Pretense in Prediction: Simulation and Understanding Minds

Abstract

Our “folk psychological capacities” have been among the most actively investigated cognitive abilities in recent philosophy and psychology. These capacities include the ability to describe each other in intentional terms, the capacity to produce and assess explanations couched in intentional terms, and the capacity to predict other people’s behavior. It’s easy to see why these capacities have generated such interest, for they are the means by which we understand other minds. For the last several decades, the dominant explanation of our folk psychological capacities has been the “theory-theory”. According to the theory-theory, people have an internally represented body of information (or perhaps mis-information) about psychological processes and the ways in which these processes give rise to behavior. This body of information is used in predicting and explaining behavior (Fodor 1987). Thus, the process of predicting and explaining the behavior of other people is analogous to the process of predicting and explaining the behavior of middle sized physical objects. In that latter process, it is generally assumed, we make use of an internalized body of information (and mis-information) about physical processes, a “folk physics” (McCloskey 1983, Stich 1996).

This paper contains material from two previous publications, Nichols, Stich, Leslie and Klein 1996, and Stich and Nichols 1996, along with some new material that has not been previously published.