Abstract
Discussions dealing with natural science, philosophy and common sense are bound to draw on long-standing debates dealing with realism, methodology of science, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, theories of meaning, and other topics. Instead of presenting a broad overview of these main trends, which will necessarily be superficial, I will do a kind of case study. The aim is to present just one particular debate which is of relevance to current research. The presentation is meant to give a taste of how these various long-standing debates are brought to bear on a specific issue. In this way, the very practice of engaging in a particular area of philosophy of science will serve as a platform from where the major areas can be seen in actual operation. The paper has four sections: the nature of ordinary talk; the ontological implications of this; the recently proposed account of the mental; an evaluation.
Highlights
Few things can be said to be more ordinary than talking about one’s own beliefs and about those of others
The main problem here arises because these mental terms seem to obtain their meaning exclusively from our relating them to our own experiences
There are four: (1) folk-psychology obliges us to accept an ontology involving the modularity of the mental; (2) connectionism obliges us to accept an ontology involving holism of the mental, which is here taken to be the exact opposite of modularity of the mental; (3) mental activity can be better explained by connectionism; and (4) folk-psychology has to be eliminated to give way to connectionism
Summary
Few things can be said to be more ordinary than talking about one’s own beliefs and about those of others. The crucial question here is the following Can this ability or skill that people have of describing each other’s behaviour and even of making predictions about them, using key concepts like ‘belief’ and ‘desire’, be conceived of as a scientific theory? The main ingredient is not a deductive structure but a set of models which may not all have empirical meaning at a given time, but may gain such a meaning in so far as they can be applied fruitfully to specific areas of empirical inquiry On this wider and more realistic understanding of theory, the ability people have of describing and predicting each other’s behaviour could, according to some philosophers, qualify as a scientific theory. The term folk-psychology has been suggested with this point in mind: folkpsychology is the simple alternative to, or the precursor of, scientific-psychology
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