Abstract
In this paper, I address Mitchell Herschbach’s arguments against the phenomenological critics of folk psychology. Central to Herschbach’s arguments is the introduction of Michael Wheeler’s distinction between ‘on-line’ and ‘off-line’ intelligence to the debate on social understanding. Herschbach uses this distinction to describe two arguments made by the phenomenological critics. The first is that folk psychology is exclusively off-line and mentalistic. The second is that social understanding is on-line and non-mentalistic. To counter the phenomenological critics, Herschbach argues for the existence of on-line false belief understanding. This demonstrates that folk psychology is not restricted to off-line forms and that folk psychology is more widespread than the phenomenological critics acknowledge. In response, I argue the on-line/off-line distinction is a problematic way of demarcating the phenomenological critics from orthodox accounts of folk psychology.
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Notes
I should note that there are two common usages of the term ‘folk psychology’. One is the general way in which people understand each other. The other is that we generally understand each other by attributing propositional attitudes. Some philosophers, e.g. Matthew Ratcliffe (2007), distinguish these two by referring to the first as ‘folk psychology’ and the second ‘FP’.
I would like to thank Mitchell Herschbach’s for making me aware of this distinction.
I would like to thank Matthew Ratcliffe for this formulation.
Here I reference a statement from Ratcliffe’s discussion of Peter Strawson’s concept of P-predicates. Strawson makes a distinction between M-Predicates and P-predicates and says that persons are described by P-predicates, e.g., ‘going for a walk’. Strawson’s distinction is not to be confused with the mind/body distinction, as ‘going for a walk’ is neither solely mental nor solely physical. To quote Ratcliffe, “Predicates like these do not fall neatly on one side or the other of the psychological/non-psychological boundary” (2009, p. 381).
I use Gallagher’s 2009b article because it categorizes points already made in his 2001 article more clearly.
Gallagher personal correspondence.
One smaller concern is Onishi and Baillargeon’s second reason for choosing their interpretation. One argument that could be made is that it is more parsimonious because FP oversimplifies the nature of social understanding. If social understanding is complex in nature, then finding a simpler way of account for the way we understand others is not a convincing reason for preferring one interpretation over another. Furthermore, for evidence that the FP approach is not the most parsimonious, see Low and Wang (2011).
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Capstick, M. On-line false belief understanding qua folk psychology?. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 27–40 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9270-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9270-2