Folk Psychology Research Articles

Why “belief” is hard work

Comment on Luhrmann, Tanya. 2012. When God talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical relationship with God. New York: Alfred E. Knopf.

Anomalous Monism in a Digital Universe

Bermudez (Philosophy of psychology: a contemporary introduction, Routledge, London, 2005) identifies the "Interface Problem" as the central problem in the philosophy of psychology: how commonsensical psychological explanations can be integrated with lower-level (cognitive, biological, etc.) explanations? In particular, since folk psychology is meant to provide causal explanations on a par with, say, neurobiological explanations, the question of how to understand the relation between the two layers arises naturally. Donald Davidson claimed that the interface problem is actually ill-posed and put forward his version of the "Autonomy Picture", the view known as anomalous monism. This work reviews Davidson's proposal in the light of digital universes: we model the key claims of the theory using cellular automata and show that Davidson's original version of the Autonomy Picture (which differs, in some respects, from what is discussed by Bermudez) is immune to two arguments against autonomy.

How are Bayesian models really used? Reply to

In response to the proposal that cognitive phenomena might be best understood in terms of cognitive theories (Endress, 2013), Frank (2013) outlined an important research program, suggesting that Bayesian models should be used as rigorous, mathematically attractive implementations of psychological theories. This research program is important and promising. However, I show that it is not followed in practice. I then turn to Frank’s defense of the assumption that learners prefer more specific rules (the “size principle”), and show that the results allegedly supporting this assumption do not provide any support for it. Further, I demonstrate that, in contrast to Frank’s criticisms, there is no circularity in an account of rule-learning based on “common-sense psychology”, and that Frank’s other criticisms of this account are unsupported. I conclude that the research program outlined by Frank is important and promising, but needs to be followed in practice. Be that as it might, the rule-learning experiments discussed by Frank are still better explained by simple psychological mechanisms.

The need for central resources in answering questions in different domains: Folk psychology, biology, and economics

This study examined whether, when lay people reason about everyday domains, they do so in a slow, serial, deliberate process or using an automatic, effortless, associative process, and whether there are differences in this respect between content domains. The cognitive resources used by lay persons in reasoning about everyday domains were investigated using a dual task methodology. Fifty-eight adult participants answered computer-administered questions on folk biology (ToB), folk economics (ToE), and folk psychology, where the latter included questions requiring participants to infer an emotion from a verbally presented situation (ToP) and false-belief tasks (ToM). Each domain was tested with questionnaires at two levels of difficulty. Half the participants concurrently performed the 2-back task. Cognitive load reduced accuracy on the main task for ToM tasks (especially for second-order false-belief items) but not for the other domains. Performing the main tasks reduces accuracy and increases latencies on the secondary task for all domains. These findings suggest that the appropriate generalisation does not relate to content domains (such as folk psychology vs. folk biology), but rather to the nature of the task under consideration. For ToE, ToB, and ToP, the relevant inference questions appear to be processed mainly by the associative systems in LTM, and the process is not affected by a concurrent secondary task. For ToM, the response generation processing occurs in the analytic subsystem, and is therefore affected by cognitive load. Further, the more difficult set of questions impaired the secondary task more than the simpler set, in every domain and in terms of both accuracy and latency. This suggests that the processing involved in the associative system consumes domain-general resources too.

From Intentions to Neurons: Social and Neural Consequences of Disbelieving in Free Will

The problem of free will is among the most fascinating and disputed questions throughout the history of philosophy and psychology. Traditionally limited to philosophical and theological debate, in the last decades it has become a matter of scientific investigation. The theoretical and methodological advances in neuroscience allowed very complex psychological functions related to free will (conscious intentions, decision-making, and agency) to be investigated. In parallel, neuroscience is gaining momentum in the media, and various scientific findings are claimed to provide evidence that free will is nothing more than an illusion. Why do neuroscientific findings have such a strong impact on our notion of free will? Does it really matter what neuroscience tells us about free will? Here we critically examine studies in experimental philosophy, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience that attempt to provide an empirical answer to these questions. This overview of the literature demonstrates that inducing disbelief in free will has an impact on folk psychology, social behavior and intentional action.

Universal belief-desire psychology? A dilemma for theory theory and simulation theory

In this article we take issue with theory theory and simulation theory accounts of folk psychology committed to (i) the belief-desire (BD) model and (ii) the assumption of universality (AU). Recent studies cast doubt on the compatibility of these commitments because they reveal considerable cross-cultural differences in folk psychologies. We present both theory theory and simulation theory with the following dilemma: either (i) keep the BD-model as an account of the surface properties of specific explicit folk psychologies and give up AU in light of the cross-cultural evidence; or (ii) defend AU with respect to core capacities underlying different culture-specific folk psychologies, and explain why the BD-model will be genuinely explanatory at this level.

Neuroscience as a Human Science: Integrating Phenomenology and Empiricism in the Study of Action and Consciousness

This paper considers where contemporary neuroscience leaves us in terms of how human consciousness fits into the material world, and whether consciousness is reducible to merely mechanical physical systems, or on the contrary whether consciousness is a self-organizing system that can in a sense use the brain for its own purposes. The paper discusses how phenomenology can be integrated with new findings about “neural plasticity” to yield new approaches to the mind–body problem and the place of consciousness as a causal player in the physical world. By phenomenology, I mean simply any attempt to have introspective or reflective access to the meaning of our own conscious states, and to carefully take account of the notorious pitfalls of subjective introspection (often subsumed within the concept of “folk psychology” in the empirically oriented cognitive theory literature).

Belief through Thick and Thin

AbstractWe distinguish between two categories of belief—thin belief and thick belief—and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifically, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling recent experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philosophical thesis that knowledge entails belief). We also suggest that the distinction can be applied to debates in the philosophy of mind and metaethics.

Ossian’s Folk Psychology

When James Macpherson turned to the popular poetry of ancient Scotland, he found in it what philosophers now call folk psychology: a commonsense theory about how minds work. Yet because his poems were largely forgeries, Macpherson winds up importing more recent physiology into his portrayal of ancient, pagan materialism. As a result, the poems’ vernacular packaging ultimately delivers a philosophy closer to more counterintuitive models of mindedness: primitive animism, radical materialism, and innate faculties of mind recognition. In ways that remain relevant today, the Ossianic project seeks a materialism that might situate literary artifacts within a broader, interdisciplinary terrain.

Nondoxasticism about Self-Deception

The philosophical difficulties presented by self-deception are vexed and multifaceted. One such difficulty is what I call the ‘doxastic problem’ of self-deception. Solving the doxastic problem involves determining whether someone in a state of self-deception that ∼p both believes that p and believes that ∼p, simply holds one or the other belief, or, as I will argue, holds neither. This final option, which has been almost entirely overlooked to-date, is what I call ‘nondoxasticism’ about self-deception. In this article, I present a negative case for nondoxasticism according to which, in the paradigm case of self-deception, there is no explanatory need to attribute the self-deceived person either their undesired belief that p, or their desired belief that ∼p. Folk psychology is replete with concepts other than belief, and if we bear this in mind, it becomes clear that the explanatory roles for which the self-deceived person's purported beliefs have traditionally been enlisted can be comfortably filled without recourse to belief.

Semantic Externalism and Knowing Our Own Minds: Ignoring Twin‐Earth and Doing Naturalistic Philosophy

AbstractIn this article I offer a naturalistic defence of semantic externalism. I argue against the following: (1) arguments for externalism rest mainly on conceptual analysis; (2) the community conceptual norms relevant to individuation of propositional attitudes are quasi‐analytic; (3) externalism raises serious questions about knowledge of propositional attitudes; and (4) externalism might be OK for “folk psychology” but not for cognitive science. The naturalist alternatives are as follows. (1) Community norms are not anything like a priori; sometimes they are incoherent. (2) Often propositional attitudes lack determinate content: we do not know the content of thoughts or sentences because there is no fully definite content to be known. (3) Often achieving determinate content is a major socially mediated cognitive achievement that depends on just the factors of social and environmental embedding posited as individuative by externalists, so (4) externalism explains how people can, sometimes, come to have, and to know, determinate attitude contents. (5) Reference and content, for both thought and language, are determined by complex and messy dialectical relations involving many such environmental and social factors; consequently, determinate reference, truth‐conditions, etc., are somewhat uncommon outcomes. (6) The basic semantic relation is (typically imperfect) socially mediated accommodation between perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, classificatory and inferential dispositions and relevant causal structures in the environment. (7) This accommodation explains how concepts, language, taxonomies, etc., contribute to individuals' rational inductive, explanatory and practical achievements. (8) So externally individuated propositional attitudes are required for cognitive science explanations of individual human rationality and its inductive and explanatory achievements. “Individual rationality ain't (entirely) in the individual head.”

Dissociating intuitive physics from intuitive psychology in adults with Williams syndrome

Dissociating intuitive physics from intuitive psychology in adults with Williams syndrome

Throwing out the Bayesian baby with the optimal bathwater: Response to

A recent probabilistic model unified findings on sequential generalization (“rule learning”) via independently-motivated principles of generalization (Frank & Tenenbaum, 2011). Endress critiques this work, arguing that learners do not prefer more specific hypotheses (a central assumption of the model), that “common-sense psychology” provides an adequate explanation of rule learning, and that Bayesian models imply incorrect optimality claims but can be fit to any pattern of data. Endress’s response raises useful points about the importance of mechanistic explanation, but the specific critiques of our work are not supported. More broadly, I argue that Endress undervalues the importance of formal models. Although probabilistic models must meet a high standard to be used as evidence for optimality claims, they nevertheless provide a powerful framework for describing cognition.

Psychology Unified: From Folk Psychology to Radical Enactivism

A properly radical enactivism—one that eschews the idea that all mentality is necessarily contentful and representational—has better prospects of unifying psychology than does traditional cognitivism. This paper offers a five-step argument in support of this claim. The first section advances the view that a principled way of characterizing psychology's subject matter is what is required if it is to be regarded as a special science. In this light, section two examines why and how cognitivism continues to be regarded as the best potential unifier for the discipline. But the third section exposes a serious problem about the scope of cognitivism that occurs because it ascribes properties to basic minds that only belong to more sophisticated minds built atop them. In a nutshell, the root problem is that cognitivism relies on folk psychological models of mental states when it assumes that all mentality is contentful. Although this gives cognitivism its intuitive appeal, it also makes it too limited to provide a general model of the mind. Radical enactivism's way of understanding mentality as embodied activity, it is argued, avoids this and provides a more appropriate means of understanding basic forms of mentality. Against the charge that radical enactivism is also limited in scope, the final section argues that it is inclusive enough to allow for and recognize the emergence of language-based folk psychological modes of mentality, thus making it the superior potential unifier for psychology.

“The Wrong Holy Ghost”: Discerning the Apostolic Gift of Discernment Using a Signaling and Systems Theoretical Approach

AbstractI develop a case study of demonic glossolalia (speaking in tongues) for its cues in conveying religious commitment among a congregation of Apostolic Pentecostals. From the perspective of signaling theory, costly or hard‐to‐fake signals may convey psychological dispositions of members and would‐be members toward an inclusive community. I utilize signaling theory in a broader systems approach to make sense of an incident of speaking in tongues that a congregation decries as demonic. To facilitate this interpretation, forms and motivations of glossolalia—the sine qua non that one has accepted Jesus as personal savior—are described and examined, including examples of calm and excited “Holy Ghost” and “backslider” and “mistaken demonic” glossolalia. To an outsider, some of the differences among these signaling modes may be difficult to distinguish, but the underlying religious and family dynamics provide insights as to how church members make distinctions they attribute to the spiritual “gift of discernment.” This approach promises to make unique contributions toward understanding the implicit folk psychologies of practices that, according to Pentecostals, mark them as “weird” or “odd.”

Perception in autism: An interactive global research between folk psychology and folk physics.

Perception in autism: An interactive global research between folk psychology and folk physics.

Non-Reductive Naturalism and the Vocabulary of Agency

1.In a recent paper Carl Sachs provides a helpful discussion of Richard Rorty's thinking concerning the question of naturalism (Sachs 2009). He distinguishes between two positions that he terms 'non-reductive physicalism' and 'pragmatic naturalism', claiming that Rorty has moved, under pressure from critical remarks by Bjorn Ramberg (2000), from an endorsement of the first to an endorsement of the second. Moreover, the latter is the more cogent position, according to Sachs. The central difference between non-reductive physicalism and pragmatic naturalism is that the latter but not the former sees what Sachs, following Ramberg, calls the vocabulary of agency as having a privileged, transcendental role in relation to other vocabularies, in particular, all descriptive vocabularies, including those of the sciences. In this paper, I will be concerned to raise some doubts about pragmatic naturalism and the reasons Sachs gives for preferring it to non-reductive physicalism; and, further, about whether Rorty or more generally a pragmatist who also wants to be a naturalist really should or needs to subscribe to pragmatic naturalism rather than non-reductive physicalism.Both non-reductive physicalism (NRP) and pragmatic naturalism (PN) reject a reductive naturalist position, according to which a certain scientific vocabulary - often taken to be that of completed physics - provides us with a full, basic account of what is true, or what the 'facts' are. All other vocabularies have to be 'made sense' of in terms of this basis, i.e. they have reduce to it (at least in principle), or else be seen as in some way or other making less than literally true claims. This is something that Rorty has steadfastly opposed through different avenues of thought. One central one (developed in Nonreductive Naturalism in Rorty 1991) has been the Davidsonean line that while there may be just one reality 'out there' consisting of physical particles in motion (or whatever the physicists tell us) there is an indefinite number of mutually incommensurable ways of describing that reality, none of which can non-question-beggingly lay claim to providing the one true description of it. The position is (semantically) non-reductive but also, apparently, naturalistic in that it allows all events can be described in microphysical terms. We might call it 'ontological physicalism'. Rorty's naturalism goes however further than this ontological thesis in that he also claims there are no radical discontinuities between non-human and human cognitive activity, and that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has provided us with a framework for understanding our place in nature alongside that of other organisms (see Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-dualist Account of Interpretation in Rorty 1991). Sachs calls this the continuity thesis. Both NRP and PN seek to uphold both these features of Rorty's naturalism.NRP can be said to stop there, but PN adds a further twist. Whilst both NPN and PN are steadfastly anti-reductive about different vocabularies, they diverge on the further question of whether there is anything especially special about that mode of understanding and explaining of ours which we apply to each others' activities, involving the attribution of beliefs, desires and verbal meanings to explain action: the vocabulary of agency (Ramberg 2000). The vocabulary of agency can be equated with a certain conception of what others have called folk or common sense psychology. For Davidson, common sense psychological explanations answer to constitutive ideals that are quite different from those of natural science, rendering any hope of reduction of the former to the latter forlorn: this is the thesis of the anomalism of the mental (see Davidson's 'Mental events', and other essays collected in his 1980). Initially this thesis operated with a notion of scientific explanation that involved strict laws, but in later work Davidson stressed that psychological explanations are distinctive compared to those of any natural science, 'exact' or otherwise, implying that there is a more significant fault-line between the vocabulary of agency and all scientific vocabularies, on the one hand, than between any two vocabularies within the latter class, on the other (Davidson 1987). …

III-The Epistemic Role of Intentions

According to David Velleman, it is part of the ‘commonsense psychology’ of intentional agency that an agent can know what she will do without relying on evidence, in virtue of intending to do it. My question is how this claim is to be interpreted and defended. I argue that the answer turns on the commonsense conception of calculative practical reasoning, and the link between such reasoning and warranted claims to knowledge. I also consider the implications of this argument for Velleman's project of vindicating the commonsense view by showing it to be consistent with an ‘evidentialist’ epistemology.

Exploring Vātsalyam: The Emotion of Love for the Child

The emotion of vātsalyam is perceived as central to the construction of love in the Indian cultural context. Usually understood as the love of the parents for their children, it is not confined to parental love alone. The article examines the historicity of the concept of vātsalyam as well as its contemporary expression. It combines enquiry from three domains—Indian philosophical thought, literature and folk psychology. The first section of the article provides the theoretical framework within which the concept is situated in Indian psychology. Drawing from the rasa theory, we explicate how experiencing of worldly emotions can simultaneously be the means of transformation. In the second section, we attempt to bring out the centrality of the emotion of vātsalyam in Indian psyche and its pan-Indian expression by drawing from the literatures in Tamil, Hindi, Bengali and Marathi. The third section of the article uses a short qualitative enquiry to examine contemporary understanding of vātsalyam based on responses of lay persons and artists relating to nature of vātsalyam, their modes of expression of this emotion, its manifestation in various relationships, and their views on the uniqueness of this emotion, or otherwise, to the Indian cultural context

Reading people or reading minds: A precis of Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology (Proceedings of the CAPE International Workshops, 2012. Part II: CAPE philosophy of animal minds workshop)

Reading people or reading minds: A precis of Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology (Proceedings of the CAPE International Workshops, 2012. Part II: CAPE philosophy of animal minds workshop)