Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T12:41:37.632Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Stephen Stich's From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Ausonio Marras*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy University of Western Ontario

Abstract

The aim of Stich's book is to further the controversial thesis that the conceptual framework of ‘folk’ psychology will have no significant role to play in a mature cognitive science. Skepticism about the scientific relevance of folk psychology has been voiced by others (behaviorists and nonbehaviorists alike); but Stich's critique is both novel and more fully developed than earlier ones. The charge is not–-or not simply–-that ‘folk theory’ is a “degenerating paradigm“ (Churchlands), or that, in general, the constructs of folk theory fail to refer altogether (Rorty; Dennett). Stich's thesis is subtler, and rests on the claim that the individuation of folk-psychological states is irremediably vague and context-and-observer relative in a way that makes a folk-psychological taxonomy ill-suited to the requirements of scientific explanation and systematization. Stich, of course, does not reject mentalism as such, as did the behaviorists: he merely rejects the assumption–-often tacitly accepted by cognitive scientists and by their philosophical interpreters–-that the mental states posited by a mature cognitive science will essentially correspond to the intentional, propositional attitude states of folk psychology. Thus, for Stich, there is no reason to suppose that cognitive science will turn out to be a sophisticated extension of folk psychology. The “Panglossian prospect” (p. 5) of a conceptual reunification of the scientific image of mind with the ‘manifest’ image under the banner of cognitivism is just what this book calls into question.

Type
Critical Notice
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Fodor, Jerry (n.d.), “Narrow Content and Meaning Holism”, Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Fodor, Jerry (n.d.), (forthcoming), Psychosemantics. Chapter 2.Google Scholar
Loar, Brian (n.d.), “Social Content and Psychological Content”, paper read at the 1985 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Stich, Stephen (1983), From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief. Cambridge: The MIT Press/A Bradford Book. ($22.50 cloth; $8.95 paper)Google Scholar