Online research in philosophy

My commentary on Hurley is concerned with foundational issues. Hurley's investigation of animal cognition is cast within a particular framework—basically, a philosophically refined version of folk psychology. Her discussion has a complicated relationship to unresolved debates about the nature and status of folk psychology, especially debates about the extent to which folk psychological categories are aimed at picking out features of the causal organization of the mind.

Many philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that our everyday or "folk" understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called "folk psychology" (sometimes "commonsense" psychology). The terms in which folk psychology is couched are the familiar ones of "belief" and "desire", "hunger", "pain" and so forth. According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and others. However, the nature and status of folk psychology remains controversial.

In this paper, I seek to refute arguments for the idea that folk psychological explanation, i.e., the explanation of actions, beliefs and desires in terms of one another, should be understood as being of a different character than ordinary scientific explanations, a view defended most prominently in analytical philosophy by Donald Davidson and John McDowell. My strategy involves arguing both against the extant arguments for the idea that FP must be construed as giving such explanations, and also against the very notion of such a different kind of explanation. I argue first that the in some sense a priori and conceptual nature of folk psychological principles does not support the idea that these are other than empirical generalisations, by appeal to recent nativist ideas in cognitive science and to Lewis's conception of the meaning of theoretical terms. Second, I argue that there is no coherent sense in which folk psychological explanations can be seen as normative. Thirdly, I examine the putatively holistic character of the mental and conclude that that too fails to provide any cogent reasons for viewing folk psychological explanations as different from other kinds of explanation.

Folk theories—untutored people’s (often implicit) theories about various features of the world—have been fashionable objects of inquiry in psychology for almost two decades now (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994), and more recently they have been of interest in experimental philosophy (Nichols 2004). Folk theories of psy- chology, physics, biology, and ethics have all come under investigation. Folk meta- physics, however, has not been as extensively studied. That so little is known about folk metaphysics is unfortunate for (at least) two reasons. First, folk metaphysics is almost certainly implicit, and it is likely to be our default way of thinking about metaphysical problems. Moreover, one’s metaphysical commitments can have pro- found consequences—in scientific, religious, and ethical contexts, for example. Thus, folk metaphysics ought to be dragged out into the open and exposed to criticism. As Peirce eloquently remarked (1994, 1.129; see also 1994, 7.579).

David Lewis has a general recipe for analysis: the Canberra Plan. His analyses of mind, color, and value all proceed according to the plan. What is curious is that his analysis of causation – one of his seminal analyses – doesn't. It doesn't and according to Lewis it can't. Lewis has two objections against using the Canberra Plan to analyze causation. After presenting Lewis' objections I argue that they both fail. I then draw some lessons from their failure.

Abstract: Suppose you are somewhat persuaded by the arguments for Eliminative Materialism, but are put off by the view itself. For instance, you might be sympathetic to one or more of the following considerations: (1) that folk psychology is a bad theory and will be soon replaced by cognitive science or neuroscience, (2) that folk psychology will never be vindicated by cognitive science, (3) that folk psychology makes ontological commitments to weird or spooky things that no proper science will admit the existence of, (4) that folk psychology seems to lead to a sort of epiphenomenalism (which is yet another thing that’s weird and spooky), and (5) that folk psychology seems to lead to the conclusion that mental content is either determined by things outside the head or is completely indeterminate, neither of which is appealing. Yet in spite of your sympathy for any one of (1)-(5), you may nonetheless cringe at the consequence of them—that is, you may be unwilling to accept the Eliminative Materialist’s radical claim that (i) there are no beliefs, desires, etc., and (ii) we should stop all talk to that quantifies to the contrary. To relieve the conflict, I propose Mental Fictionalism: the view that we are fictionalists about mental states.

Naturalism is the word of the day. It’s the ‘ism’ that most philosophers embrace (at least in English speaking climes). Wearers of the badge are a wildly diverse bunch. This is because there are quite different ways of being a naturalist and of conceiving of the naturalistic project. Some naturalists take a special interest in our everyday or folk commitments. For them, the interesting philosophical project is to determine how much, if any, of what we ordinarily think about various subject matters (e.g. the mental, the moral, the aesthetic) is compatible with our best scientific understanding of what there is. To decide this, special methods have been created for (1) perspicuously representing our folk commitments and (2) examining if these outstrip, or go beyond, the commitments of a certain scientific understanding of what there is in nature. By these lights the philosophical task of the naturalist is to determine if the folk are committed to something over and above what is posited by a certain scientific world view. This naturalistic programme, known as the Canberra plan, relies on a special framework devised by its principal architect, David Lewis (1970, 1972) – a framework which has been extended by his followers, most prominently Frank Jackson (1998).1..

Here I challenge the philosophical consensus that we use folk psychology for the purposes of metarepresentation. The paper intends to show that folk psychology should not be conceived on par with fact-stating discourses in spite of what its surface semantics may suggest. I argue that folk-psychological discourse is organised in a way and has conceptual characteristics such that it cannot fulfill a fact-stating function. To support this claim I develop an open question argument for psychological interpretations, and I draw attention to the central role of rationality, the conceptual connections, and the essential evaluative content inherent in folk psychological ascriptions. As a conclusion I propose that a fictionalist account of the discourse would fit its characteristics better than a factualist-realist interpretation.

The so-called Canberra Plan is a grandchild of the Ramsey-Carnap treatment of theoretical terms. In its original form, the Ramsey-Carnap approach provided a method for analysing the meaning of scientific terms, such as “electron”, “gene” and “quark”—terms whose meanings could plausibly be delineated by their roles within scientific theories. But in the hands of David Lewis (1970, 1972), the original approach begat a more ambitious descendant, generalised and extended in two distinct ways: first, Lewis applied the technique to analyse the meaning of terms introduced not just by explicit scientific theories, but also by implicit folk theories such as folk psychology; second, he supplemented the theory to provide an account of the way in which the referents of the analysed terms might be identified on the basis of empirical investigation.

The so-called Canberra Plan is a grandchild of the Ramsey-Carnap treatment of theoretical terms. In its original form, the Ramsey-Carnap approach provided a method for analysing the meaning of scientific terms, such as “electron”, “gene” and “quark”—terms whose meanings could plausibly be delineated by their roles within scientific theories. But in the hands of David Lewis (1970, 1972), the original approach begat a more ambitious descendant, generalised and extended in two distinct ways: first, Lewis applied the technique to analyse the meaning of terms introduced not just by explicit scientific theories, but also by implicit folk theories such as folk psychology; second, he supplemented the theory to provide an account of the way in which the referents of the analysed terms might be identified on the basis of empirical investigation.