Abstract
There is a long-standing debate in the philosophy of action and the philosophy of science over folk psychological explanations of human action: do the (perhaps implicit) generalizations that underwrite such explanations purport to state contingent, empirically established connections between beliefs, desires, and actions, or do such generalizations serve rather to define, at least in part, what it is to have a belief or desire, or perform an action? This question has proven important because of certain traditional assumptions made about the role of law-statements in scientific explanations. According to this tradition, law-statements take the form of generalizations, and the laws we find in well-established sciences are contingent and empirical; as such, if the kinds of generalizations at work in folk psychological explanations of human action act like definitions, or state conceptual connections, then such generalizations could not play the kind of explanatory role we find in mature sciences. This paper argues that the aforementioned way of framing the debate reflects a still powerful but impoverished conception of the role laws play in scientific explanations, a conception that, moreover, cannot be reconciled with a good deal of actual scientific practice. When we update the philosophy of science, we find the concerns that are raised for folk psychological explanations largely evaporate or are found not to be specific to such explanations.
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Notes
Rosenberg (2012). As stated, [L] is a clear non-starter. To make it at all plausible, we need to add that there is no obvious better means than \(a\) available, \(a\) has to be reasonably low risk compared to the benefit of securing \(d\), and so on. While there are serious doubts about whether we can fill out [L] to make it both plausible and non-trivial, the issue won’t matter to the arguments of this paper.
A holist could say that [L] is just incomplete: if you had a “complete” theory, it would accommodate the elephant and frontal lobe patients, and so on. But this move makes it plain that the resulting complete theory would be an empirically backed theory of a certain part of human psychology.
The role of models in science has been widely examined, though philosophers of science differ in what they take models to be and how they think models function in science. See van Fraassen (1980); van Fraassen (1989), Cartwright (1983, 1999), Giere (1999, 2004, 2006), and Teller (2001); Teller (2004) for excellent discussions of these issues.
Both Maibom (2003) and Godfrey-Smith (2005) have appealed to Giere’s account of models to resolve certain disputes concerning what the folk are doing, psychologically speaking, when they predict and explain the actions of others. According to both Maibom and Godfrey-Smith, our quotidian capacities to predict and explain human action are best understood in terms of facility with a model. However, the appeal to models in the current paper has an importantly different aim: Maibom and Godfrey-Smith are concerned with the psychology of mental state attribution, not whether principles like [L] are contingent or conceptual, or the possible role [L] might play in the science of psychology. Thus, while the arguments of the present paper may complement the views of Maibom and Godfrey-Smith, it is not an extension of their project.
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Roth, M. Folk psychology as science. Synthese 190, 3971–3982 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0240-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-012-0240-6