This article appeared in
Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London: Nature Publishing
Group, 2002.
Keywords: Eliminativism, Folk Psychology, Introspection,
Simulation, Theory Theory
Contents:
1. Introduction – What Is Folk
Psychology?
2. History
3. Folk Psychology and the Scientific View of the
Mind
4. Folk Psychology as Tacit
Knowledge
5. Simulation Theory
6. Introspection Revisited
Folk psychology is the body of information people have
about the mind, and it is often regarded as the basis for our capacity to
attribute mental states and to predict and explain actions.
1. Introduction – What Is Folk Psychology?
Most broadly, folk psychology is simply the information
that lay people have about the mind.
Although the scope of folk psychology is thus vast, contemporary
discussion of folk psychology in philosophy and cognitive science have focused
largely on the portion of folk psychology that guides the prediction and
explanation of actions. A large
measure of the interest in this portion of folk psychology derives from the
central role it plays in our everyday lives. Folk psychological prediction and
explanation abound in our lives. We
engage in it for mundane chores, like trying to figure out what the baby wants,
what your peers believe about your work, and what your spouse will do if you
arrive home late. Folk psychology
is also implicated in loftier endeavors like trying to glean Descartes’ reasons
for thinking that many ideas are innate.
So pervasive is the role of folk psychology in our lives that Jerry Fodor
has remarked that if folk psychology should turn out to be seriously mistaken,
it would be “the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our
species” (Fodor 1987, xii).
2. History
The idea that lay people have views about beliefs and
desires and that people believe that actions result from beliefs and desires is
hardly new. Indeed, Descartes would
never have denied that people have such information. However, according to Descartes, the
core information about the mind comes from introspection, which he regarded as
an unimpeachable source. Since
introspection reveals the truth about the mind to each of us, for Descartes, the
somewhat pejorative qualifier “folk” is unnecessary. Folk psychology is psychology.
In the twentieth century two developments led to a
revolutionary new picture of lay views of the mind. The first development was the challenge
to introspection as a source of knowledge about the mind. This challenge occurred in both
psychology and philosophy. In the
early part of the century, psychologists advocating methodological behaviorism
maintained that introspection was scientifically disreputable and could not be a
source of knowledge about the mind. In effect, they forswore all talk of mental
states in scientific psychology. In
philosophy, Ryle (1949) launched a more sweeping attack. On his view, sometimes
labeled “logical behaviorism”, it is a mistake to think that there are beliefs
and desires inhering in an unobservable mind. Unlike the methodological behaviorists,
though, Ryle did not enjoin against using terms like “belief” and “desire”.
Rather, he maintained that such terms refer not to internal mental states, but
to publicly observable phenomena, in particular, to dispositions to behave in
certain ways under certain conditions.
Of course, one important consequence of Ryle’s view is that since beliefs
and desires are not internal states, they cannot be possibly be revealed by
introspection. The suspicions about
introspection have exercised a powerful hold over psychology and philosophy of
mind ever since, even among those not sympathetic to logical
behaviorism.
The second historic development occurred in the wake of
introspection’s decline. If we
can’t rely on introspection to provide us with knowledge of the mind, then we
need a new account of the source of our knowledge about the mind. Wilfrid Sellars (1956) developed what
has turned out to be the most influential alternative to the introspectionist
account of lay knowledge about the mind.
Rather than maintain that the mind reveals its secrets to itself through
introspection, Sellars suggested that lay people have a theory of the
mind. The way Sellars makes the
point is by proposing a myth about the origins of our commonsense view. He
suggests that in our distant past, our ancestors never spoke of internal mental
states like beliefs and desires.
Rather, these “Rylean” ancestors only spoke of publicly observable
phenomena like behavior and dispositions to behave. At this point, our ancestors even lacked
terms for inner mental states. Then one day Jones, a great genius, arose from
this group. Jones recognized that positing inner states like thoughts as
theoretical entities provides a powerful basis for explaining the verbal
behavior of his peers, and Jones developed a theory according to which
such behavior is indeed the expression of internal thoughts. Jones then taught his peers how to use
the theory to interpret the behavior of others. We are ultimately the beneficiaries of
Jones’ genius as well, since we too use the theory to interpret others’
behavior.
Although Sellars explicitly presents this origin story
as a myth, the point is that the myth allows us to see quite clearly a new
picture of the nature of our commonsense views about the mind. On this picture, the commonsense view is
a theory of mind, and the theory posits inner mental states like thoughts
that are not publicly observable.
Once this proposal is in place, the myth can be seen as one possible (and
surely false) account of the origin of the theory. The important advance is that Sellars
has provided us with an alternative account of commonsense psychology that does
not rely on introspection. Nor,
however, does it adopt the desperate logical behaviorist account that terms like
thought refer to publicly observable phenomena. This idea that folk psychology is a
theory, whatever its origins, has come to be known as the “theory theory”
(Morton 1980). The theory theory
not only makes clear a new way to construe commonsense psychology once
introspection had been displaced, Sellars’ account provides a new way of
construing introspection itself.
For Sellars suggests that the commonsense theory of mind is what we use
to attribute mental states to ourselves as well as others.
3. Folk Psychology and the Scientific View of the
Mind
The very possibility that the theory theory is right
requires us to be explicit about the potential gap between folk psychology and
the scientific view of the mind.
For if lay views about the mind derive, not from indubitable
introspection but from a commonsense theory, then it may well be the case that
lay views of the mind will not cohere with mature scientific views of the
mind. It now becomes a question of
some moment whether folk psychology adequately characterizes the mind.
In order to evaluate this question, one needs to know
much more precisely what folk psychology is. In philosophy, one prominent way of
characterizing folk psychology is to appeal to platitudes that everyone accepts,
e.g., “Persons in pain tend to want to relieve that pain. Persons who feel thirst tend to desire
drinkable fluids. Persons who are
angry tend to be impatient” (Churchland 1988, 58-9). According to Churchland, among
others, the collection of all these platitudes constitutes the folk theory of
mind that guides the prediction, explanation and interpretation of behavior
(1988 p. 59). If one assembled such
a list, one might then determine whether items on the list would be corroborated
or refuted by mature science.
It is at this point that the most prominent theme in
philosophical discussions of folk psychology emerges. For, some suggest, if the folk account
diverges widely from the scientific account, then we should conclude that the
folk theory is wrong.
Indeed, it may turn out that the folk theory is so thoroughly wrong that
we must reject the theoretical posits of “belief” and “desire” and acknowledge
that beliefs and desires don’t really exist. According to Eliminative Materialism
this is exactly the case. The folk
theory is so far off the mark that we need to uproot the ontology of folk
psychology entirely, just as we have uprooted the ontology of the
supernatural. Eliminativist
arguments have been developed in two rather different ways. Some (e.g., Stich 1983) maintain that
folk psychology will be at odds with a mature scientific psychology and that
this gives reason to suspect that we need to jettison the folk ontology of
beliefs and desires. Others (e.g.,
Churchland 1981) envision neuroscience as the proper scientific approach to the
mind and argue that folk psychology will not fit with mature neuroscience; as a
result, the folk ontology should be rejected in favor of a neuroscientific
ontology.
Evaluating Eliminative Materialism is a matter of
considerable complexity. For, as
several authors have noted, eliminativist arguments typically depend on
important assumptions about reference, reductionism, and other controversial
issues in metaphysics (see, e.g., Lycan 1988, Stich 1996). The claim that bears directly on present
concerns, though, is that folk psychology is a hopelessly mistaken theory. The merits of folk psychology have been
deeply contested over the last quarter century. Eliminativists bemoan the
explanatory failures and limitations of folk psychology, and maintain that these
shortcomings indicate that mature science will be quite at odds with folk
psychology (e.g., Churchland 1981).
Others, however, have celebrated the remarkable success of folk
psychology. Indeed, Fodor maintains
that folk psychology is much better at predicting behavior than contemporary
scientific approaches, and that this extraordinary predictive success suggests
that the folk theory is roughly right and hence will fit with a mature cognitive
science (Fodor 1987).
4. Folk Psychology as Tacit Knowledge
While philosophers have debated the continuities between
science and folk psychology and the consequences that would follow from various
scenarios, cognitive scientists have been concerned to explore more
systematically the nature of the capacity to attribute beliefs, desires, and
emotions and the capacity to predict and explain behavior. It has become increasingly clear that
the platitude approach to folk psychology does not suffice to explain the lay
capacity for psychological attribution, prediction, and explanation.
To take a simple example, people are quite good at
attributing emotions to others on the basis of facial expressions. Very small differences in musculature
activity in the face guide attributions of emotions, and people do not seem to
be able to articulate the principles that underwrite these attributions. Indeed, some of these processes clearly
occur outside of conscious awareness.
For instance, subjects are more likely to judge a neutral face as sad if
they have just been subliminally exposed to a smiling face (Underwood
1995). Similarly, the attribution
of goals from motion cues seems to exceed the available platitudes. In a famous study, Heider & Simmel
(1944) showed subjects geometric objects moving around in a two dimensional
scene. Almost all subjects
attributed goals to the geometric objects, and there was a good deal of
consistency in subjects regarding certain events as chasing, fighting, and
trying to get out of a box. What is
guiding subjects’ judgments here?
Certainly we have no platitudes about the likely goals of geometric
objects. The judgments seem to be
guided instead by rather low-level motion cues. Determining which motion cues tend to
produce which judgments is an area of active research, and the details are far
from worked out. But there are a
number of cues that seem to contribute to judgments of intention in geometric
displays, including relative speed following a position change, orientation of
the object relative to direction of motion, and the turning axis of the
geometric object (see, e.g., Scholl & Tremoulet 2000). It seems most unlikely that the final
account of the motion properties that elicit judgments of intention will map
neatly onto folk platitudes.
The foregoing suggests that the mechanisms underlying
folk psychological capacities are far more intricate than is suggested by
platitude accounts. Prediction,
explanation and attribution are unlikely to be a matter of applying platitudes
to instances. Like other
interesting cognitive capacities (e.g., language comprehension and production,
folk physics), we can expect that much of the information underlying the
capacity is not consciously accessible. This is not a debilitating problem for
the theory theory, of course, since one can simply adopt the view that the folk
psychological theory is at least partly “tacit”. Indeed, that has long been the
prevailing assumption in the empirical research on folk psychology.
By far the most extensive empirical research on folk
psychology has been focused on charting the development of folk psychological
capacities in children. This
research illustrates in a dramatic way the central role that folk psychology
plays in our everyday lives. The
distressing social deficits of children with autism have been linked to a
breakdown in their capacity for folk psychology (Baron-Cohen 1995). Furthermore, an analysis of everyday
speech in normal children indicates that from a very young age, they talk a
great deal about beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions (Bartsch &
Wellman 1995). And this is not just talk.
Experimental evidence indicates that children are quite good at
predicting a “target” person’s behavior on the basis of the target’s beliefs,
desires, and emotions (Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997). Some important capacities emerge at a
strikingly early age. For instance,
evidence indicates that 18-month old children can attribute desires on the basis
of facial expressions (Repacholi & Gopnik 1997). Most researchers in the field agree that
these capacities depend on a tacit theory of mind. In light of the early emergence of folk
psychology in normal children and its breakdown in autism, many researchers
maintain further that the tacit folk psychology theory has an innate basis. However, even among those who agree that
folk psychology is a tacit theory with an innate basis, there is serious
disagreement about the nature of the tacit theory. On one account, this body of information
is very much like a scientific theory, and the process of development is really
a process of theory-revision, much like the process of theory-revision in
science (e.g., Gopnik & Meltzoff 1997). On a prominent alternative view, the
tacit theory is not at all like a scientific theory, but rather is represented
in an innate module with restricted information flow to other parts of the mind.
This module has to develop, to be sure, but the development is a fairly tightly
constrained maturational process rather than an open-ended theory-revision
process (Leslie 1994).
5. Simulation theory
While theory theorists debate amongst themselves about
the nature of the folk theory, there is a much more pervasive threat to the
theory theory, “simulation theory”.
According to simulation theory, one does not use a psychological theory
in predicting a target’s behavior, but rather, one pretends to have the mental
states of the target and then runs one’s own decision making mechanisms
“off-line” using these pretend inputs.
The resulting decision is then used to predict what the target will do
(Gordon 1986, Goldman 1989). This
approach makes a serious departure from the theory theory since it explains
important folk psychological capacities by appealing to something other than a
tacit body of knowledge about the mind.
In fact, the introduction of simulation theory makes the very term “folk
psychology” problematic since the term is typically tied to the theory
theory. As a result “mindreading”
is often used as a more theoretically neutral term for the cluster of capacities
we have for attributing mental states and predicting and explaining behavior.
Simulation theory has one absolutely stunning
virtue. It gives an elegant
explanation of the remarkable success of lay prediction of thought and
action. Typically when I am trying
to figure out what a target person is going to do, it’s plausible that the
target and I share similar cognitive mechanisms. As a result, if I use my own cognitive
mechanism to run a simulation, it’s likely that the outcome of that simulation
will be very much like what the target’s analogous mechanism will actually
do. This virtue of the simulation
approach is illustrated well by an example from Paul Harris (1992). Harris asks us to imagine a
psycholinguistics experiment in which we are to predict the grammaticality
judgments of another English speaker on a set of sentences. It seems likely that we would be quite
accurate at such a task. How is it
that we would do so well? A
simulation-style explanation is that we use our own mechanisms for judging
grammaticality and then we attribute the output to the subject. So, if our own mechanisms produce the
judgment that a sentence is grammatical, we attribute that judgment to the
target. Given that the mechanisms
that produce judgments of grammaticality are extremely complex, to explain
success on this task, a theory theory account would have to appeal to an
improbably vast amount of tacit knowledge about how people make grammaticality
judgments. The simulation-style alternative is
almost certainly a better explanation.
It is important to note that in Harris’ example, no
pretense is involved, and in that sense, the example is not entirely parallel to
the classic off-line simulation account.
But the example certainly succeeds in showing that prediction of behavior
will at least sometimes rely on resources that go beyond a tacit theory of
psychology, and that in some cases at least, we use a simulation-like process to
predict others’ behavior.
Thus, simulation (or simulation-like) processes
plausibly play some role in mindreading.
How much of a role does simulation play? One proposal, “radical simulation”, is
that simulation explains everything that the theory theory purported to
explain, including all attribution of mental states, prediction of behavior, and
explanation of behavior (e.g., Gordon 1986, 1996). This radical view led some simulation
theorists to suggest that there is no folk psychological theory. Earlier it was noted that even
Descartes wouldn’t have challenged the claim that people have a body of
information about the mind. But
radical simulationists challenge precisely that claim. As simulation theorists pointed out
early on, this would entail that the debate over eliminativism needs to be
seriously overhauled. For if there
is no folk psychological theory, it can’t very well be the case that the theory
is false.
Despite this provocative prospect, the radical kind of
simulation theory has few advocates. One problem for radical simulation is that
there are many cases in which we are very bad at predicting what people will do,
and simulation theory has difficulty explaining our failures in these cases
(Stich & Nichols 1992). There
is a huge body of literature in social psychology documenting situations in
which subjects behave in ways that are quite surprising to commonsense. It is worth spending the time to look in
detail at an example. In an experiment demonstrating the endowment
effect, Kahneman and colleagues (1990) gave a coffee mug to subject in one
group, the “endowed” group, and then offered the subjects the opportunity to
trade the mug for various amounts of cash.
Another group of subjects, the “unendowed” group, was not given the mug
but was allowed to choose between the mug and various amounts of cash. It turns out that subjects in the
endowed group tend to place a much higher cash value on the mug than subjects in
the unendowed group. Most people
find this result quite interesting, and part of the reason it’s interesting is
because it’s surprising. Yet
if simulation theory explained all of mindreading, it’s a bit puzzling why we
are surprised by the finding. For
we should be able to imagine ourselves in the endowed subject’s situation and
let our own cognitive mechanisms determine what value we would set on the
object. Indeed, recent research
confirms that we are not successful at this imaginative exercise. Loewenstein and Adler (1995) explored
whether subjects would be able to predict the value they themselves would set on
an object if they were endowed with it. They handed subjects a coffee mug and
asked the subjects to imagine that they owned the mug and to indicate how much
they would be willing to sell it for if they owned it. After they completed this part of the
task, subjects were told that they could in fact keep the mug – it was
theirs. Then the subjects were once
again asked to indicate how much they would be willing to sell it for. It turned out that subjects were bad at
predicting their own judgments.
Subjects tended to want significantly more money when they were endowed
with the object than when they were merely imagining that they were endowed with
it. If we made judgments like this
using simulation theory, one would expect subjects to be simply excellent at
this sort of task. And this is
merely one example in a sea of similarly surprising results from social
psychology. Indeed, if simulation
theory accounted for all of our mindreading capacities, one would expect social
psychology to be a radically different discipline, with few deeply surprising
results. The theory theory, by contrast, can provide a natural explanation of
these folk mistakes by maintaining that the body of information that guides our
judgments in these cases is incomplete.
The tacit theory is missing information in crucial places, and the
absence of this information leads to the mistaken predictions.
A second problem with radical simulation is that for many normal, successful attributions of mental states, it is difficult even to devise a simulation theory that would explain how we arrive at the mental state attributions in the first place. The point is perhaps easiest to make with attribution of perception. You know that if you are sitting at the dinner table, the person across from you can see your face but not your knees. But if she puts her head under the table, then she may well be able to see your knees. It is not at all clear how pretending to have the mental states of the other person is going to tell you whether she has visual access to your knees. By contrast, the tacit theory approach suggests an obvious answer. You calculate, in classical fashion, information about the opacity of the table, information about line of sight, information about the amount of ambient light etc, and from this information the tacit theory of mind (which would presumably have information about when a subject is likely to see something) produces a perceptual attribution.
Although radical simulation currently has few advocates,
simulation theory has altered considerably the landscape on folk psychology.
People working on both sides of the simulation debate have converged in
maintaining that a full explanation of the capacities for attribution,
prediction and explanation will require a hybrid account, appealing both to
simulation processes and to tacit knowledge about mental states (e.g., Goldman
2000, Nichols & Stich forthcoming).
Simulation theory exacts a significant revision in the view that lay
understanding of other minds derives from a folk psychological theory, and this
has ramifications for both cognitive science and philosophy. First, it suggests that the capacity for
mindreading cannot be entirely captured by classical cognitive models. The kinds of mechanisms exploited in
mindreading will be much different from the kinds of mechanisms exploited by
capacities like folk physics and folk biology. Secondly, if simulation processes play
an important role in mindreading, much of the eliminativist debate is too
crude. For a large part of our
mindreading capacity may be insulated from any eliminativist threat. On the other hand, insofar as the
success of mindreading depends on simulation-style mechanisms (as opposed to
tacit theory), the success of mindreading cannot be casually used to support the
claim that the folk psychological theory is largely true.
6. Introspection Revisited
A second major challenge to the theory theory emerges
from a reassessment of the capacity for introspection. One of the vital historical precursors
leading to the theory theory was the repudiation of introspection as a reliable
source of information about the mind.
However, introspection fell into disrepute under the auspices of
behaviorism. It’s not clear that
the motivations for renouncing introspection are still telling for cognitive
scientists who reject behaviorism.
Many cognitive scientists in fact still maintain that
the available evidence indicates that the only way to access one’s own mental
states is via the theory of mind (e.g., Nisbett & Wilson 1977; Gopnik
1993). This view effectively
embraces Sellars’ early suggestion that the folk theory of mind is essential not
only for attributing mental states to others but also for attributing mental
states to oneself. Although this
theory theory approach to introspection continues to be extremely influential,
some researchers have recently begun to defend alternative cognitive accounts of
introspection according to which access to our own minds does not depend on the
theory of mind (Goldman 1993; Nichols & Stich 2002). Goldman (1993) suggests further that
introspective access might provide the basis for our concepts of belief and
desire. In this case it might turn
out that the theory of mind itself depends on introspection rather than the
reverse.
The nature of introspection and its possible role in
generating our understanding of others’ minds is far from settled in the
contemporary literature. But
whatever the outcome of this debate, there is every reason to think that our
capacity for mindreading is a subserved by an extremely diverse and intricate
set of mechanisms. Although it’s
likely that the theory theory explains part of the capacity for mindreading,
it’s also likely the theory theory cannot provide anything remotely like a
complete account of the capacity for mindreading. Rather, our capacity for
mindreading also plausibly depends on simulation-like processes and perhaps even
introspective mechanisms that are independent of the theory of
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GLOSSARY
Eliminativism: The claim
that the commonsense view of the mind is so deeply mistaken that commonsense
psychological notions like “belief” and “desire” do not refer to anything.
Simulation Theory:
The view that the lay prediction and
explanation of another’s behavior involves pretending to have the other’s mental
states and allowing one’s own cognitive mechanisms to run “off-line” using these pretend
inputs.