Folk Psychology is not a Predictive Device

Abstract

Human beings are special, as a species, not in having minds but in having the concept of mind. We have evolved, biologically and culturally, to be able to attribute states of mind, to be able to have and use folk psychology. And we are this way because we are social creatures; we have a very particular kind of sociality, in fact, which makes most of our activities cooperative while forcing us to manage them by a mixture of reasoning, social shaping, and imagination, without very many innate social routines. The human condition is to need answers about others' behavior, and to have to get these answers largely by various forms of thinking. ' The aim of this paper is to challenge might seem like an obvious consequence of this fact. It might seem obvious that the central question about another person's behavior is what will this person do?, in other words that folk psychology focuses on predictions. One might think that the purpose that drives a person's gathering and organising information about others is to know in advance others will do. This is I shall call the thesis. I doubt it. In this paper I shall not argue directly against the prediction thesis, but simply argue that it is not supported by plausible construals of the claim that the role of folk psychology is to allow human social life. Moreover I do not want to challenge some obvious truths which closely resemble the prediction thesis. To make things precise, formulate the prediction thesis as follows: