Folk Psychology is Here to Stay

Abstract

Folk psychology is a network of principles which constitutes a sort of common-sense theory about how to explain human behavior. These principles provide a central role to certain propositional attitudes, particularly beliefs and desires. The theory asserts, for example, that if someone desires that p, and this desire is not overridden by other desires, and he believes that an action of kind K will bring it about that p, and he believes that such an action is within his power, and he does not believe that some other kind of action is within his power and is a preferable way to bring it about that p, then ceteris paribus, the desire and the beliefs will cause him to perform an action of kind K. The theory is largely functional, in that the states it postulates are characterized primarily in terms of their causal relations to each other, to perception and other environmental stimuli, and to behavior. Folk psychology (henceforth FP) is deeply ingrained in our common-sense conception of ourselves as persons. Whatever else a person is, he is supposed to be a rational (at least largely rational) agent-that is, a creature whose behavior is systematically caused by, and explainable in terms of, his beliefs, desires, and related propositional attitudes. The wholesale rejection of FP, therefore, would entail a drastic revision of our conceptual scheme. This fact seems to us to constitute a good prima facie reason for not discarding FP too quickly in the face of apparent difficulties. Recently, however, FP has come under fire from two quarters. Paul Churchland (1981) has argued that since FP has been with us for at least twenty-five centuries, and thus is not the product of any deliberate and self-conscious attempt to develop a psychological theory which coheres with the account of homo sapiens which the natural sciences provide, there is little reason to suppose that FP is true, or that humans undergo beliefs, desires, and the like. And Stephen Stich (1983) has argued that current work in cognitive science suggests that no events or states posited by a mature cognitive psychology will be identifiable as the events and states posited by FP; Stich maintains that if this turns out to be the case,