of reasons. However, those interested in the topic have typically erred on the side of caution, sticking to the tighter definition. In sum, the receivedwisdomaboutfolkpsychologyencapsulatestwochiefassumptions:(1)that makingsenseofactionsrequiresinterpretingthemintermsofreasonscomposedof variouspropositionalattitudes(atabareminimum–beliefsanddesires)and(2)that this activity is primarily concerned with providing predictions and explanations of actions. Folk psychology, construed in this way, is usually taken to be the central, core ability that underlies all interpersonal understanding and interaction, rather than just one amongst many ingredients of social ability. For instance, Currie and Sterelny (2000, p. 145) describe the orthodox view as being committed to the idea that “mind-reading [FP] and the capacity to negotiate the social world are not the same thing, but the former seems to be necessary for the latter [….] our basic grip on the social world depends on our being able to see our fellows as motivated by beliefs and desires we sometimes share and sometimes do not”. The central questions driving recent debates do not concern whether and where folk psychology is applied. Participants generally take the existence and ubiquity of folk psychology (construed as the attribution of internal proposi- tional attitude states) for granted, concentrating instead on questions about which processes underlie it and how they arise during development. Great energy has been invested over the past two decades into determining the means by which folk psychology is conducted, the emphasis being on whether it involves the deployment of (1) a specialised theory, understood as a systematically organised bodyofknowledgedetailingthelinksbetweentypicalperceptualinputs,intentional states and behaviours; (2) procedures of simulative imagining that directly manip- ulate the relevant intentional states themselves, without using any principles about such states (e.g. this might be achieved by using ‘shared circuits’ or by running practicalreasoningandothersub-personalmechanismsoff-line);or(3)somehybrid combination of these processes. ThenametheorytheorywasfirstintroducedbyMorton(1980)inordertohighlight the fact that the idea that folk psychology is a theory is itself a theory, and not obviously a true one.2 Simulation theory, first advanced by Gordon in 1986 and subsequentlydevelopedbyothers,hasbeenitsmostsuccessfulrival.Afairlytypical simulationistclaimisthat,inordertopredictandexplainanotherperson’spsycho- logical states and actions, one starts with an understanding of the target’s current mentalstatesandfeedspretendinputsintoone’sownmentalstate/behaviourgener- ation mechanisms. Rather than using the output of this process to produce one’s ownactions,oneassignsittotheotherintheformofanactionprediction.Inother words, rather than applying a theory, one runs one’s own psychological processes ‘off-line’,usingoneselfasamodeloftheother.However,therearemanydifferent versionsofsimulationtheoryandseveralpointsofdisagreementbetweenthem.3 INTRODUCTION 3 It was once common to think that there was a straight either/or choice between theory theory and simulation theory (cf. Stich and Nichols 1995). Currently, however, there is a growing trend towards the acceptance of some sort of hybrid account, where simulation routines and bodies of knowledge play complementary but distinct roles in interpersonal understanding. But what should be clear is that, for those who make this sort of debate the focus of their inquiries, the orthodox viewoffolkpsychologyistakenforgranted.Theory,simulationandhybridtheories all presuppose a particular understanding of the nature, scope and function of our everyday modes of interpersonal understanding, which is that it consists of the attribution of propositional attitudes to others – encountered in the third person as a ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’, rather than in the second-person as a ‘you’ – and perhaps also to oneself, in order to predict and explain action. Suchassumptionsareequallyleftuntouchedinmostdebatesaboutthebiological basis,acquisitionanddevelopmentoffolkpsychologicalabilities.Manyclaimthat folk psychological abilities have their source in an inherited device or ‘module’, an adaptation selected for the specific task of understanding others by facilitating simulation, deployment of a theory or both.4 Others place more emphasis on the role of the child’s developmental environment. For example, Garfield et al. (2001, p. 502) suggest that folk psychology is enabled by an “acquired module”, which formsthroughtheinteractionofvariousin-builtabilitieswiththesocialenvironment during development. Gopnik (1996) restricts the role of inherited components to a basic, non-metarepresentational starter theory of mind and rational theory- construction mechanisms, holding that folk psychology is a theoretical product fashioned in an evidence-sensitive way, one that is directly analogous to the way in which human adults forge mature scientific theories. Another important topic that has been hotly debated is whether folk psychology isanexclusivelyhumanabilityoronesharedwithotherspecies.Themostfamous long-runningandintensivedebateaboutthishascentredonthesocialintelligenceof primates.Althoughitisnotplausiblethatallsophisticatedprimatesocialintelligence requires a metarepresentational theory of mind, it was thought that some of their abilitiesmight.Forexample,ifprimateswerecapableofgenuinetacticaldeception, then they would need to be able to represent the beliefs, desires and intentions of others. In 1978, when the debate was just kicking off, Premack and Woodruff launched a small industry by asking in a paper of the same name, “Does the Chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” Earlyassessmentsgleanedfromanecdotesofthebehavioursofindividualanimals seemed to show that a positive answer to this question might be warranted (Byrne and Whiten 1991). But more recent controlled experiments have decisively overturned that verdict. The dismal performance of chimpanzees on a non-verbal variantofthefalsebelieftaskhasgalvanisedwidespreadagreementthatthesocial cognitionofgreatapesdoesnotdependonasophisticatedcapacityformindreading, certainlynotonebasedontheirhavinganunderstandingofbeliefor,indeed,ofthe inter-relations between that concept and the other central propositional attitudes. Comparingthetestresultsforapeswiththoseofhumanchildrenhasallbutsecured
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