Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation


Συγγραφέας: Daniel D. Hutto


Daniel D. Hutto: Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation (pdf, 32 pages)
Folk Psychology is dead. Long live Folk Psychology!! This could be the motto of many of the papers in this volume. I too endorse the need to reform the standard assumptions about the function, scope and basis of our capacity to understand others in terms of what might be called – accurately, if rather cumbersomely – propositionalattitude belief-desire psychology. Yet, I stop short of proposing a successor. I take it to be a datum that certain populations of psychologically normal, adult humans do, as a matter of fact, make sense of intentional action by appeal to reasons. In speaking of ‘reasons’ I mean precisely what philosophers have long understood to be the products of discrete episodes of means-end practical reasoning – processes that result in intentions to act (see, for example, Goldie, this volume). It is a commonplace than we make sense of actions in such terms (I say more about the reference of this ‘we’ in a moment). Sometimes we act for one reason and not another, decisively; though I am happy to grant that this may be a less frequent occurrence than is commonly supposed. Equally, determining for which reason an action was performed may be extremely difficult, even for an action’s author. Nevertheless, if an action is done for a reason it must be possible to explicate it, minimally, by appeal to a particular belief/desire pairing. As the essential components of reasons these psychological attitudes must each stand in relation to...