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  • Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches
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Abstract

A pluralistic approach to folk psychology must countenance the evaluative, regulatory, predictive, and explanatory roles played by attributions of intelligence in social practices across cultures. Building off of the work of the psychologist Robert Sternberg and the philosophers Gilbert Ryle and Daniel Dennett, I argue that a relativistic interpretivism best accounts for the many varieties of intelligence that emerge from folk discourse. To be intelligent (in the sense invoked in folk psychological practices) is to be comparatively good at solving intellectual problems that an interpreter deems worth solving.

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Notes

  1. An exception: Clark Glymour’s (1998) incisive critique of the methodology of The Bell Curve.

  2. A partial exception: Hubert Dreyfus’s (2014) masterful work on skillful coping, which has important affinities with the account of intelligence developed in this article.

  3. Stephen Jay Gould (1996: Ch. 6) provides an accessible breakdown of the factor analytic techniques that generate g. Even Jensen’s (1982) otherwise unfailingly negative review praises Gould’s explanation of factor analysis.

  4. Ryle’s discussion of knowledge-how has inspired more discussion of skills than intelligence (Kremer 2016; Fridland 2017; Riley 2017; Stanley and Williamson 2017; Weatherson 2017). The two are closely related, but intelligence is intrinsically comparative—saying that somebody is skilled in some domain is not necessarily to compare their skill to others’—and more general—being intelligence requires sharp thinking as well as smart moves, though which precise bunch of skills it requires depends on the relevant interpreter’s stereotype. Whereas this article provides an account of intelligence—qua trait—the literature on skill focuses on intelligent action. Of course, since intelligence is a propensity for correct thought and action, the two are explanatorily intertwined.

  5. I entertain this assumption for the sake of illustration, but it plays no role in my argument. Indeed, I think it is false if read literally; folk psychological models incorporate phenomena, such as perceptual representations, that exist absolutely (not relative to interpretation). The conclusion of this article is that interpretivism is the best account of intelligence (whether or not it accounts for any other folk psychological phenomena).

  6. It might be asked, with regard to these cases of overlap, whether attributions of intelligence or attributions of belief take precedence. I doubt there is any straightforward answer to this question. One of the salutary advances of pluralistic approaches to folk psychology has been to challenge (Andrews 2012) or complicate (Westra 2018, 2019) the Dennettian(/Davidsonian) claim that belief, desire, and rationality lie at the heart of all folk conceptions of the mental—and are thus the primary targets of every intentional stance. It is plausible that, sometimes, folks start with the ascription of a certain level and variety of intelligence, and ascribe beliefs only secondarily, to flesh out their psychological profile of a smart (or stupid) agent. However, in my view, the relationships between folk psychological phenomena cannot be determined a priori; we must await detailed evidence about how folks actually model agents.

  7. Arguments for: Fodor (1987), Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum (2018). Against: Ryle (1949), Curry (2018).

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Acknowledgements

This article has benefitted from the book smarts of Dan Dennett, Nabeel Hamid, Garrett Thomson, Evan Westra, two anonymous reviewers, and students in my Spring 2019 course on The Philosophy and Science of Intelligence at the College of Wooster.

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    Devin Sanchez Curry

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Curry, D.S. Street smarts. Synthese 199, 161–180 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02641-z

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