Making Folk Psychology Explicit: The Relevance of Robert Brandom’s Philosophy for the Debate on Social Cognition
Philosophia 40 (1):139-163 (2012)
Abstract
One of the central explananda in the debate on social cognition is the interpretation of other people in terms of reasons for action. There is a growing dissatisfaction among participants in the debate concerning the descriptive adequacy of the traditional belief-desire model of action interpretation. Applying this model as an explanatory model at the subpersonal level threatens to leave the original explanandum largely unarticulated. Against this background we show how Brandom’s deontic scorekeeping model can be used as a valuable descriptive tool for making folk psychology explicit. Following Brandom’s non-formalist and non-mentalistic account of reason discourse, we suggest that the process of making sense of others is best captured as proceeding from a ‘factive’ baseline. According to this picture the ascription of beliefs and desires is not the default interpretation strategy, but rather the result of prior scaffolding of the agent’s deontic score. We close by discussing Brandom’s model in the light of empirical findings on the ontogeny of reason attributionDOI
10.1007/s11406-010-9288-z
My notes
Similar books and articles
Universal belief-desire psychology? A dilemma for theory theory and simulation theory.Derek W. Strijbos & Leon C. de Bruin - 2013 - Philosophical Psychology 26 (5):744-764.
Folk psychology without principles: an alternative to the belief–desire model of action interpretation.Leon C. de Bruin & Derek W. Strijbos - 2010 - Philosophical Explorations 13 (3):257-274.
Early Social Cognition: Alternatives to Implicit Mindreading.Leon de Bruin, Derek Strijbos & Marc Slors - 2011 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (3):499-517.
Early Social Cognition: Alternatives to Implicit Mindreading.Leon Bruin, Derek Strijbos & Marc Slors - 2011 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 2 (3):499-517.
The need to explain behavior: Predicting, explaining, and the social function of mental state attribution.Kristin Andrews - 2007
The Ethical Dimension of Folk Psychology?Karsten R. Stueber - 2009 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 52 (5):532-547.
Folk Psychology and Folk Morality: Response to Critics.Joshua Knobe - 2004 - Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 24 (2):270-279.
Genuine Normativity, Expressive Bootstrapping, and Normative Phenomenalism.David Lauer - 2009 - Etica and Politica / Ethics & Politics 11 (1):321-350.
Two uses of folk psychology: Implications for psychological science.Garth J. O. Fletcher - 1995 - Philosophical Psychology 8 (3):375-88.
Critter psychology: On the possibility of nonhuman animal folk psychology.Kristin Andrews - 2007 - In Daniel D. Hutto & Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Re-Assessed. Kluwer/Springer Press. pp. 191--209.
Analytics
Added to PP
2010-11-18
Downloads
70 (#173,640)
6 months
2 (#298,943)
2010-11-18
Downloads
70 (#173,640)
6 months
2 (#298,943)
Historical graph of downloads
Citations of this work
Cognitive ontology in flux: The possibility of protean brains.Daniel D. Hutto, Anco Peeters & Miguel Segundo-Ortin - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (2):209-223.
The Social Cover View: a Non-epistemic Approach to Mindreading.Manuel Almagro Holgado & Víctor Fernandez Castro - 2019 - Philosophia 48 (2):483-505.
A Problem for Cognitive Load Theory—the Distinctively Human Life‐form.Jan Derry - 2020 - Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (1):5-22.
The expressive function of folk psychology.Victor Fernandez Castro - 2017 - Filosofia Unisinos 18 (1).
References found in this work
Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment.Robert Brandom - 1994 - Harvard University Press.
Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?David Premack & G. Woodruff - 1978 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4 (4):515-629.
Mental Events.Donald Davidson - 1970 - In L. Foster & J. W. Swanson (eds.), Experience and Theory. Clarendon Press. pp. 207-224.