Abstract
In a recent article in this journal, Krzysztof Poslajko reconstructs—and endorses as probative—a dilemma for interpretivism first posed by Alex Byrne. On the first horn of the dilemma, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge in relation to an ideal interpreter (and thus loses any connection with actual folk psychological practices). On the second horn, the interpretivist takes attitudes to emerge in relation to individuals’ judgements (and thus denies the possibility of error). I show that this is a false dilemma. By taking a model-theoretic approach to folk psychology, and marrying interpretivism with dispositionalism, interpretivists can viably reject the notion of an ideal (or canonical) interpreter—and relativize attitudes to actual lay interpreters—without taking on board the unacceptable epistemological consequences of allowing that attitudes are judgement-dependent.
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Notes
When Poslajko discusses the literature on folk psychology, he misleadingly claims that “all the major contenders in the mind-reading debate … namely the theory-theory approach, the simulation theory and the phenomenological view, see propositional attitudes as having a sort of tracking epistemology in the sense that our cognitive efforts are trying to be correct descriptions of mental reality. As different as these theories are, they all assume that when we attribute mental states to others, we are in the business of trying to discover what the mental states of the other are” (2020: 718). For one thing, Poslajko does not mention model-theoretic approaches, which have become a major contender. He also overstates the extent to which there is a consensus assumption of the epistemological goals of mental state attribution. An increasingly influential strand of the folk psychology literature is dedicated to arguing that mental state attribution serves a wide variety of non-epistemological normative and regulatory goals (Morton 2003; McGeer 2007; Andrews 2012; Zawidzki 2013; Bohl 2015; Spaulding 2018; Curry 2018, 2020a, b).
Poslajko (2020: 715) briefly discusses Schwitzgebel’s dispositionalism without recognizing this potential marriage with interpretivism. Interpretivists must be dispositionalists, given how interpreters construe beliefs. By my lights, anti-reductionist dispositionalists ought to be interpretivists too: they hold that to believe is to have an appropriate pattern of dispositions, and how interpreters model beliefs is the best—maybe the sole viable—non-reductionist candidate for what makes a pattern of dispositions appropriate.
In conversation, philosophers sometimes object to interpretivism by claiming that human beings (or our phylogenetic ancestors) had to have evolved beliefs before we could evolve interpretive capacities; thus, beliefs must exist independent of interpretive capacities. I think objectors find this argument compelling because, in imagining pre-interpretive humans, they fail to bracket their own interpretive capacities. Of course it is perfectly imaginable that pre-interpretive humans had beliefs—relative to the folk psychological models brought to bear by those doing the imagining. It is even plausible that they had to have had some such beliefs in order to become interpreters (though, due to mindshaping processes (Zawidzki 2013), the evolutionary story is likely more complex than this premise lets on). However, bracketing the imaginer’s own folk psychological capacities, it is also perfectly imaginable that pre-interpretive humans merely had dispositions, and that patterns of these dispositions emerged as beliefs only once practices of interpretation evolved.
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Thanks to Lindsey Fiorelli, Justin Bernstein, and two anonymous reviewers.
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Curry, D.S. Interpretivism without Judgement-Dependence. Philosophia 49, 611–615 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00231-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00231-4