The aim of chapter 2 was not so much to present my own views but to describe the contemporary history of a philosoph- ical tradition. I want now to state some of my own views on so-called folk psychology (FP), because I do not believe they have been represented in the literature so far. The standard discussions, both pro and con (Churchland 1981, Stich 1983, Horgan and Woodward 1985, and Fodor 1986) have been within the tradition.
I will state the argument stepwise as a series of theses and answers.
Thesis: FP is an empirical thesis like any other, and as such it
is subject to empirical confirmation and disconfirmation.
Answer: The actual capacities that people have for coping
with themselves and others are for the most part not in propo- sitional form. They are, in my sense, Background capacities. For example, how we respond to facial expressions, what we find natural in behavior, and even how we understand utter- ances are in large part matters of know-how, not theories. You distort these capacities if you think of them as theories. See chapter 8 for more about this.
Thesis: All the same, you could state theoretical correlates or
principles underlying these capacities. This would constitute a folk psychology and will in all likelihood be false, since in gen- eral folk theories are false.
Answer: You can, with some distortion, state a theoretical
analogue to a practical skill. But it would be miraculous if these were in general false. Where it really matters, where
something is at stake, folk theories have to be in general true or we would not have survived. Folk physics can be wrong about peripheral issues, such as the movement of the celestial spheres and the origin of the earth, because it doesn't much matter. But when it comes to which way your body moves if you jump off a cliff or what happens if a huge rock falls on you, folk theories had better be right or we would not have survived.
Thesis: It now becomes a specific matter for cognitive science
(CS) to decide which theses of FP are true and which of its ontological commitments are warranted. For example, FP pos- tulates beliefs and desires to account for behavior, but if it turns out that the CS account of behavior is inconsistent with this, then beliefs and desires do not exist.
Answer: Just about everything is wrong with this claim. First,
we do not postulate beliefs and desires to account for anything. We simply experience conscious beliefs and desires. Think about real-life examples. It is a hot day and you are driving a pickup truck in the desert outside of Phoenix. No air condi- tioning. You can't remember when you were so thirsty, and you want a cold beer so bad you could scream. Now where is the "postulation" of a desire? Conscious desires are experi- enced. They are no more postulated than conscious pains.
Second, beliefs and desires sometimes cause actions, but there is no essential connection. Most beliefs and desires never issue in actions. For example, I believe that the sun is 94 mil- lion miles away, and I would like to be a billionaire. Which of my actions do this belief and this desire explain? That if I want to buy a ticket to the sun I will be sure to get a 94-million-mile ticket? That the next time somebody gives me a billion, I won't refuse?
Thesis: All the same, postulated or not, there is unlikely to be
a smooth reduction of the entities of FP to the more basic sci- ence of neurobiology, so it seems that elimination is the only alternative.
Answer: I have already said what a bad argument this is.
Most types of real entities, from split-level ranch houses to cocktail parties, from interest rates to football games, do not undergo a smooth reduction to the entities of some fundamen- tal theory. Why should they? I guess I have a "theory" of cocktail parties—at least as much as I have a theory of "folk psychology"—and cocktail parties certainly consist of molecule movements; but my theory of cocktail parties is nowhere near as good a theory as my theory of molecular physics, and there is no type reduction of cocktail parties to the taxonomy of physics. But all the same, cocktail parties really do exist. The question of the reducibility of such entities is irrelevant to the question of their existence.
Why would anyone make such an egregious mistake? That is, why would anyone suppose that the "smooth reduction" of beliefs and desires to neurobiology is even relevant to the existence of beliefs and desires? The answer is that they are drawing a false analogy with the history of certain parts of physics. Churchland thinks that "belief" and "desire" have the same status in the theory of folk psychology that "phlogiston" and "caloric fluid" had in physics. But the analogy breaks down in all sorts of ways: Beliefs and desires, unlike phlogis- ton and caloric fluid, were not postulated as part of some spe- cial theory, they are actually experienced as part of our mental life. Their existence is no more theory-relative than is the existence of ranch houses, cocktail parties, football games, interest rates, or tables and chairs. One can always describe one's commonsense beliefs about such things as a "theory," but the existence of the phenomena is prior to the theory. Again, always think about actual cases. My theory of cocktail parties would include such things as that big cocktail parties are likely to be noisier than small ones, and my theory of ranch houses would include the claim that they tend to spread out more than most other types of houses. Such "theories" are no doubt hopelessly inadequate, and the entities do not undergo smooth reduction to physics, where I have a much better theories for describing the same phenomena. But what has all
that got to do with the existence of split-level ranch houses? Nothing. Similarly the inadequacy of commonsense psychol- ogy and the failure of commonsense taxonomy to match the taxonomy of brain science (this is what is meant by the failure of "smooth reduction") have nothing to do with the existence of beliefs and desires. In a word, beliefs and split-level ranch houses are totally unlike phlogiston because their ontology is not dependent on the truth of a special theory, and their irreducibility to a more fundamental science is irrelevant to their existence.
Thesis: Yes, but what you are saying begs the question. You are just saying that beliefs and desires, like cocktail parties and split-level ranch houses, are not theoretical entities—their evi- dentiary base is not derived from some theory. But isn't that precisely one of the points at issue?
Answer: I think is is obvious that beliefs and desires are experienced as such, and they are certainly not "postulated" to explain behavior, because they are not postulated at all. How- ever even "theoretical entities" do not in general get their legit- imacy from reducibility. Consider economics. Interest rates, effective demand, marginal propensity to consume—are all referred to in mathematical economics. But none of the types of entities in question undergoes a smooth reduction to phys- ics or neurobiology, for example. Again, why should they?
Reducibility is a weird requirement for ontology anyway, because classically one way to show that an entity did not really exist has been to reduce it to something else. Thus sun- sets are reducible to planetary movements in the solar system, which showed that, as traditionally conceived, sunsets do not exist. The appearance of the sun setting is caused by some- thing else, that is, the rotation of the earth relative to the sun. Thesis: Still, it is possible to list a lot of folk psychological claims and see that many of them are doubtful.
Answer: If you look at the actual lists given, there is some- thing fishy going on. If I were going to list some propositions of FP, I would list such things as:
1. In general, beliefs can be either true or false. 2. Sometimes people get hungry, and when they are hungry they often want to eat something.
3. Pains are often unpleasant. For this reason people often try to avoid them.
It is hard to imagine what kind of empirical evidence could refute these propositions. The reason is that on a natural con- strual they are not empirical hypotheses, or not just empirical hypotheses. They are more like constitutive principles of the phenomena in question. Proposition 1, for example, is more like the "hypothesis" that a touchdown in American football counts six points. If you are told that a scientific study has shown that touchdowns actually count only 5.999999999 points, you know that somebody is seriously confused. It is part of the current definition of a touchdown that it counts six points. We can change the definition but not discover a dif- ferent fact. Similarly, it is part of the definition of "belief" that beliefs are candidates for truth or falsity. We could not "dis- cover" that beliefs are not susceptible to being true or false.
If you look at lists of candidates that have been given for "laws" of FP, they tend to be either obviously false on their face or they are constitutive principles. For example, Church- land (1981) lists the principle that, "barring confusion, distrac- tion, etc." anyone who believes p and if p then q , believes q (p. 209 in Lycan 1990b). As a candidate for a commonsense belief, this is literally incredible. If it were true, then proving theorems would be no more difficult than examining one's beliefs (without "confusion, distraction, etc."). It is very easy to refute FP if you say it consists of such false principles to start with.
A candidate for a constitutive principle is Churchland's example that anyone w h o fears p wants it to be the case that not p. How would you look for empirical evidence that this is false? It is part of the definition of "fear." So the deeper mis- take is not just to suppose that FP is a theory, but that all the propositions of the theory are empirical hypotheses.
Since they are constitutive, not empirical, the only way to show them false would be to show that they have no range of application. For example, the "constitutive principles" of witchcraft don't apply to anything because there aren't any witches. But you could not show that conscious desires and pains do not exist in the way that you can show that witches do not exist, because these are conscious experiences, and you cannot make the usual appearance reality distinction for con- scious experiences (more about this in chapter 3).
Lots of commonsense psychological beliefs have been shown to be false, and no doubt more will be. Consider a spectacular example: Common sense tells us that our pains are located in physical space within our bodies, that for example, a pain in the foot is literally inside the area of the foot. But we now know that is false. The brain forms a body image, and pains, like all bodily sensations, are parts of the body image. The pain-in-the-foot is literally in the physical space of the brain.
So common sense was wildly wrong about some aspects of the location of pains in physical space. But even such an extreme falsehood does not show—and could not show—that pains do not exist. What is actually likely to happen, indeed is happening, is that common sense will be supplemented with additional scientific knowledge. For example, we now recog- nize distinctions between long- and short-term memory, and between those and iconic memories, and these distinctions are the result of neurobiological investigations.