Mind and Common Sense: Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior

Folk psychology, insist some, is just like folk mechanics, folk thermodynamics, folk meteorology, folk chemistry, and folk biology. It is a framework of concepts, roughly adequate to the demands of everyday life, with which the humble adept comprehends, explains, predicts, and manipulates a certain domain of phenomena. It is, in short, a folk theory. As with any theory, it may be evaluated for its virtues or vices in all of the dimensions listed. And as with any theory, it may be rejected in its entirety if it fails the measure of such evaluation. Call this the theoretical view of our self understanding. Folk psychology, insist others, is radically unlike the examples cited. It does not consist of laws. It does not support causal explanations. It does not evolve over time. Its central purpose is normative rather than descriptive. And thus it is not the sort of framework that might be shown to be radically defective by sheerly empirical findings. Its assimilation to theories is just a mistake. It has nothing to fear, therefore, from advances in cognitive theory or the neurosciences. Call this the anti-theoretical view of our self understanding. Somebody here is deeply mistaken. The first burden of this paper is to argue that it is the anti-theoretical view that harbors most, though not all, of those mistakes. In the thirty years since the theoretical view was introduced (see esp. Sellars 1956, Feyerabend 1963, Rorty 1965, Churchland 1970, 1979, 1981), a variety of objections have been levelled against it. The more interesting of those will be addressed shortly. My current view is that these objections motivate no changes whatever in the theoretical view.