Against a normative view of folk psychology.

Meredith R Wilkinson

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00598

Abstract

Recently Elqayam and Evans (2011) have proposed that researchers studying human thinking should be moving away from normative accounts that specify how we “ought” to reason to a more descriptivist framework that describes how we reason. This is an approach that I very much support. The aim of the present article is to demonstrate how this can be applied to the study of mental state reasoning in terms of folk psychology (FP). Folk psychology refers to our everyday ability to attribute mental states to other people, including their beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth (e.g., Ratcliffe and Hutto, 2007). I do not want to deny that FP can be normative. Indeed, there are many instances where normative responding is required. For example, in the traditional false belief task (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) there is a “right” or “wrong” answer - a single norm paradigm (Elqayam and Evans, 2011). However, it may be the case that FP is normative in certain circumstances (e.g., the false belief task) but as I shall suggest below this is not always the case. By viewing FP as normative what researchers end up doing is ignoring the processes of how such inferences arise. What I want to propose is that viewing FP as normative is problematic since it reduces mental state inferences to simply being “right” or “wrong.” I propose that moving away from a normative agenda in FP and embracing a more descriptivist framework proves extremely useful for our understanding of how we understand others' minds.

Highlights

Elqayam and Evans (2011) have proposed that researchers studying human thinking should be moving away from normative accounts that specify how we “ought” to reason to a more descriptivist framework that describes how we reason
Dennett (1989) views FP as a form of mindreading but has the perspective of the intentional stance. His perspective appears to be normative in nature specifying both a normative framework and an ought stance. This sense of normativism in FP extends to recent literature: “Even on the standard view, folk psychology is not just an explanatory/predictive practice, it is in a sense, a normative practice: a practice of showing how people’s performances lives up to certain norms and thereby become, in that special way, intelligible
WHAT IS PROBLEMATIC ABOUT VIEWING FOLK PSYCHOLOGY AS NORMATIVE? Whilst I accept that there is normative responding in FP, for example, it is normative to assume that if we push someone off a seat on the bus so that we can sit down they will be angry I believe that viewing FP as normative is problematic since it reduces mental state reasoning to “right” or “wrong” answers and a “right” way to reason

Summary

Introduction

Elqayam and Evans (2011) have proposed that researchers studying human thinking should be moving away from normative accounts that specify how we “ought” to reason to a more descriptivist framework that describes how we reason. FOLK PSYCHOLOGY AS A NORMATIVE FRAMEWORK One factor that philosophers have proposed regarding FP is that it is normative in nature. WHAT IS PROBLEMATIC ABOUT VIEWING FOLK PSYCHOLOGY AS NORMATIVE?

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