folk psychology and its place in anthropology

8/4/2019 Folk Psychology and Its Place in Anthropology

1/28

Folk psychology and its place in anthropology

Introduction

First, and very briefly, folk psychology is the picture we have of ourselves as

conscious, self-directed beings: we are intentional agents and what we dowhether in

the physical or the social worlddepends upon our thoughts, our mental states, our

state of mind. (It is not itself a theory orideological accountof that picturewhy we

have it, or how each of us acquires it (although there are many theories too); it simply

is that picture.)

In some respects, though, this discussion concerns a boundary, one that,

despite changes of vocabulary, is very ancient and predates the advent of the social

and psychological sciences by several millenia. Even scholars who are happy about

the boundary must take account of it (practically and epistemologically), while those

who think it is artificial are and must be troubled by its invocation by those who think

it marks an important ontological divide. This boundary has many different names

and has been characterised in many different ways, for it has been considered by

different sorts of philosophers (metaphysicians and epistemologists) as well as many

social and psychological scientists. One appropriate way of introducing the boundary

in this context, perhaps, is to present it that between the geistes- and the

naturwissenchaften , but the underlying dualism can also be read in the opposition

between cause and meaning (not too mention varieties of macro- v micro oppositions,

nature v nurture, biology v culture). Consider, for example, a recent invocation:

Recent years have seen a growing impetus to explain social life almost

exclusively in biological and mechanistic terms, and to dismiss cultural

meaning and difference. Daily we read assertions that everything from

disease to morality--not to mention the presumed characteristics of race,

gender, and sexuality--can be explained by reference primarily to

genetics and our evolutionary past. (Dust-jacket blurb for McKinnon,

Susan and Sydel Silverman, [eds] Complexities:Beyond Nature andNurture. 2005. University of Chicago Press).

As this example indicates, the social science preoccupation with the boundary

between biology, mechanism, universalism and cultural meaning, non-mechanism(?),

particularity has not subsided.


2/28

The boundary has always been troublesome to the social science disciplines

because its classical formulation has meant that it runs through the middle of their

disciplinary territories: macro-sociology v symbolic interactionism, for example, or

biological anthropology v medical anthropology. The same boundary troubles the

psychological sciences too.

I want to suggest that over the last fifty years the boundary has been moved by

a significantalbeit comparatively smallextent. It has moved because there is no

longer any reason to think that a concern with phenomena regarded as, in some sense,

meaningful, is in conflict with a concern with phenomena that are not, at least in

regard to the study of human beings. It was the ordinary capacities of human psyches

that led philosophers like Descartes to regard the world as comprising twofundamentally different kinds of substance: mind and matter. (Of course, there was a

long religious tradition with which Descartes views were continuous, but he

formulated specific arguments for them, rather than relying solely on doctrine.)

Arguably, the dualisms in social and psychological sciences were heir to that of

Descartes. And a large part of the story of the rejection of this philosophical thesis

also depends upon philosophers. Surprisingly, Weber not only thought there was no

contradiction in thinking of sociology as causal and as concerned with subjective

meanings, he insisted that doing both was the only way sociology could be a serious

discipline. I think that what has happened in the last few decades tends vindicate his

view.

Im not sure how much this has affected psychology, but it is my contention

that the move has affected anthropology less than it should have doneas is

evidenced by the quote with which I began. That is reason enough to be interested in

the matters under discussion, but I also have a great interest in Dan Sperbers programfor a naturalistic theory of culture and societya program which depends upon

developing quite intimate relations between anthropology and cognitive psychology. I

have doubts about the program as he has set it out, and certainly as it has been

pursued by some of his colleagues. What I do not have doubts about, however, is the

worthiness of the project of trying to build a naturalistic theory of mind and culture

one that dispenses with the sorts of dichotomy underlying the quote, or, at least, robs


3/28

it of any fundamental significance.1 (What we call the mind, and what we call culture,

is the product of evolution no less than the brain or the kidney, so whatever

metaphysical difficulties the minds capacities engender, I cannot see that naturalistic

account of its coming into being and its nature are impossible. After all, the nature of

causation presents metaphysical problems, but we could hardly understand the

physical world without such a concept.)

Today, especially in the philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive

sciences,2 the boundary Ive been alluding to is usually thought of as having

something to do with the difference between ordinary causal and scientific pictures of

the world and that sustained by folk psychologyespecially the ontological

commitments and explanatory principles that those pictures involve. A fewadventurous souls have felt that folk psychology is so problematic that it must be

eliminated from the realm of science, even if it is indispensable to everyday life. Most

scholars, though, have felt that developments in our understanding of psychological

and computational processes, and of the nature of certain philosophical questions,

mean that there is a good chance that folk psychology can be naturalised in a very

radical way. Sperber is deeply immersed in this literature; I do not think hes wrong to

be so immersed, just that hes wrong about some of the methodological implications

he sees as flowing from it. I agree with him that there are no good grounds for

thinking of socio-cultural processes involve cultural structures or collective minds or

anything that is thought of as independent of the processes that occur interpersonally

(and I will not address that issue). What I have doubts about is his view of the kind of

psychology we need for a naturalistic social science; like Weber, I remain

unconvinced that what I will call folk psychology is not enough for this purpose.

Sperber feels we need to buy into particular kinds of cognitive models.

But most of tonights talk will be only about folk psychology itself and how it

relates to the boundary Ive mentioned.

1 Fundamental ontologicalsignificance, that is; as Ill argue, the divide does mark a significant

methodological discontinuity. But this is a non-dichotomous discontinuity and is no more mysterious

than the discontinuity between molecular and population genetics, say.

2 That federation of scholars drawn from psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience and a

number of sub-areas of philosophy, such as logic, the philosophy of language, and action theory that

address one another on issues of the mind and its relation to the brain.


4/28

As noted, the psychological sciences have hardly been less troubled by that

boundary than the social sciences. Wittgenstein famously saidsome fifty years ago

(1958, Part II, paragraph xiv)that in psychology there are experimental methods

and conceptual confusion. While this is undoubtedly still true in some areas (or,

perhaps, its only true of the popular reporting of psychological findings and the hype

scientists are driven to use in order to extract funds for research), it would be more

apt, these days, to characterise psychology as a whole as marked by conceptual

problems. Anthropology, which has been insulated from other disciplines for longer

than psychology, is, I believe, still characterizable in a Wittgensteinian spirit, as

having ethnographic findings and conceptual confusion. What I have to say here is

aimed at bringing anthropology into line with psychology, not only in having

conceptual problems rather than confusions, but in having the same conceptual

problems. Actually, I believe that, in principle anyway, and for much of anthropology,

the conceptual problems will be less acute than they are for psychology. 3 All of which

is a way of circling around my main point: that folk psychology is fundamental to

anthropology (and the other social sciences). The genuinely social sciences, I want to

suggest, pose questions that arise only within the horizon constituted by folk

psychology, even though this is sometimes obscured by the analytic level at which

issues arise. This, of course, means nothing at all for those who want to pose

questions concerning the pycho-biological underpinnings of our folk psychological

capacities, even those who are anthropologists as well, unless they think that those

psycho-biological underpinnings can allow us to dispense with folk psychology.

My immediate task is to characterise folk psychology, but, first, a preliminary

just in case my initial characterisation was insufficient to pre-empt a possible source

of confusion (although dyed-in-the-wool relativists might want to resist what Im

about to say). Whats most often these days called folk psychology mightfrom the

perspective of socio-cultural anthropology, which has used the adjective folk to

characterise purely local structures of categories, such as folk botany, folk

taxonomybe better referred to under one of its other names: belief-desire

psychology, intentional psychology, propositional attitude psychology. However,

3 The qualification is necessary because many anthropologistsperhaps even the majoritycleave to

a form of relativismfor what they take to be ethical reasonsthat is an endless source of conceptual

confusion. Although I dont want to downplay the ethically sensitive nature of anthropology, I do think

that important part of relativism is a bad theory of the nature of ethics.


5/28

when folk is used by psychologists and philosophers, it is meant to contrast with

scientific or theoretical; thus, we have folk physics and folk biology as well as

folk psychology. Secondly, there is nothing in this notion of folk that connotes

something of a primarily taxonomic structure; for even if the folk perspective is

opposed to scientific or theoretical ones, on the views we are considering it is still

seen as offering a comprehensive and explanatory perspective on its subject matter,

Thirdly, and perhaps obviously, there is no implication at all that the phenomena thus

picked out are purely local or culturally specific. On the contrary, the presumption is

that the basic features of folk psychology are species-typical and developmentally

entrenched (we acquire folk psychological principles in the same way that we do the

principles of grammar), and that both having and being interpretable in relation to folk

psychology are part of what it is for something to qualify as a (standard) person, or,

equivalently, for something to have a mind.

So FP picks out the intuitive understandings that human beings have of one

another as agents whose behaviour is a function of their psychologicalthats to say

mentalstates. It is only by identifying those psychological states that we can figure

out what others are doing, a process we generally call interpreting them. Only when

we figure out what others want, believe, fear, hope, expect, like, dislike, and so on,

can we make out what thoughts they have and what actions they have performed, are

performing or will perform. Folk psychology not only covers these states, but moods,

sensations, emotions and so on, but we will concentrate on those mental states that are

most closely associated with actionsthe things human beings doremembering that

one very prominent class of actions is that constituted by all the things we do with

words, as are those that do not result in any overt behaviour, such as considering or

drawing conclusions.

There are three good reasons for concentrating on the folk psychology of

action: 1) the social sciences clearly focus on social action and social interaction, even

if some varieties only consider a subset of these (institutions, for example); 2) the folk

psychology of action is centrally concerned with beliefs and desires, the mental states

that the most prominent theories have had most success in analysing; 3) by

comparison to folk psychological states like consciousness and the various sensations,

action has been the focus of much concern.


6/28

Folk psychology outlined4

The specificities of folk psychology of action are usually presented by appeal

to our intuitions about the difference between, for example, a wink and a blink,

running for a bus and tripping over, kicking a ball and ones leg moving in a similar

fashion when the patellar tendon is hit by a doctor testing ones reflexes, telling

someone that it is raining and uttering the sentence It is raining in ones sleep or in

a practice session during elocution lessons. The distinctionbetween action and

mere behaviourpicks out things we do, in the sense of actions we take; these are

contrasted to things that happen to us (such as falling off a bike) or things we do in the

course of taking action (as when I produce air currents while whistling a tune). One

diagnostic test of action is its being answerable to a demand for reasons, usually

framed by Why? asked in a particular way. Thus, there is no answer to the question

what my reasons were for falling off my bike or producing air currents, since I didnt

have any, for there were not actions of mine (and why can only be asked of the

causes for these doings). Notice that the diagnostic only suggests that actions are

answerable to the why question, for in the overwhelming number of cases no

question about peoples actions arises. All day, every day, we move through a social

environment which is literally defined by the actions of others and ourselves, and we

deploy folk psychology effortlessly and tacitly the whole time as we do sorather as

we deploy the principles of grammar effortlessly and tacitly in speaking and listening

to others. Nevertheless, there are answers to the why questions we couldand

sometimes find ourselves needing toask.

Answers to questions about reasons for action invariably refer to mental verbs

what was believed, desired, intended, hoped, feared, regretted, wished, etc, etc.

that identify the mental states and processes associated (I deliberately use a neutral

term here, for the time being) with the action. The two most fundamental verbs are

believe and desire, since these, or synonyms, pick out the states that constitute the

action.5The idea is that belief-desire pairs define basic actions, and, when we want to

know why someone did something, we always need to know both, even if our

4 Folk psychology covers inputs (from the external environment--Fred felt sick because he saw a bad

accident, or because the smell was so awful, or from the internalFred drank a litre of water because

he was so thirsty), internal processing (Anne knew he was home because she saw the lights were on)

as well as outputs. But it is the last that we are concentrating on here. Lewis, and those who follow

him, see all the platitudinous principles underlying these common-or-garden folk psychological

statements serve to define folk psychological terms such as "believe", "want" and "desire" (Ravenscroft

SEP Folk psychology as a theory).


7/28

question is usually about one or the other. Consider: Q: Why did he move to Berlin?

A: Because he wanted work. Here we are given the desire, but tacitly supply the belief

(that he believed he would or might get work there). Q; Why did he move to Nice? A:

He thought the warm climate would improve his health. Here we are given the belief,

while the desire (that his health improve) we tacitly supply ourselves. She moved his

rook to avoid check, He said that to get you to laugh, She crossed the road to buy

a newspaper; these and countless other humdrum examples show, when one gets

used to spelling out what is usually tacit, that the folk psychology of action is

consistently patterned around belief-desire states.6

Folk psychology evidently embodies a great many heuristic principles about

ourselves as agents which we employ in interpreting one another: such as that whenconfronted by ordinary middle-sized objects, under standard lighting conditions,

people will perceive those objects; that when people suffer bodily injuries they will

experience pain; that people will experience sadness when they lose things or people

that they care about greatly; that if people believe both that if p then q and that p, then

they will infer q. But the principle that seems the most entrenched is the following: if

a person desires that d, and believes that by V-ing s/he can satisfy that desire, then she

Vs providing that doing so will not compromise some other desire that is greater than

that for d.7 This principle is indispensable to the interpretation of action and

interaction; but, the suggestion is, it is important not only in the interpretation of

othersfrom the outside in, so to speakbut from the inside out too, in the

generation of actions. To take action is to behave under the impress of specific beliefs

and desires (Im still hedging about the connections here)to behave, in short, for

reasons.

I remarked in passing earlier on that the folk psychology of action applied alsoto those our linguistic actionsour utterances. Thus, taking what someone says as a

5 And which the action necessarily expresses. Note too that other verbs can be regarded as having as

part of their meaning either believe or desire. Thus, it would be deviant to suggest that one

regretted that Elvis was dead but did not believe that he was, or that one wished for world peace

without desiring it.

6 Note that beliefs and desires are contrasted by the direction of fit: beliefs aim to fit the world (i.e. to

be true), whereas the point of desires to get the world to fit them (to get the propositional content of the

desire to become true).

7 A complication: there may be a number of other desires that will be compromised by V-ing in pursuit

of d no one of which outweighs d but which in aggregate do so, in which case the agent again will not

V.


8/28

statement or assertion that it is raining, means attributing to the speaker the belief that

it is raining and the desire to state that belief by uttering the sentence that expresses

that it is raining. (Consider the difference between rehearsing a line from a play,

Frieda, will you marry me? and using that sentence in proposing marriage to

Frieda.) So speaking and other kinds of action are essentially of a kind (making a

statement, asking a question or giving an order are all things we do, no less than

cleaning our teeth or changing the tyre on a car), and all actions and action-

explanations are homogeneous with respect to their fundamental relationships to

belief-desire states.

To take action, then, is to have reasons for behaving thus and so; but it is

important to see that it is not to formulate or make present to consciousness thosereasons. On the contrary, one usually only articulates reasons for actions when asked

to provide them. Sometimes, indeed, actions that were once under the control of

mental states that were present to consciousness as when you attend to the engine

noise and deliberately move your feet to raise the accelerator peddle and depress the

clutch as you change gear during early driving lessonsbecome utterly submerged

or automatic once one has mastered the procedure. Yet here too you will answer in the

standard way if things go wrongas when you change from fourth to first gear

instead of third and an explanation is demanded of you: I didnt want to do that, I

thought Id moved into third, not first.

Notoriously, the mental is underdetermined by behaviour (which is why the

behaviourists sought determinative relationships between inputs and outputs): it is not

possible to say what an agent believes or desires simply by observing the noises and

movements she makes, for any given movement is compatible with any number of

different combinations of mental states. So it is only by identifying the mental statethat we can identify the movement as a kind of action. (I can observe your arm go up,

but it is only when I discern your mental states that I can see that your arm going up

as the action of your casting a vote.) Even if I hear you say clearly, from the next

room, Out foul spot, I will misinterpret you if I think you are ordering your dog

from the house when you are reading a speech from Hamleteven if your dog, Spot,

leaves the room. The converse of this is that a given belief can give rise to an

indefinitely large range of very different behaviours depending on the desires it is

paired with (compare the behaviour that might arise from the belief that there is a


9/28

large man-eating lion approaching me when it is paired with a desire to remain

healthy and when it is paired with a desire to die); similarly, a given desire can give

rise to an indefinitely large range of very different behaviours depending on the

beliefs it is paired with. (Consider all the different ways someone might act on the

basis of a desire for money depending on the beliefs they haveabout whats right,

about the chances of getting caught).

This last consideration would seem to make it almost miraculous that we can

ever interpret one anothers actions, for, at some level, it is true that all we ever have

to go on is behaviour. This is where the idea that the realm of the mental is the realm

of the rational comes in. There are two aspects to this claim: the more basic notion is

behavioural (or thin) rationality, which is simply the assumption that behaviours canbe interpreted as actions only insofar as they are understood as rational given certain

specific beliefs and desires: that, for instance, my drinking from the cup is rational

given that I want to drink coffee and that believe there is coffee in the cup; that my

saying to you It is 3.00 is rational given that I want to tell you what the time is and

that I believe it is 3.00; that it is rational to perform a ritual to rid the house of a ghost,

given that I believe the house is haunted by a ghost that can be driven out by a ritual

and I want to get rid of it. This makes it clear, once more, that the links between

beliefs, desires and the interpretation of behaviour are very tight; if we know can infer

we can understand or predict the third. But there is a second sense in which, on the

picture we are considering, rationality is relevant to the interpretation of action:

attitudinal rationality. We have to be a little careful here, but we can start to

appreciate what is important if we note that, by their nature, beliefs that they can be

true or false. If it is not coffee in the cup, as I believe, then I cannot satisfy my desire

for coffee by drinking what is in the cup (and if it is something very unpleasant in it,

say a poison of some kind, then other desires of minefor example, the desire to

remain healthywould also not be satisfied). And this pattern is quite general, so we

might say that the role of beliefs is to help us satisfy our desiresthe satisfaction of

desires, we might say, is what beliefs are for. So, ascriptions of belief to an agent

incline us to see an agent as being disposed to make moves appropriate to ensuring

that his beliefs are true. Of course, it would be absurd to think that assuming an agent

is responsive to the issue of the truth of her beliefs was the same as expecting her to

work to prove or disprove her beliefs; we have so many beliefs (about chairs and


10/28

tables as well as about God and how Princess Diana really died), and life is so short,

that we have no choice but to trust most of the beliefs we have. All we seem to expect

is that upon being presented with evidence that one of our beliefs is suspect, then we

would normally consider that evidence, for we are bound to care whether our beliefs

are true or false. Even those cases where we decide to shut our eyes to the evidence,

because we cant imagine giving up the belief (say, that ones child would never

deliberately injure somebody), we nevertheless seem to show that we care about the

truth of our beliefs (thats why we shut our eyes to the evidence). The practical effect

of these presumptions of rationality that are built into folk psychology is to allow us

to triangulate belief, desire and action, such that if we can make inferences between

them.

I have tried to restrict the discussion to relatively uncontroversial matters,

presenting claims and examples that might induce you to agree to what is more or less

a human ethological picture.8 Yet the characteristics of folk psychology have

historically been crucial to the boundary I mentioned in the introduction. For while it

seems clear that we pre-theoretically regard citing the interactions of mental states

with one another and with the environment as explanatory because they are causal, a

view shared by most of psychological approaches too, there are reservations about the

causal nature of mental states that, as I mentioned, go back at least to Descartes. And

although very few people accept Cartesian substance dualism any longer, the

problematic nature of the way mind and mentality are to be fitted into a material

world is still evident.

In addition, on various influential accounts of proper scientific procedure folk

psychology fares very badly. For the central principle (if a person desires that d, and

8 Some might find it unconvincing because the picture is too simple. For, we dont just take actions, we

formulate plans, develop policies and long range goals and have ambitions, both from the perspective

of our purely personal inclinations and from a perspective that relates to our social position. Moreover,

a good many of our beliefs and desires have stories to be told too, relating to our cultural milieu and

our biographies. Furthermore, because actions are embedded in ongoing streams of activity, the

projected course of which affects what we do and why we do it, they can be regarded from any number

of perspectives; thus, I put Greengro on the grass, because I believe it to be a fertilizer that will make

the lawn look better, which I desire because (I believe) it will make the property look more impressive,

which I desire because (I believe) that will make it more attractive to people and, hence (I believe),

more valuable when I execute my plan to put it on the market next spring, so that I will have enough

money to So, my action now, of putting Greengro on the lawn, could be properly described in any

number of ways from fertilizing the lawn to trying to maximise his cash assets. So much is obvious,

but the point is that none of this counts against what has been said about the folk psychology of action.

Indeed, it seems to presuppose that account.


11/28

believes that by V-ing s/he can satisfy that desire, then she Vs providing that doing

so will not compromise some other desire that is greater than that for d) can never be

subject to falsification or confirmation, because it is never put under test. If it turns

out that my understanding of your desires and beliefs leads me to expect you to act in

a particular manner, but you dont, I will use the very same principle to infer back

from what you did do to new understandings of the beliefs and desires you had. (You

carry an umbrella; I take it you expect that it might rain and want to stay dry. It rains

and you do not put up your umbrella; I will try to figure out what else you might want

and believe that would lead to the carrying of the umbrella.)

The characteristicand the problematicfeature of folk psychology is that it

deals in states and processesmental states and processthat are representationaland/orintentional. That is to say, they represent, stand for or are aboutsomething, in

which they differ from physical states and processes.9 The usual way to make the

point about intentionality is by giving examples: Gabi believes that Kurt will get the

job; Hans hopes Schroeder will win the election; Annika is frightened that her son

will fail his exams; Michael wishes that he had worked harder at losing weight; I hope

that my horse will win the big race. Paradigmatically, as these examples (and all the

others Ive used) suggest, psychological verbs relate a person to a mental object, or

content. The form of these sentences indicates why Russells phrase, propositional

attitudes, is still widely used: an individual is related via a psychological verb to a

proposition.10 Thus, Q Vs that p summarises the basic form, which makes it clear that

there are three axes of substitution: different individuals might believe the same

proposition, or they might have different attitudes to the same proposition (I hope,

you doubt and John fears that my horse will win, for example).11

9 The philosophical usage derives from the medieval Latin, intentio, which the scholastics used todenote something whose being consisted in being thought about. It is connected only etymologically to

the standard use of intentional as derived from the verb, to intend (which, of course, is a

psychological verb like all the rest and therefore as much part of the domain of intentionality as

believe). The term was revived in the 19 th C by Franz Brentano, in hisPsychology from an Empirical

Standpoint.

10 There are a number of technical reasons why proposition is preferred to sentence (which might

seem to be the most obvious candidate for what individuals have attitudes to); one central reason is to

allow that people speaking different languages have attitudes to the same proposition. So a proposition

is what a sentence expresses. (There are many complexities: possible world theorists, for example,

count there are husbands as expressing the same proposition as there are wives because both are

true of exactly the same set of possible worlds.)

11 Some formulations seem not to conform to the formula: for example, John fears global warming;

Fred believes Betty. There is, in response, the idea that transformations between deep and surface


12/28

So far, so good; the problems arise when we try to characterise the nature of

the contents, or intentional objects, of propositional attitudes, for they behave

strangelyif not downright badly (Quine called them creatures of darkness). It is

sometimes said of these intentional objects that they have a mode of being that

consists in their being thought about (Aquinas, cited in Mackie 1975), but that

simply indicates that they constitute a very peculiar class of entities. The metaphysical

status of these entities is highly controversial, but if we concentrate on what is not

controversialthe way we speak about intentional objectswe can at least mark the

way in which they are peculiar. For example: 1) if I say I want a cup of coffee, (cf.

I bought a cup of coffee), there is no particular entity that I want, and if I remember

a childhood friend, I dont necessarily remember him as having eyes of any particular

colour, whereas my friend most certainly did; 2) you cant wash the holy grail if it

doesnt exist, but you can look or hope for it, and nobody can shake hands with my

imaginary childhood friend, but I can remember him; 3) And if Im hoping that my

next door neighbour, Samuel Clements, will move, Im not hoping that I shall no

longer live next door to Mark Twain, even though Mark Twain and Samuel Clements

are the same man, just as my fear of the ghost that haunts my attic is not a fear of the

possum that runs around up there, even if it as that beast that causes my fear. So the

mental representations have properties that the entities they represent do not, and vice

versa.12

Fifty years ago, philosophers (such as Chisholm) impressed by these

characteristics argued that they force us to acknowledge an irreducible category of

intentional mental entities, in which case any form of reductive physicalism must fail.

However, the argument was also taken in another way; Quine argued that the manifest

forms obscures the underlying Q Vs that p structure. (What about Irma hates Joe though?)

12 The contrast discussed here has nothing to do with whether the representedobjects are physical or abstract; you cant compute the largest prime number orfind the solution to human aggression, but you can search for look for them.

These characteristics show that talk of intentionality, in this sense, involves the use of intenSional

sentences. An intenSional context or sentence is one where the substitution of coextensive predicates or

co-referring terms cannot be done without affecting the truth value of the sentence. The opposite of

intenSionality is extensionality: if Fred bumped into Mark Twain then Fred bumped into Samuel

Clements; but if Fred worries that Mark Twain will write no more stories Chisholm thought ess-ality

was the mark of the intentional, but there are many intensional contexts that are not intentional, just as

there are intentional states that


13/28

virtues of reductive physicalism indicated that we should take the irreducibility of

intentionality to imply the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a

science of intention (Quine 1960: 221 [cited in Crane, REP]).

But there was a second strand of arguments against the prospects of

integrating folk psychology into the framework of science (one that was developed by

followers of Wittgenstein). Consider these sentences:

1. John took his manager to dinner because he thought it would

advance his career.

2. Johns radiator burst because he left his car outside and the

temperature dropped to -5 last night.

In both cases, it seems obvious, the because signals a causal link (implying,

minimally, that had the explaining factor not occurred--the thought or reason, in one

case, and the drop in temperature in the other--the event being explained [that very

one, anyway] would not have happened). This is one mark of the causal: to say that x

was a causeor part of the causeof y, is to say that if x had not occurred, y would

not have occurred. Yet, many felt, there is a key difference between the two cases, for

the first, but not the second, is subject to evaluative considerations. (It makes no sense

to ask whether the radiator was right to burst or whether it should have burst. But such

questions are always permissible in cases like the first one.) After all, Johns rival for

promotion, Freida, may also have had the thought that taking the manager to dinner

would advance her career (something shes also keen to do), but refrained from doing

so because she also thought that doing that sort of thing is unseemly or improper. The

underlying thought here goes like this: the second, physical, case implies a

generalisation of the form If x, then y that is exceptionless, such that if x obtains but

not y we have grounds for rejecting the generalisation, for it is untrue; the first case,

based on reasons, is very different. There, a generalisation with the form If x, then y

doesnt work, at least not in the same way; even if we formulate a generalisation like,

If someone is ambitious, he or she has reason to suck up to the boss, this seems to

amount to a rule orprecept rather than a law, and as Friedas case shows, when

someone doesnt follow a rule, we do not necessarily regard the rule as suspect. The

idea is, then, that in explaining human actions we appeal to norms, rules, values and

other notions that involve cultural patterns, which are, moreover, subject to ethical


14/28

considerations (it is not illogical to ask whether such norms, rules, etc, are right), in a

way that has no counterpart in the explanation of physical events, was enough to

persuade many thinkers that there was a deep incompatibility between ordinary causal

explanation and the explanation of human actions.

Another influential argument for the incompatibility derived from David

Humes conception of causation and natural law; it pointed out that the effect of a

given cause cannot be entailed by any consideration of reason or logic, so that the

connection between the two must be empirical and contingentanything, in principle,

could happen after a given event (which is why we do not explain why a man is

unmarried by pointing out that he is a bachelor). Yet, in folk psychological

explanations there does seem to be logical or conceptual connection between causes(my desire for beer, for example) and the effects (my stomach enclosing half a litre of

beer) that they are to explain.13 One way to summarise this line of thought is to say

that human actions take place in the space of reasons rather than in the space of

causes. So, for a while, it was common in the British philosophical tradition too to

hold that the way we explain human actions is non-causal nature.

13 The authority for the doctrine that there could be no logical connection between causes and effects

is the gigantic figure of David Hume, who wrote (inAn Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

[1772]):

All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit,

relations of ideas, and matters of fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of geometry, algebra,

and arithmetic, and in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively

certain. Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought,

without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. Though there never were a

circle or triangle in nature, the truths demonstrated by Euclid would for ever retain their

certainty and evidence.

Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner;

nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of

every matter of fact is still possible, because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the

mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. that the sun will not

rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the

affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it

demonstratively false, it would imply a contradiction, and could never be distinctly conceived by the

mind.

The case against the interpretationists logical connection argument does not count against what Hume says here,

but only against the way the interpretationists have interpreted Hume.


15/28

All in all, then, the philosophical climate, and the general lack of success of

those branches of the social sciences that proclaimed themselves to be properly

scientific, meant that the prospects for folk psychologys integration into the

broader picture of the world the physical and biological disciplines were developing

were not good.

Indeed, they were so bad that psychologists and philosophers of mind sought

to develop an account of the relations between agents that omitted entirely all talk of

the mind: hence, behaviourism, which can be seen as a response to all these

difficulties with the logic of folk psychologyone that sought to avoid them without

resorting to any form of metaphysical dualism. The idea, as the name indicates,

suggests that psychology and the philosophy mind should be concerned only withbehaviour, which is non-intentional and therefore logically unproblematic, andin

keeping with dominant ideas of the timein order that those unobservable creatures

of darkness could be ignored.14

Analytical behaviourism, the philosophical position, takes talk of mental terms

as talk ofdispositions to behaviour. For philosophers like Ryle, this is a conceptual

claim: a mental state term like a belief designates a disposition to behave just as

fragility is a disposition to break easily. (Ryles was a soft behaviourism, by

comparison to the hard variety that equates psychological states with relations

between physicalistic characterisations of inputs and outputs, in that his was a claim

about mental states and actions rather than behaviour construed in non-intentional

terms.)

The behaviours of bodies are physical events, yet there is an obvious

connection between behaviour and mental states. Common sense psychology itself

indicates the intimacy of the relations between belief, desire and behaviour (cf., the

standard distinction between action and behaviour with which we began our

discussion of folk psychology); it is not, for example, simply an empirical

14 The basic position: (1) Psychology is the science of behavior. Psychology is not the science of

mind. (2) Behavior can be described and explained without making reference to mental events or to

internal psychological processes. The sources of behavior are external (in the environment), not

internal (in the mind). (3) In the course of theory development in psychology, if, somehow, mental

terms or concepts are deployed in describing or explaining behavior, then either (a) these terms or

concepts should be eliminated and replaced by behavioral terms or (b) they can and should be

translated or paraphrased into behavioral concepts. (Graham, G:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/


16/28

generalisation that people who are hungry--have a desire for food--tend to eat: it

seems to be part of what we mean by being hungry that those in that state can

generally be expected to hunt for food, accept food if offered it, and so on. And if we

know that someone desires food then we can tell what they believe by noticing their

behaviourthat they go to the fridge, say: that they believe that there is (or, at least,

there is a reasonable chance that there is) food in the fridge. Generalising, we can say

that people behave in such a way that their desires will be satisfied if their beliefs are

true. And this leads to the thought that, perhaps, it is reasonable to think of mental

states as being non-contingently connected with behaviour. But how, exactly? For it is

clear that someone can desire food, believe that there is food in the fridge and yet not

go to the fridge (they may, for example, be fasting or believe that some homicidal

maniac has put a poisonous snake in the fridge). So mental states need not express

themselves in a particular behaviour if there are other factors in operation (and it

should be noted that, if we forget gross inhibiting factors [paralysis, etc], the other

relevant factors in this context are themselves beliefs and desires). Yet even though

the appropriate behaviours need not manifest themselves on a particular occasion

(indeed, they may never manifest themselves), it seems wrong to think that the

relation between a mental state like hunger or the belief that cobras are dangerous is

only contingently associated with eating or avoiding cobras.

So, the proposal is, we associate mental states with behaviour in the way that

physical dispositions are associated with physical properties. For it is not an

interesting empirical fact about fragile objects that they tend to break if dropped on a

hard surface or struck sharply, even though a particular fragile object need never

break. As Ryle (whose The concept of mind[1949] is the classical locus of analytical

behaviourism) says: To say that sugar is soluble is to say that it would dissolve, or

would have dissolved, if immersed in water (1949:43). So dispositions are non-

contingently connected to properties, but they are iffy and definitions of

dispositional properties are formulated using subjunctive conditionals.15

The general idea, then, is that we can identify each mental state with the

relevant behavioural disposition (B-M & Jackson:31). Of course, the dispositionality

of mental states is more complex than that involved in simple dispositions like

15 Dispositional properties like softness or brittleness contrast with categoricalproperties like being

spherical or long or having a specific mass.


17/28

softness, elasticity or fragility, but what is at issue is their fundamental logical

characteristics. So, Ryle says that dispositional words like believes, signify

abilities, tendencies or pronesses to dothings of lots of different kinds (The

concept of mind:118), but, on his view, it is crucial that we see that mental states are

dispositional if we are to avoid the logical and metaphysical difficulties of Cartesian

dualism.

Now one of the specific features of Ryles behaviourism is that Xs having a

particular disposition amounts to nothing more than the appropriate iffy statements

(conditional subjunctives) being true of X. It might be thought natural to see

dispositions as underlying states, so that possession of those states is what makes the

conditional sentences true. But Ryle rejects this view: an objects categoricalproperties are states, but its dispositional properties are not tied to states (or changes

of state), but merely what states or changes it is bound or liable to be inor to

undergowhen a particular condition is realised (43). His view is readily

understandable if we realise that if this were not Ryles position, and dispositions

were allowed to count as states, then hed have to face the question states of what?

and allowas is so naturalthat mental states were states of mind; then wed be

back where we started, worrying about how the mind related to the brain/body, how

the immateriality of the former related to the materiality of the latter, and so on.16

So mental states are not categorical states, but dispositions to behave, and

what makes psychological claims true are subjects behavioural dispositions. Thus,

Ryle would say, Hannahs belief that the banking stocks will soon recover amounts

not to an internal state but to the truth of a set of conditional statements about her

(that, for example, if she had the opportunity and cared about preserving her wealth,

she would buy banking shares; that if she were a committed communist she would besaddened by the prospect of the recovery, or a committed liberal be relieved by it, and

so on). All we need to stop worrying about how the mind fits into the material world

is to see that states of mindso calledare nothing but dispositions to behaviour.

16 Ryle was also writing at a time when the idea that philosophical problems could be solved by a

proper appreciation of the way linguistic usage inflected thought: Ryle is unashamedly a linguistic

philosopher, whereas [for a later] generation language became so to speak unmentionable, at least

in the context of philosophical discussions of other topics. Accordingly, Ryle attempts to trace the

Cartesian myth to a philosophical misunderstanding about the role of the language of psychological

ascription (Huw Price in M. Michael & J. OLeary-Hawthorne, eds,Philosophy in Mind, Kluwer,

1994).


18/28

Now there is no doubt that Ryles case for the non-contingency of the link

between mental predicates and behaviour is appealing: somebody who said My head

hurts all day every day, but Im going to see a doctor with a view to getting her to

increase the level of pain a little more, is either extremely (pathologically?) strange

or they have made a mistake about the meaning of the word pain. (And think about

how much our thoughts would tend to the second option if we knew the person was

not a native speaker but one currently learning the language.) And somebody who

claims to know that Roger is a much better tennis player than Andre, but is genuinely

surprised that Andre never manages to beat Roger, has probably failed to understand

the notion of being good at tennis, just as somebody who claims to be courageous, but

abandons even his closest friends and relatives whenever the slightest danger

threatens, is either deceiving himself greatly or has failed to grasp what courage is.

It seems natural, then, to conclude, with Ryle, that the link between behaviour

and mental concepts is logical rather than merely empirical. In fact, it seems right to

say that folk psychological states supervene on behavioural dispositions, in that

difference in psychological states necessarily involves difference in behavioural

dispositions (but not vice versa), bearing in mind that the notion of disposition

involves not just what has occurred, but commitments to what would occur.

Yet, there are well-knownindeed, orthodoxand very damaging objections

to analytical behaviourism: 1) the problem of the asymmetry between first-person

knowledge of mental states and third-person knowledge; 2) the absence of a proper

behavioural analysis ofany mental state and, connectedly, 3) the regress that that

project would entail; 4) the causal and/or explanatory objection.

The objection that occurs first, and almost spontaneously, to most people is

that AB seems to ignore what we all know to be the casethat we have better

knowledge of our own psychological states than we do have of others: it seems that

Ryles is essentially a third-person perspective (hence the joke about two

behaviourists meeting on the street). But AB need not deny that I can have knowledge

of which of two entirely new foods I prefer without waiting to see how I behave when

offered a choice; it just has to provide a dispositional account of that self-knowledge.

Yet, AB does have a problem with what seems to explain or justify our convictions

about self-knowledge versus knowledge of others mental states. For we are consciousof our own mental states and can introspect them, but what is it, according to AB, that


19/28

we are conscious of when we are introspecting? (And although issues of introspection

and consciousness are difficult problems for all theories of mind, they are especially

difficult for AB [B-M and Jackson:33-4].)

2) While it seems a comparatively straightforward matter to give an analysis

of what we mean by elasticity in terms of the physical behaviour of an object,

nobody has ever succeeded in giving a convincing analysis of a single mental state in

terms of behavioural dispositions. And there is a very good reason why this is so:

mental states and processes, taken individually, simply do not match up with

behavioural dispositions; even if I believe that the creature in front of me is a life-

threateningly dangerous carnivore, I wont be disposed to run if Im intent on ending

my life and indifferent to pain. (Whereas I may well run if Im not indifferent to painand believe that there is a very high cliff a few metres behind me; on the other hand, if

I do want to live, I may still not run if I believe that I have nowhere to go but over that

cliff.) What these and countless other considerations show is that the link between

mental states and behaviour is highly conditional; the link between a particular state

and any particular behaviour always depends upon all the other mental states a person

is in; and these constitute an open set. So there can be no analysis of mental states

solely in terms of behavioural dispositions.

3) But lets assume for a moment that there is some mental state that is always

and only associated with a restricted set of other mental states, so that it does always

result in a particular profile of behaviours. Would this represent a success for

analytical behaviourism? Hardly. For the analysis only works by specifying other

mental states and not behavioural dispositions, yet the whole point of the exercise was

to account for mental states only in terms of behavioural dispositions.

4) Finally, it is certainly natural to think that The car skidded because of the

icy road and Hannah sold her shares because she believed the stock market was

about to collapse are equivalent in offering an explanation of an event in terms of

what caused it: her belief caused and explains Hannahs behaviour just as the icy road

caused and explains the skid. Yet AB must deny this. Instead, it says that, by contrast

to the because in the first example, the because in the statement about Hannah is

not offering a cause, but a veiled definition, along the lines of A goal was scored

because the whole of the ball legitimately crossed the goal line. For, on Rylesaccount, being disposed to sell your shares if you want to preserve your wealth just is


20/28

what it is to believe that the stock market will collapse, rather as the whole of the ball

legitimately crossing the goal line just is what it is to be a goal. So the statement about

Hannahs actions in selling her shares is, on the AB view, utterly uninformative:

Hannah sold her shares because she was disposed to sell her shares.

AB is also hard-pressed to explain why we think of paralysed people as having

the same states of mind as everyone else but lacking the requisites for realising the

causal power of those states.

These considerations about the weaknesses of ABs account of mental states

prompted the move to functionalism, which begins with the basic observation that it

goes profoundly against the grain to think of the mind as [mere patterns] of behaviour.

The mind is rather what stands behind and brings about our complex behaviour

(Armstrong 1965:74-5, cited in Smith & Jones:152).

But this raises the question of why Ryle felt compelled to defend something

that went so profoundly against the grain. there are two significant features of the

philosophical climate of the time that explain ABs insistence that dispositions are not

states with causal powers. One was a positivistic hostility to the positing of

unobservables to account for the manifest behaviour of something [which goes back

to Comte]. Closely associated with this was the logical positivists doctrine of

verificationism, which holds that the meaning of a sentence is constituted by the

means used to determine its truth. (Now, of course, both scientific and everyday

explanatory practices are recognised to routinely and legitimately employ abductive

reasoningreasoning to the best explanation. As B-M and Jackson note, nobody now

thinks that talk of electrons is analysable into talk of the tracks in cloud chambers;

rather it is talk of what explains those tracks.)

The second factor was the one weve mentioned already; the thought that if

mental states were to be counted as internal causes of behaviour then the anti-dualist

would be faced with the following problem: causal relations (since Hume) have

always been held to be contingent (the state of being unmarried cannot cause

somebody to be a bachelor), whereas (all sides agree) there are conceptual

connections between mental states and actions/behaviour. Faced, then, with three

propositions that are hard to reconcile with one anotherthat causal connections are

contingent; that mental states have non-contingent relations with behaviour; that


21/28

mental states cause behaviourAB thought the causal link between mental states and

behaviour should be abandoned (since, given the positivism of the times, this seemed

the least costly in terms of overall intellectual adjustments).

The way out of the conundrum is to see that there may be a logical link

between a description ordefinition of something and what it is disposed to cause, or

has caused, without there being any implication that this negates the non-contingency

of the relations involved. B-M and Jackson use the example of poison (36): ingesting

a poison causes an illness, but there is a conceptual connection between somethings

causing illness and its being a poison (its its disposition to make people sick that

makes us call a substance a poison). Similarly, dangerous bends tend to cause

accidents, yet there is obviously a conceptual connection between a bends propensityto cause accidents and its being described as dangerous. Applied to mental states, the

idea is that the fact that they cause behaviour and dispositions to behaviour is part of

what defines them as this or that mental state.

So, if the objections to the attempt to develop a picture of human behaviour

without the mind were decisive (and almost everyone agrees that they were), so that

mental states areas the folk assumed all alongwhat lie behind bring about our

complex behaviour, as Armstrong suggested, where do we go from here? The answer

that many people gave was functionalism or the causal theory of mind.

Before looking at the tenets of this theory, it might be worth telling a little

story about the history of computers; mathematics in the 19 th century underwent a bit

of a crisis when it was discovered that there were forms of geometry that violated

Euclidean axioms (in particular, the claim that for any line L on a plane and any point

P on that plane but not located along L, there is one and only one line through P

parallel to L) but were nevertheless consistent. What everybody had regarded as

intuitively unquestionable turned out to be modifiable after all. So mathematicians

sought ways to regiment mathematical reasoning so that all derivations were

grounded in explicit axioms and rules of inference, and the semantic intuitions of the

mathematician were either excluded or explicitly codified. It is no coincidence that

among the scholars who responded thus were people like Frege, who made

tremendous contributions to logic as well as mathematics. This explicit codification

meant, in effect, spelling out all semantic features in a rigorously defined syntax. Thenext step was seeing that if the syntax and the rules governing it were well-enough


22/28

defined then you could write down explicit rules on how to perform operationsa

dumb procedure that a person could learn by rote (in the olden days thats how we

were taught to do simple arithmetic). And if that procedure was explicit enough, even

a machine constructed could carry it out. Hence we arrive at the well-known Turing

machine which consists of a very long tape on which are symbols from a finite list are

written, a reader which reads the symbols one at a time, and which may also erase a

symbol and replace it with another from the alphabet, and then moves the tape

forwards or backwards to the next symbol. Turing proved that such a simple machine

could compute anything that any computer on the market can compute, providing its

storage capacity (the length of the tape) was sufficient. The point about this is that

simple mechanical procedures, operating with a well defined syntax could simulate

procedures that were equivalent to those that involved a semantics. So Turings

signficance is that he showed how there could be a link between semantics, syntax

and causal relations, which is clearly significant to those wanting to integrate the

mental and the physical.

Functionalism again: once we allow that dispositions are or can be states

(having seen that ABs reasons for denying this were unsound) there is no case

against following (what are, in any case, amongst the profoundest of) our intuitions

that mental states are intra-personal causes of behaviour. But we need also to take

account of the conceptual connections between mental states and behaviour, so we

must see mental states as partly defined and differentiated by the causal roles they

have. Yet, there are complications here, as the discussion of ABs shortcomings

suggests: the causal roles of mental states have to be defined by reference to their

interaction with one another in producing behaviour, for, as we saw, the conceptual

link between a given state and behaviour is always conditional on other mental states:

thus, we must think of pain as roughly the internal state apt for behaviour that will,

by the lights of what we believe, minimize the bodily damage causing the pain,

provided we desire to minimize that damage (B-M & Jackson:38). [There doesnt

seem any reason not to compare this formulation with laws and theirceteris paribus

clauses.] Similarly, the belief that it is going to rain is the internal state apt to result in

the bringing in of the washing, when present with a desire to get the washing dry, and

the absence of any greater desire that would be compromised by bringing in the

washing, as well as a belief that washing left out in the rain will get wetter rather than


23/28

drier; or to result in the carrying of an umbrella, when present with a desire not to get

wet on the way to work, and the absence of any greater desire

The complications are not done with yet, though. For the state-behaviour

nexus must itself be embedded in the right causal-historical context: to count as the

belief that it is going to rain, the belief must have an appropriate causal connection to

rain, otherwise it would be a fluke that that state plays the right causal role (ibid).

My desire for Stilton has the right conceptual connection to getting Stilton into my

stomach only by combining with beliefs that are causally connected in the right way

with a sample of Stilton. For even if I have a strong desire for Stilton, it will play no

role in causing some to be in my stomach, and therefore no role in explaining why its

there, if it was teleported into my stomach by mistake by some advanced alien. Sothere is a conceptual link between the mind and antecedent conditions[a] link

upstream as well as downstream. For the downstream link only gets to be non-fluky

inasmuch as there is a non-fluky upstream link (B-M & Jackson:39; see Davidson on

deviant causal chains).

This all leads to the view that is called a causal theory of mind, which holds

that mental states are inner states with typical causes and typical causal powers. The

causes of those states may be environmental circumstances or other mental states, just

as their causal powers may affect behaviour or other mental states. This picture is

vulnerable to none of the objections that beset AB, yet it preserves the central and

important claim about the conceptual link between mental states and behaviour (see

Smith and Jones Chap XI for a detailed defence of this claim against possible

objections). In particular, the tripartite structure of the picture identifies this causal

theory as a species of functionalism, a theory of mind which:

specifies mental states in terms of three kinds ofclauses: input clauses which say which conditionstypically give rise to which mental states; outputclauses, which say which mental states typically giverise to which behavioural responses; and interactionclauses, which say how mental states typically interact.(B-M & Jackson:40.)

As Smith and Jones point out, this sort of formulation is neutral about the

nature of the state specified; one could add either that the states are immaterial

Cartesian states or physical ones. The contemporary preference for the latter depends

upon broader and substantial critiques of substance dualism.


24/28

The indirect nature of the specification of a states role or function is regarded

as one of functionalisms strengths. For while similarly specified states, of, for

example, disease (having measles was a matter of being in a physical state responsible

for symptoms x, y, and z caused by a specific kind of process) have turned out to be

specifiable in other termsas the state produced by infection with a specific organism

the functionalist analysis of mental states requires mulitiple realizability at the level

of physical states. Indeed, the no chauvinism injunction is central to functionalism

in all its forms; the causal functioning of the physical state is essential to its being that

state, and shared software does not require identical hardware (S & J:161).

Multiple realisability is characteristic of numerous, states, devices, objects,

processes, properties and events: all those that are defined at least partly by theirfunctional role. So, car alarms, pistons, carburettors, dangerous cross-roads, being a

student, CEO or thermostat, processes like metabolism, filtration and initiation, and

countless others, are all multiply realisable. Now there is a distinction that can be

drawn in relation to these sort of entities between the role occupied (which is

essential) and the entity that occupies it. Similarly, with mental states, what matters is

the role occupied, specified in terms of the three sorts of clause, not what physical

arrangement is occupying it.

The arguments in favour of MR are standard to all forms of functionalism: we

dont know what realises a mental state, but we all recognise the states; we can

imagine beings very different from ourselves that have mental states; we dont mind if

different parts of the brain takes over the job of occupying a role (stroke victims);

there is evidence that the brain is highly plastic in the early years of life, and growth

under the impact of the environment produces the later configurations of states, so it

is possible that different brains, under different circumstances, develop somewhatdifferently at the neuro-anatomical level; in principle, the brain is as apt for prosthetic

modification as the heart. What these arguments about multiple realizability do not

establish is just what sort of functionalism we should hold: common-sense (or

analytical) functionalism views the meaning of mental state terms as given by the folk

functional roles, while the various varieties of empirical functionalism have in

common the view that which functional roles determine which mental states is a

matter for neuroscience, even if the folks ideas initially fix the reference of mental

state terms (just as folk categories pick out gold, but chemistry tells us what it really


25/28

is, and enables us to sort genuine from fake gold; so there could be fools pain, just as

there is fools gold [B-M and Jackson:Chap. 5, where this approach is considered and

criticised]).

Considering common-sense functionalism now, we have to face some basic

questions. First, there is the problem that any given state, process etc, has many causal

powersplays many causal rolesso how do we decide which ones matter for the

functional role? The heart, for example, makes characteristic noises, indicates whether

a person is alive or dead as well as pumping blood; why is the last special? Well, it is

part of our concept, nowadays anyway, that it is pumping blood that matters:

something that filled all the other causal roles but did not pump blood would not be

counted a heart. The same goes for all the other examples mentioned: it is commonknowledge which roles count.

Similarly, common-sense functionalism (CSF) says, the roles that matter for

mental states are common knowledge, and the propositions that constitute it are

sufficient to spell out the input, interaction and output clauses that count for being in a

particular mental state: tigers appearing in the field of vision under normal

circumstances cause the perception of tigers, which cause belief that a tiger is near,

which, in conjunction with a belief that if tigers are near then danger threatens ones

well-being, and the desire to preserve ones well-being, will result in tiger avoidance

behaviour. And these clauses, according to CSF, give the meaning of mental state

terms (B-M and Jackson46), which is why it is often called analytical

functionalism: it offers an analysis of our mental state vocabulary in functional terms.

The fact that people tend to move in such a way that what they desire is satisifed if

what they believe is true is more than an interesting [contingent?] truth. It is in part

constitutive of our understanding of belief and desire (46). So CSF preserves theconceptual connections that were central to analytical behaviourism, but gives them a

more moderate and more plausible role. The connections are governed by CP clauses

(there is always an implicit typically in its specifications) and no part of the network

of connections is essential.

There are five questions that can arise here: 1) about how CSF sees the

analysis of concepts; 2) about a possible worry that talk of networks of connections

masks an unaccceptable circularity; 3) how to characterise the behaviour of the outputclauses; 4) how to specify the raft of commonsense opinions that are taken to define


26/28

mental states; 5) whether CSF relies on a discredited description theory of reference.

The last is the subject of a whole chapter, but B-M & J tackle the other four in chapter

3.

1) Most of the concepts relevant to CSF are cluster concepts, which involve a

whole bunch of features, the possession of all of which suffices for something to fall

under the concept. But something can possess a subset of those features and still fall

under that concept: what matters is that enough of the list is satisfied or near enough

satisfied, and what counts as enough may itself be a vague matter, and may change

with time (47-8). This, B-M and Jackson say, amounts to a sort of conceptual

analysis, but they reject (for Quinean and Wittgensteinian reasons) the view that such

analysis provides a list of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for falling undera concept. Our language does not work that way, and proper conceptual analysis must

capture the vagueness our concepts embody. But language is clearly not so vague that

we mean nothing determinate when we use a concept lacking a cut and dried list of

what falls under it. (See their discussion of what it is for something to be a pen.)

2) CSF claims that mental states are interconnected in intimate ways. For

example a belief will cause behaviour which, if it is true, will satisfy a desire,

providing there are no other more important desires that it is believed will be

frustrated by satisfying the first one. What beliefs a perception will cause depends

upon what other beliefs are held [and, sometimes at least, upon what is desired]. It is

apt, therefore, to think of mental states as coming as a package deal, just as

husband and wife, and father and child do.

I hope thats enough to give you a feel for one prominent form of

functionalism. There are other forms of philosophical functionalism: what

differentiates them is answers to the question of which functional roles are essential to

which mental states, as well as the more general issue of where functionalism should

stand on how that question is answered (B-M & J:44). Some feel that the answers

should come from psychology and neuroscience: for them, the job of showing that

there is no principled reason why integrating the mental and neurological pictures of

ourselves shouldnt be achieved. But most scholars prefer not to take a wait and see

attitude. So there is a large and lively debate about the best form of cognitive

architecture for pursuing the functionalist perspective (LOT, the map theory,connectionism). But an important part of the arguments between these perspectives


27/28

concerns the question of the content of mental statesthe propositions following

that in our ascriptions of belief and desire, and which are so essential to the

explanatory role of these states in folk psychology. As we saw, propositional states

have properties that make them hard to handle in the standard ways that apply to non-

intentional states. Since propositions are not only semantic entities, but are clearly

related to sentences, it might be thought that content could be approached in the ways

that linguists approach semantics. And, indeed, there are deep connections between

the cognitive disciplines, philosophy of language and linguistics; the problem is that

linguistic semantics and the philosophy of language is likewise marked by diverse

approaches, and part of what motivates them is often precisely how they articulate

with some positions in the realm of cognition.

Moreover, there are arguments that suggest that meanings arent even in the

head. These arguments draw on recent theories of linguistic reference to suggest that

what people believe etc, depends not only on how they are from the skin inwards, but

also upon features of their physical and social environment. So the issues are not

simply about content, but about narrow and broad content.

So that there remains an incredibly difficult area to do with meaning is

undeniable, for nobody yet knows how content might be naturalized, although it

seems to me that the LOT hypothesis (the one Sperber has been most influenced by)

is understandably regarded as a promising. (Fodor worked with Chomsky.) Were it to

prove capable of being established and answering its many problems, it would

certainly account for folk psychologys inherent characteristics and for why it plays

the explanatory role it does in the lives of human beings.

But where does all this leave anthropology and folk psychology? My

conclusion is modest to the point of being downright lame. Anthropology is grounded

in folk psychologyhistorically and by its very constitution. The questions that have

grounded our enquiries into other ways of life since Herodotus first started

documenting them, 2.5K years ago, have come out of our need to explain why people

do what they do; these questions were framed in the terms of folk psychology. Today

too anthropology tries to explain why people do what they do, under the aspect of

their agency, their intentionality, and when it succeeds it does so by providing us with

a grasp of the mental states that underlie and cause their actions.


28/28

These facts have been obscured by a history of theorising that was predicated

on:

A conception of how scientific explanation really wascausal and law-like.

This was shared by those who thought social science must measure up to that model,

which involved marginalising FP, and those who thought social science never could

because the realities of human life were not amenable to it. So they agreed where the

boundary between cause and meaning was, but disagreed about whether it was

possible and/or worthwhile trying to cross it. One side said out with meaning and lets

be scientists; while the other said out with science and lets stick with meaning. But

what Weber believed, and what developments in our understandings of science and of

cognition suggest, was that the boundary was in the wrong place. Folk psych isconcerned with meaning but its also causal.

Sperber believes that intentional objects can only be part of a properly

naturalised anthropology if they are located inside the heads of subjects; beliefs that

Responses: behaviourism; its failure, the rise of materialism; forms of

materialismfunctionalism; computational theory of mind; LOT and its critics;

lingering problemsfor psychology; Davidson and non-reductive physicalism; token

identities enough to suggest viability of Weberian program; Sperbers suspicion of

intentional science; Boyd and Richerson

More recently

folk psychology and its place in anthropology

Documents