Folk Psychological Explanation Research Articles

Subjective total comparative evaluations

AbstractIn Preference, Value, Choice, and Welfare, I argued, among other things, that preferences in economics are and ought to be total subjective comparative evaluations, that the theory of rational choice is a reformulation of everyday folk-psychological explanations and predictions of behaviour, and that revealed preference theory is completely untenable. All three of these theses have been challenged in essays by Erik Angner (2018), Francesco Guala (2019) and Johanna Thoma (2021a, 2021b). This essay responds to these criticisms and defends these three theses.

Folk Psychology and the Interpretation of Decision Theory

Most philosophical decision theorists and philosophers of the social sciences believe that decision theory is and should be in the business of providing folk psychological explanations of choice behaviour, and that it can only do so if we understand the preferences, utilities and probabilities that feature in decision-theoretic models as ascriptions of mental states not reducible to choice. The behavioural interpretation of preference and related concepts, still common in economics, is consequently cast as misguided. This paper argues that even those who strive to provide folk psychological explanations should side with the economists, and adopt a behavioural interpretation of the preferences featuring in decision-theoretic models. Under a mentalistic inter-pretation of preference, decision-theoretic models do not straightforwardly provide ordinary folk psychological explanations. Instead, they involve controversial enough commitments about the mental causes of choice to not only fail to adequately capture much unreflective decision-making, but also many intentional, reason-based and instrumentally rational choices. Satisfactory folk psychological explanation in fact only comes indirectly from inferring more fundamental conative attitudes from a pattern of decision-theoretic preferences. And the behavioural interpretation does a better job at facilitating such inferences. My argument extends to the related concepts of utility and probability.

Representation in Cognitive Science

<i>Representation in Cognitive Science</i>

Rethinking creative intelligence: comparative psychology and the concept of creativity

The concept of creativity is a central one in folk psychological explanation and has long been prominent in philosophical debates about the nature of art, genius, and the imagination. The scientific investigation of creativity in humans is also well established, and there has been increasing interest in the question of whether the concept can be rigorously applied to non-human animals. In this paper, I argue that such applications face serious challenges of both a conceptual and methodological character, reflecting deep controversies within both philosophy and psychology concerning how to define and apply the concept of creativity. After providing a brief review of some of the leading theories of creativity (Section 2) and discussing some of the strongest putative cases of creative intelligence in non-human animals (Section 3), I examine some of the more worrisome difficulties faced by attempts to use these theories to answer the question of whether animals are truly creative (Section 4). I conclude by examining how we might overcome them, and suggest that one approach worth taking seriously is to adopt what I term a Strong Rejectionist view of creativity, eschewing use of the term entirely in the scientific study of comparative cognition.

Folk psychology and network theory: Fact or gamble? A reply to Kalis and Borsboom

Kalis and Borsboom (2020) defend their realism about folk psychology against my challenge to provide a grounding argument for the correctness of folk psychological explanation (Oude Maatman, 2020). In this reply, I show how their clarified realism in fact vindicates this challenge, as it heavily relies on the predictive success of folk psychology. I then proceed by describing how their realist interpretation of “intentional content” complicates the usability of network theory, and show that both their antireductionism and realism are grounded in an empirical gamble against alternatives. I end with a brief defense of my own version of network theory.

Reformulating the network theory of mental disorders: Folk psychology as a factor, not a fact

Borsboom et al. (2019) argue that the network theory of mental disorders, if correct, blocks the biological reduction of mental disorders. This is mainly argued through a partial reformulation of network theory which combines multiple realizability of symptoms with a realist interpretation of folk psychological explanations. In this article, I argue that (a) the latter is problematic and that (b) the combination of these arguments voids the previous predictive and explanatory power of network theory. I then present a novel way in which network theory could avoid biological reductionism by considering folk psychology not as a fact, but as a structuring cause of causal connections between intentional state symptoms, together with culture and time period. Drawing from this, a novel principle for network theory is proposed, which allows it to retain force against reductionism while also retaining predictive and explanatory power.

Attention and Consciousness in Intentional Action: Steps Toward Rich Artificial Agency

If artificial agents are to be created such that they occupy space in our social and cultural milieu, then we should expect them to be targets of folk psychological explanation. That is to say, their behavior ought to be explicable in terms of beliefs, desires, obligations, and especially intentions. Herein, we focus on the concept of intentional action, and especially its relationship to consciousness. After outlining some lessons learned from philosophy and psychology that give insight into the structure of intentional action, we find that attention plays a critical role in agency, and indeed, in the production of intentional action. We argue that the insights offered by the literature on agency and intentional action motivate a particular kind of computational cognitive architecture, and one that hasn’t been well-explicated or computationally fleshed out among the community of AI researchers and computational cognitive scientists who work on cognitive systems. To give a sense of what such a system might look like, we present the ARCADIA attention-driven cognitive system as first steps toward an architecture to support the type of agency that rich human–machine interaction will undoubtedly demand.

Two arguments supporting the thesis of the predictive nature of reasons for action

The dominant view in contemporary philosophy of action is that, to explain an action we need to provide a reason for it. A reason is what rationalises an action. According to Donald Davidson, before we can describe a reason we must identify the need that accompanies the performance of a given action, as well as the specific attitude of the agent to the action. The author of “Action, Reason and Cause” believes that the proattitude/ belief pair helps determine the reason for action, which is at the same time the action’s cause. Davidson’s view has a lot of supporters today and is strictly related to the so-called post-Humean theories of action. The objective of the present analysis is to demonstrate that the primary reason for action is not provided by the pro-attitude/belief pair, but by predictions due to which agents act in such and such a way. This expands on Elizabeth Anscombe’s intuition according to which each intention is predictive in nature. I will support the thesis about the predictive nature of reasons for action by means of two arguments. The first argument relies on the analysis of the Knobe effect concerning the asymmetry between attributing intentionality and attributing responsibility for actions; the other draws upon the theory of predictive processing. The remainder of this paper has the following structure: in §1, I will discuss Donald Davidson’s theory. §2 will focus on Elizabeth Anscombe’s conception. In §3, I will examine an argument drawn from the analysis of the Knobe effect, according to which an agent will intentionally perform a given action when he can predict the effects of performing it. §4 will introduce the problem of providing reasons for action in the context of folkpsychological explanations. §5 will examine the theory of predictive processing. §6 will demonstrate that predictions serve a specific, normative role in the decision-making processes, whereas §7 will advance the argument from predictive processing whereby to explain an action is to identify specific predictive reasoning which caused the action to be performed . In the Conclusions, I will show the consequences of my main thesis for the problem of the nature of actions and explanations, as well as the rationale for using folk-psychological categories.

Donald Davidson: Looking Back, Looking Forward (Volume Introduction)

The papers collected in this issue were solicited to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Donald Davidson’s birth. Four of them discuss the implications of Davidson’s views—in particular, his later views on triangulation—for questions that are still very much at the centre of current debates. These are, first, the question whether Saul Kripke’s doubts about meaning and rule-following can be answered without making concessions to the sceptic or to the quietist; second, the question whether a way can be found to answer Davidson’s own doubts about the continuity of non-propositional thought and language; third, the question whether normative properties can be at once causal and prescriptive; fourth, the question whether folk psychological explanations can be at once illuminating and autonomous. The fifth paper reexamines Davidson’s take on the principle of compositionality, which always was at the centre of his theorizing about language.

Davidson, Reasons, and Causes: A Plea for a Little Bit More Empathy

In this essay, I will suggest ways of improving on Davidson’s conception of the explanatory autonomy of folk psychological explanations. For that purpose, I will appeal to insights from the recent theory of mind debate emphasizing the centrality of various forms of empathy for our understanding of another person’s mindedness. While I will argue that we need to abandon Davidson’s position of anomalous monism, I will also show that my account is fully compatible with Davidson’s non-reductive and interpretationist account of meaning and mental content. Indeed, my account does more justice to the empathic capacities underlying our interpretive capacities, which Davidson himself has to acknowledge in thinking about the constitutive features of thought and meaning. More specifically, I will propose a new way of philosophically safeguarding the causal-explanatory autonomy of our ordinary action explanations by showing how our empathic capacities are involved in epistemically delineating the domain of rational agency.

Naturalism, non-factualism, and normative situated behaviour

This paper argues that the normative character of our unreflective situated behaviour is not factual. We highlight a problematic assumption shared by the two most influential trends in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science, reductionism and enactivism. Our intentional, normative explanations are referential, descriptive or factual. Underneath this assumption lies the idea that only facts can make true or false our attributions of cognitive, mental and agential abilities. We will argue against this view by describing the main features and problems of reductionism and enactivism and then we will offer two arguments against this shared factualist assumption: (1) normative vocabulary is ineliminable if we want a complete explanation of our situated practices; and (2) the factualist assumption is a species of the is-ought fallacy. Finally, we will claim that a folk psychological explanation of our normative practices is fully compatible with ontological naturalism when such descriptivist or factualist assumption is rejected.

Influences and vulnerabilities in radicalised lone-actor terrorists

The threat to national security from terrorists acting on their own initiative is a challenge for law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the UK and elsewhere. The UK Parliament’s 2014 threat assessment noted ‘a trend towards ‘low signature’ terrorism by small, self-directed groups and lone actors’ [House of Commons Home Affairs Committee (2014) Counter-Terrorism – Seventeenth Report of Session 2013–14]. Lone actors have become a higher priority for counter-terrorism professionals (UK police, Prevent practitioners and security agencies), but there is a paucity of research into the views and awareness of these professionals. This qualitative study examined how Prevent practitioners perceived the radicalisation and motivations of lone-actor terrorists they had encountered. Participants were an opportunity sample of five Prevent practitioners; all had served as police officers with varying employment backgrounds and counter-terrorism experience. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews identified perceived general characteristics of lone-actor radicalisation. Three themes clustering around the concept of becoming a terrorist are discussed: mechanisms of radicalisation, vulnerability to radical discourse, and individual motivation. Participants construed radicalisation as a process over time, accelerated in the presence of generalised criminality or extensive Internet use. Vulnerability was seen as inherent, as well as a product of social context. Participants adopted folk-psychological explanations with mental health problems, social isolation and relative deprivation cited as prominent vulnerability factors. Lone actors were seen as motivated by grievances (e.g. deprivation), pressure from external sources (e.g. rational prospectors) or personal reward (e.g. sensation-seeking). Practitioners’ perceptions of the process over time had parallels with a diathesis–stress model, although there was some support for social movement theory.

Functions and mental representation: the theoretical role of representations and its real nature

Representations are not only used in our folk-psychological explanations of behaviour, but are also fruitfully postulated, for example, in cognitive science. The mainstream view in cognitive science maintains that our mind is a representational system. This popular view requires an understanding of the nature of the entities they are postulating. Teleosemantic theories face this challenge, unpacking the normativity in the relation of representation by appealing to the teleological function of the representing state. It has been argued that, if intentionality is to be explained in teleological terms, then the function of a state cannot depend on its phylogenetical history, given the metaphysical possibility of a duplicate of an intentional being that lacks an evolutionary history (Swampman). In this paper, I present a method to produce, according to our current knowledge in genetic engineering, human-like individuals who are not the product of natural selection in the required sense. This variation will be used to shed light on the main replies that have been offered in the literature to the Swampman thought experiment. I argue that these replies are not satisfactory: representations should better not depend on natural selection. I conclude that a non-etiological notion of function is to be preferred for characterizing the relation of representation.

Can Sellars’ argument for scientific realism be used against his own scientia mensura principle?

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Lange’s (Philos Stud 101:213–51, 2000) argument in support of Sellars’ scientific realism (i.e. against ’the layer-cake picture’ of theoretical explanation), which, if successful, surprisingly, undermines Sellars’ scientia mensura principle and justifies the anti-Sellarsian view to the effect that certain domains of discourse which use irreducibly normative descriptions and explanations (e.g. folk-psychological discourse) are explanatorily autonomous. (However, interestingly enough, Lange takes himself to be a Sellarsian and does not put forward his claim as an explicitly anti-Sellarsian one.) It will be argued that Lange’s argument against the layer-cake view is not strictly speaking Sellarsian, since Lange interprets Sellars’ argument in an overly abstract or formal manner. Moreover, I will suggest that, within a properly Sellarsian context, Lange’s argument against the layer-cake picture can actually be used for quite un- Langean purposes, namely in order to show that folk-psychological descriptions and explanations are not if fact autonomous. However, Lange could insist that his reconstruction of Sellars’ argument is substantially correct (irrespectively of how Sellars himself understood it) and he does have the resources to do so. I will propose that the substantial issue between Lange and Sellars turns on their different views on the function of ceteris-paribus clauses, and ultimately, on issues about the unity of science. Finally, it will be suggested that the Sellarsian framework for tackling these issues constitutes a viable alternative to Lange’s picture of theoretical explanation, while at the same time incorporating be the sound insights of the latter.

Fictionalism about Folk Psychology

For nothing is actually removed from existence by being labeled ... appearance . . . What appears is there, and must be dealt with; but materialism has no rational way of dealing with appearance.-BradleyAppearance and Reality, 1930, 12.1. IntroductionFictionalists avoid commitment-full-fledged ontological commitment, that is. To be a fictionalist about a given domain is to adopt a strategy of taking discourse about the domain seriously while at the same time stopping short of accepting that such discourse entails any, potentially embarrassing, ontological commitments. Endorsing fictionalism about some domain is thus meant to provide a way of taking a less-thanfully realist stance towards the domain's entities without rejecting the value or usefulness of discourse about the domain altogether. Sainsbury highlights this as the main motivation of fictionalism:the starting point for fictionalism is some kind of ontological scruple: one cannot bring oneself to believe in moral values, nonactual things, unobservable things, or abstract things. But one has somehow to do justice to the fact that one cannot simply throw away the related regions of discourse: morality, modality, elementary physics, or mathematics. Fictionalism to the rescue. (2010, 2)This paper argues that fictionalism about folk psychology, FaF, is ill motivated in any domain. It is not a successful way of dealing with eliminativist threats aimed at classical cognitivist theories-theories which predict that folk-psychological constructs, understood subpersonally, will be vindicated by a mature cognitive science. Nor would FaF be an appropriate response to worries about the ontological status of mental states and the determinacy of their content, where such mental states are understood as featuring in reason explanations about the actions of people. The paper's moral? Friends of folk are best advised to expose such threats as empty rather than by making fictionalist ontological concessions.The case against FaF is made in the following steps. It is argued that there is no advantage in trying to vindicate folk by treating the constructs of classical cognitivism-viz. subpersonal mental representations-as useful fictions as opposed to serious scientific posits or as serving as the basis for philosophical explanations. Both scientific and philosophical considerations point to the conclusion that subpersonal representations of the sort that classical cognitivism posits should be eliminated, not preserved by our best science of mind (Section 1). Yet there is no need to assume that folk-psychological explanations are subpersonally based. It is possible and plausible that such explanations are based, just as they appear to be, in nonscientific interpretative, narrative practices. A recent attempt to motivate FaF based on this assumption is examined and rejected (Section 2). Then a more compelling, Dennettstyle rationale for adopting a FaFish line based on worries about the indeterminacy of folk-psychological attributions is considered. Dennett endorses FaF, broadly construed, in arguing that while folk-psychological phenomena exhibit objective patterns they are nevertheless, at best, mildly real (Section 3). The final section offers three considerations that should encourage the reader to resist such FaFish conclusions (Section 4).1. Fictionalism about Folk Psychology: Take OneClassical cognitivism characterizes subpersonal cognitive states in a way that is deeply indebted to our everyday, folk-psychological conception of mind. Ramsey (2007) exposes classical cognitivism's commitment on this front, showing how it gives rise to an outlook on representation that amounts to a sort of merger between classical computational theory and folk psychology (Ramsey 2007, 38). Why so? What's the connection? On the one hand, cognitivism embraces the view that cognition is computation, which [is] . . . understood as a form of quasi-linguisticsymbol manipulation done in accordance with specifiable rules (39). …

Folk psychology as science

There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of action and the philosophy of science over folk psychological explanations of human action: do the (perhaps implicit) generalizations that underwrite such explanations purport to state contingent, empirically established connections between beliefs, desires, and actions, or do such generalizations serve rather to define, at least in part, what it is to have a belief or desire, or perform an action? This question has proven important because of certain traditional assumptions made about the role of law-statements in scientific explanations. According to this tradition, law-statements take the form of generalizations, and the laws we find in well-established sciences are contingent and empirical; as such, if the kinds of generalizations at work in folk psychological explanations of human action act like definitions, or state conceptual connections, then such generalizations could not play the kind of explanatory role we find in mature sciences. This paper argues that the aforementioned way of framing the debate reflects a still powerful but impoverished conception of the role laws play in scientific explanations, a conception that, moreover, cannot be reconciled with a good deal of actual scientific practice. When we update the philosophy of science, we find the concerns that are raised for folk psychological explanations largely evaporate or are found not to be specific to such explanations.

The Causal Autonomy of Reason Explanations and How Not to Worry about Causal Deviance

This essay will defend a causal conception of action explanations in terms of an agent’s reasons by delineating a metaphysical and epistemic framework that allows us to view folk psychology as providing us with causal and autonomous explanatory strategies of accounting for individual agency. At the same time, I will calm philosophical concerns about the issue of causal deviance that have been at the center of the recent debates between causalist and noncausalist interpretations of action explanations. For that purpose, it is important to realize that the domain of folk-psychological action explanation is also the domain of skillful and goal-directed bodily movements, a domain to which we have independent epistemic access.

Individualism and the metaphysics of actions

I examine an intuitive property of folk-psychological explanations I call self-sufficiency. I argue that individualism cannot honor this property and work toward distilling an account of psychological explanation that does honor it, given some fairly standard assumptions. In doing so, my preference for an Externalist individuation of intentional state will emerge unambiguously. The assumptions I rely on are fairly standard but not uncontroversial. Yet not always do I attempt to defend them from objections. My goal is an account of folk psychology consistent with our every-day practices rather than the deduction of an idealized psychology from first principles. I conclude with some applications offered as evidence that the goal was achieved.

Sellars on thoughts and beliefs

In this paper, I examine Wilfrid Sellars’ famous Myth of Jones. I argue the myth provides an ontologically austere account of thoughts and beliefs that makes sense of the full range of our folk psychological abilities. Sellars’ account draws on both Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ryle provides Sellars with the resources to make thoughts metaphysically respectable and Wittgenstein the resources to make beliefs rationally criticisable. By combining these insights into a single account, Sellars is able to see reasons as causes and, hence, to respect the full range of our folk psychological generalisations. This is achieved by modelling folk psychological practice on theoretical reasoning. But despite frequent misinterpretation, Sellars does not claim that thoughts and beliefs are theoretical concepts. Thus, folk psychological explanation is not theoretical, and hence, it is not replaceable by scientific theory. Hence, scientific concepts will not eliminate folk psychological concepts. Thus, Sellars avoids eliminativism.

RECLAIMING THE ANCESTORS OF SIMULATION THEORY

Collingwood's account of re-enactment is not often invoked as a source of inspira tion in contemporary action It was thus a pleasant surprise to come across an attempt to connect current research in cognitive psychology with the historical debate about the nature of action explanation that took place in mid-century, and to reclaim the centrality of Collingwood's work to contemporary theorizing about the nature of folk-psychological explanation. Stueber's Rediscovering Empathy articulates an interesting and highly original defense of empathy as a distinctive method of explanation in the social sciences. In so doing it contests a philosophical trend that has tended to dismiss the method of empathetic identification for relying on an implausibly Cartesian conception of the mind and on the employment of mysterious telepathic powers that lie beyond the scope of verification. Stueber's defense of empathy unfolds in the context of the contemporary debate in analytic philosophy of mind between and theory. Oversimplifying the matter somewhat, the issue at stake for theory theorists and simulation theorists is whether the ability to predict the be havior of other human beings depends on the employment of a theory about how human beings typically tend to react in certain circumstances (theory theory), or whether it is only necessary to empathize with them and ask how we would act if we found ourselves in their situation. In most cases simulation theory and theory theory have been presented as empirical hypotheses to be tested in experimental conditions. The testing ground for this debate has been developmental psychology, where experiments carried out under controlled conditions have shown that where as children around the age of three are unable to accurately predict the behavior of agents who hold beliefs different from their own, children aged five and over have no problems in performing this task. The question at stake is whether the five-year old as opposed to the three-year-old ability to predict the behavior of persons with a different set of beliefs from their own depends on the possession of a fairly so phisticated theory about how people generally act (as the theory theorists claims), or whether this ability is connected less with the child's cognitive development and more with the child's emotional development, that is, with his or her ability to empathize with others and take their point of view (as simulationists claim).