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Daniel D. Hutto - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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a reconciliation for the future of psychiatry both Folk Psychology and cognitive science
Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2016Co-Authors: Daniel D. HuttoAbstract:Philosophy of psychiatry faces a tough choice between two competing ways of understanding mental disorders. The Folk Psychology or FP view puts our everyday normative conceptual scheme in the driver’s seat – on the assumption that it, and it only, tells us what mental disorders are (Graham 2009). Opposing this, the scientific image or SI view (Murphy 2006, Gerrans 2014) holds that our understanding of mental disorders must come, wholly and solely, from the sciences of the mind, unfettered by FP. This paper argues that the FP view is problematic because it is too limited: there is more to the mind than FP allows, hence we must look beyond FP for properly deep and illuminating explanations of mental disorders. SI promises just this. But when cast in its standard cognitivist formulations SI is unnecessarily and unjustifiably neurocentric. After rejecting both the FP view, in its pure form, and SI, in its popular cognitivist renderings, this paper concludes that a more liberal version of SI can accommodate what is best in both views – once SI is so formulated and the FP view properly edited and significantly revised, the two views can be reconciled and combined to provide a sound philosophical basis for a future psychiatry.
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Psychology Unified: From Folk Psychology to Radical Enactivism
2014Co-Authors: Daniel D. HuttoAbstract:This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. 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
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fictionalism about Folk Psychology
The Monist, 2013Co-Authors: Daniel D. HuttoAbstract: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 Psychology 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 Psychology 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). …
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Psychology unified from Folk Psychology to radical enactivism
Review of General Psychology, 2013Co-Authors: Daniel D. HuttoAbstract: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 cognitivi...
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lessons from wittgenstein elucidating Folk Psychology
New Ideas in Psychology, 2009Co-Authors: Daniel D. HuttoAbstract:Abstract To the extent that psychologists are concerned to do more than collect raw data for possible interpretation, they cannot avoid interrogating the philosophical assumptions which inform their work. This paper argues that there is a vital need for conceptual clarification of many of the central topics studied by today's sciences of the mind. Yet, rather than offering a comprehensive survey of these, this paper focuses on one illustrative, high profile case: the way in which our everyday understanding of reasons for action has been wrongly categorized in terms of ‘theory of mind’ abilities. Focusing on this example I show how it is possible to elucidate topics in the philosophy of Psychology by relinquishing certain powerful explanatory temptations and by attending more closely to our everyday practices and activities.
Kristin Andrews - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Introduction to Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches
Synthese, 2020Co-Authors: Kristin Andrews, Shannon Spaulding, Evan WestraAbstract:This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic Folk Psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety Folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that Folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research program encompassing both revisionary and more traditionally inspired approaches to Folk Psychology. After reviewing the origins of pluralistic Folk Psychology, the papers in the current issue are introduced. These papers fall into three thematic clusters: Folk - psychological strategies beyond propositional attitude attribution (Section 2.1); Enculturation and regulative Folk Psychology (Section 2.2); and Defenses of pluralism (Section 2.3).
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the Folk psychological spiral explanation regulation and language
Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2015Co-Authors: Kristin AndrewsAbstract:In this paper I intend to argue that an explanatory role for Folk Psychology is also a regulative role, and that language is not required for these regulative functions. I will start by drawing out the relationship between prediction, explanation, and regulation of behavior according to both mindreading approaches to Folk Psychology and the pluralistic account I defend. I will argue that social cognition does not take the form of causal reasoning so much as it does normative reasoning, and will introduce the Folk psychological spiral. Then I will examine the cognitive resources necessary for participating in the Folk psychological spiral, and I will argue that these cognitive resources can be had without language. There is preliminary evidence that some other species understand one another through a normative lens that, through looping effects, creates expectations that community members strive to live up to.
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The Functions of Folk Psychology
2015Co-Authors: Kristin AndrewsAbstract:The debates about the form of Folk Psychology and the potential eliminability of Folk Psychology rest on a particular view about how humans understand other minds. That is, though Folk Psychology is described as “our commonsense conception of psychological phenomena ” (Churchland 1981, p. 67), there have been implicit assumptions regarding the nature of that commonsense conception. It has been assumed that Folk Psychology involves two practices, the prediction and explanation of behavior. And it has been assumed that one cognitive mechanism subsumes both these practices. I argue for a new conception of Folk Psychology, one which challenges these assumptions. There is reason to think that Folk Psychology is more diverse than is typically thought, both insofar as there are a heterogeneous collection of heuristics that are used, and as our Folk psychological practices include more than prediction and explanation. While these practices remain central in the philosophical discussions and the related studies coming from developmental Psychology, other practices have also been suggested as being part of Folk Psychology, such as coordinating behavior (Morton 2003) and justifying behavior (Andrews 2004). These points lead me to accept a pluralistic account of Folk Psychology which describes the ways humans understand other humans, as well as the sub-personal mechanisms and the functions of such understanding. I will argue that Folk Psychology needs to be thickened in two dimensions; it should be plural with regard to Folk psychological practices and plural with regard to the mechanisms subsuming those practices. Evidence for this view come from social Psychology, which suggests that humans human Folk Psychology utilizes a number of different heuristics, such as the attribution of traits and inductive generalizations
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do apes read minds toward a new Folk Psychology
2012Co-Authors: Kristin AndrewsAbstract:By adulthood, most of us have become experts in human behavior, able to make sense of the myriad behaviors we find in environments ranging from the family home to the local mall and beyond. In philosophy of mind, our understanding of others has been largely explained in terms of knowing others' beliefs and desires; describing others' behavior in these terms is the core of what is known as Folk Psychology. In Do Apes Read Minds? Kristin Andrews challenges this view of Folk Psychology, arguing that we don't consider others' beliefs and desires when predicting most quotidian behavior, and that our explanations in these terms are often inaccurate or unhelpful. Rather than mindreading, or understanding others as receptacles for propositional attitudes, Andrews claims that Folk psychologists see others first as whole persons with traits, emotions, and social relations. Drawing on research in developmental Psychology, social Psychology, and animal cognition, Andrews argues for a pluralistic Folk Psychology that employs different kinds of practices (including prediction, explanation, and justification) and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and generalization from self) that are involved in our Folk psychological practices. According to this understanding of Folk Psychology -- which does not require the sophisticated cognitive machinery of second-order metacognition associated with having a theory of mind -- animals (including the other great apes) may be Folk psychologists, too.
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it s in your nature a pluralistic Folk Psychology
Synthese, 2008Co-Authors: Kristin AndrewsAbstract:I suggest a pluralistic account of Folk Psychology according to which not all predictions or explanations rely on the attribution of mental states, and not all intentional actions are explained by mental states. This view of Folk Psychology is supported by research in developmental and social Psychology. It is well known that people use personality traits to predict behavior. I argue that trait attribution is not shorthand for mental state attributions, since traits are not identical to beliefs or desires, and an understanding of belief or desire is not necessary for using trait attributions. In addition, we sometimes predict and explain behavior through appeal to personality traits that the target wouldn’t endorse, and so could not serve as the target’s reasons. I conclude by suggesting that our Folk Psychology includes the notion that some behavior is explained by personality traits—who the person is—rather than by beliefs and desires—what the person thinks. Consequences of this view for the debate between simulation theory and theory theory, as well as the debate on chimpanzee theory of mind are discussed.
Alvin I. Goldman - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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1Folk Psychology AND MENTAL CONCEPTS
2015Co-Authors: Alvin I. GoldmanAbstract:By "Folk Psychology " I mean the commonsense understanding and deployment of mentalistic concepts, especially the propositional attitudes. Three (or four) principal questions are of interest in the study of Folk Psychology: (Q1) How do ordinary people understand, or represent to themselves, the various mental states? That is, what are the contents of their concepts of the mental states? (Q2) How do they go about attributing these states? This question decomposes into two subquestions: (Q2)(A) how do people attribute such states to others, and (Q2)(B) how do they attribute such states to themselves? (3) How do people acquire their concepts of mental states and their skill at applying these concepts? The study of Folk Psychology is the attempt to answer these questions, an attempt which should be (and is) a combined effort among philosophers and cognitive scientists. Large literatures on the topic already exist in both philosophy and developmental Psychology, and other branches of cognitive and neuroscience also have much to contribute. The study of Folk Psychology might profitably be viewed as a branch of "descriptive epistemology", since epistemology is (partly) concerned with how beliefs are formed (Goldman 1986) and Folk Psychology involves the formation of beliefs about a special subject-matter
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To Appear in:
2014Co-Authors: Alvin I. Goldman, Edited Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, Stephen StichAbstract:‘Theory of Mind ’ refers to the cognitive capacity to attribute mental states to self and others. Other names for the same capacity include “commonsense Psychology,” “naïve Psychology, ” “Folk Psychology, ” “mindreading ” and “mentalizing. ” Mental attributions are commonly made in both verbal and non-verbal forms. Virtually al
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the Psychology of Folk Psychology
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1993Co-Authors: Alvin I. GoldmanAbstract:Folk Psychology, the naive understanding of mental state concepts, requires a model of how people ascribe mental states to themselves. Competent speakers associate a distinctive memory representation (a category representation, CR) with each mentalistic word in their lexicon. A decision to ascribe such a word to oneself depends on matching to the CR an instance representation (IR) of one's current state. As in visual object recognition, evidence about a CR's content includes the IRs that are or are not available to trigger a match. This poses serious problems for functionalism, the theory-of-mind approach to the meaning of mental terms. A simple functionalist model is inadequate because (1) the relational and subjunctive (what would have happened) information it requires concerning target states is not generally available and (2) it could lead to combinatorial explosion. A modified functionalist model can appeal to qualitative (phenomenological) properties, but the earlier problems still reappear. Qualitative properties are important for sensations, propositional attitudes, and their contents, providing a model that need not refer to functional (causal-relational) properties at all. The introspectionist character of the proposed model does not imply that ascribing mental states to oneself is infallible or complete; nor is the model refuted by empirical research on introspective reports. Empirical research on “theory of mind” does not support any strict version of functionalism but only an understanding of mentalistic words that may depend on phenomenological or experiential qualities.
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consciousness Folk Psychology and cognitive science
Consciousness and Cognition, 1993Co-Authors: Alvin I. GoldmanAbstract:Abstract This paper supports the basic integrity of the Folk-psychological conception of consciousness and its importance in cognitive theorizing. Section 1 critically examines some proposed definitions of consciousness and argues that the Folk-psychological notion of phenomenal consciousness is not captured by various functional–relational definitions. Section 2 rebuts the arguments of several writers who challenge the very existence of phenomenal consciousness, or the coherence or tenability of the Folk-psychological notion of awareness. Section 3 defends a significant role for phenomenal consciousness in the execution of a certain cognitive task, viz., classification of one′s own mental states. Execution of this task, which is part of Folk psychologizing, is taken as a datum in scientific Psychology. It is then argued (on theoretical grounds) that the most promising sort of scientific model of the self-ascription of mental states is one that posits the kinds of phenomenal properties invoked by Folk Psychology. Cognitive science and neuroscience can of course refine and improve upon the Folk understanding of consciousness, awareness, and mental states generally. But the Folk-psychological constructs should not be jettisoned; they have a role to play in cognitive theorizing.
Stephen Stich - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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behavioral circumscription and the Folk Psychology of belief a study in ethno mentalizing
Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, 2017Co-Authors: David Rose, Stephen Stich, Edouard Machery, Mario Alai, Adriano Angelucci, Renatas Berniūnas, Emma Ellen Kathrina Buchtel, Amita Chatterjee, Hyundeuk Cheon, Inrae ChoAbstract:Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subject's assertion that p matches her nonverbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in Folk Psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in Folk Psychology.
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To Appear in:
2014Co-Authors: Alvin I. Goldman, Edited Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, Stephen StichAbstract:‘Theory of Mind ’ refers to the cognitive capacity to attribute mental states to self and others. Other names for the same capacity include “commonsense Psychology,” “naïve Psychology, ” “Folk Psychology, ” “mindreading ” and “mentalizing. ” Mental attributions are commonly made in both verbal and non-verbal forms. Virtually al
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Rutgers University
2013Co-Authors: Stephen Stich, Shaun NicholsAbstract:For the last 25 years discussions and debates about commonsense Psychology (or “Folk Psychology, ” as it is often called) have been center stage in the philosophy of mind. There have been heated disagreements both about what Folk Psychology is and about how it is related to the scientific understanding of the mind/brain that is emerging in Psychology and the neurosciences. In this chapter we will begin by explaining why Folk Psychology plays such an important role in the philosophy of mind. Doing that will require a quick look at a bit of the history of philosophical discussions about the mind. We’ll then turn our attention to the lively contemporary discussions aimed at clarifying the philosophical role that Folk Psychology is expected to play and at using findings in the cognitive sciences to get a clearer understanding of the exact nature of Folk Psychology. 1. Why does Folk Psychology play an important role in the philosophy of mind? To appreciate philosophers ’ fascination with Folk Psychology, it will be useful to begin with a brief reminder about the two most important questions in the philosophy of mind, and the problems engendered by what was for centuries the most influentia
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what is Folk Psychology
Cognition, 1994Co-Authors: Stephen Stich, Ian RavenscroftAbstract:Eliminativism has been a major focus of discussion in the philosophy of mind for the last two decades. According to eliminativists, beliefs and other intentional states are the posits of a Folk theory of mind standardly called "Folk Psychology". That theory, they claim, is radically false and hence beliefs and other intentional states do not exist. We argue that the expression "Folk Psychology" is ambiguous in an important way. On the one hand, "Folk Psychology" is used by many philosophers and cognitive scientists to refer to an internally represented theory of human Psychology exploited in the prediction of behavior. On the other hand, "Folk Psychology" is used to refer to the theory of mind implicit in our everyday talk about mental states. We then argue that sorting out the conceptual and terminological confusion surrounding "Folk Psychology" has major consequences for the eliminativism debate. In particular, if certain models of cognition turn out to be true, then on some readings of "Folk Psychology" the arguments for elimination collapse.
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Folk Psychology simulation or tacit theory
Philosophical Issues, 1993Co-Authors: Stephen Stich, Shaun NicholsAbstract:A central goal of contemporary cognitive science is the explanation of cognitive abilities or capacities. [Cummins 1983] During the last three decades a wide range of cognitive capacities have been subjected to careful empirical scrutiny. The adult's ability to produce and comprehend natural language sentences and the child's capacity to acquire a natural language were among the first to be explored. [Chomsky 1965, Fodor, Bever & Garrett 1974, Pinker 1989] There is also a rich literature on the ability to solve mathematical problems [Greeno 1983], the ability to recognize objects visually [Rock 1983, Gregory 1970, Marr 1982], the ability to manipulate and predict the behavior of middle sized physical objects [McClosky 1983, Hayes 1985], and a host of others. In all of this work, the dominant explanatory strategy proceeds by positing an internally represented "knowledge struc-
Karsten R Stueber - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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varieties of empathy neuroscience and the narrativist challenge to the contemporary theory of mind debate
Emotion Review, 2012Co-Authors: Karsten R StueberAbstract:This article will defend the centrality of empathy and simulation for our understanding of individual agency within the conceptual framework of Folk Psychology. It will situate this defense in the ...
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rediscovering empathy agency Folk Psychology and the human sciences
2006Co-Authors: Karsten R StueberAbstract:In this timely and wide-ranging study, Karsten Stueber argues that empathy is epistemically central for our Folk-psychological understanding of other agents--that it is something we cannot do without in order to gain understanding of other minds. Setting his argument in the context of contemporary philosophy of mind and the interdisciplinary debate about the nature of our mindreading abilities, Stueber counters objections raised by some in the philosophy of social science and argues that it is time to rehabilitate the empathy thesis.Empathy, regarded at the beginning of the twentieth century as the fundamental method of gaining knowledge of other minds, has suffered a century of philosophical neglect. Stueber addresses the plausible philosophical misgivings about empathy that have been responsible for its failure to gain widespread philosophical acceptance.Crucial in this context is his defense of the assumption, very much contested in contemporary philosophy of mind, that the notion of rational agency is at the core of Folk Psychology. Stueber then discusses the contemporary debate between simulation theorists--who defend various forms of the empathy thesis--and theory theorists. In distinguishing between basic and reenactive empathy, he provides a new interpretive framework for the investigation into our mindreading capacities. Finally, he considers epistemic objections to empathy raised by the philosophy of social science that have been insufficiently discussed in contemporary debates. Empathy theorists, Stueber writes, should be prepared to admit that, although empathy can be regarded as the central default mode for understanding other agents, there are certain limitations in its ability to make sense of other agents; and there are supplemental theoretical strategies available to overcome these limitations.