Folk psychology and freedom of the will

Abstract

Philosophers discussing folk psychology tend to focus on some categories at the expense of others. Belief receives most attention; desire and action come in joint second place. The emotions feature only when questions of universality and cultural variation are addressed. Other mental states - e.g. intentions, volitions and moods - appear hardly at all. The one-sided diet has its drawbacks. One such drawback is a lack of engagement and exchange with other philosophical and scientific disciplines. Intentions, volitions and moods are objects of intense curiosity elsewhere, both inside and outside of philosophy: intentions are investigated in the philosophy of action and the law; moods (like Angst) have attracted the scrutiny of existentialists and psychiatrists; and volitions have been central to the millennia-old debate over freedom of the will. I believe that the debate over folk psychology would be richer and deeper if it made contact with the work in these areas. The same is true in the opposite direction: The philosophies of action, moods and the will might well profit from reflecting on the controversy over the status of folk psychology. In this paper, I shall try to bring theorising about folk psychology into contact with philosophical and sociological work on freedom of the will. In order to allow for a reasonable degree of argumentative resolution, I shall concentrate on just two kindred proposals, one each from the two respective discussions. The free-will literature will be represented by a recent book, Understanding Agency (2000) by the social theorist Barry Barnes. I shall compare and contrast Barnes' important work on freedom of the will with my own so-called sociophilosophy of folk psychology (Kusch 1999). By "sociophilosophy" I mean a philosophy that takes its starting point from the results of, and a critical engagement with, the social sciences in general, and the sociology of knowledge in particular. Although Barnes does not use the term "sociophilosophy" himself, it will be obvious to anyone familiar with Barnes' wide-ranging oeuvre that he sympathises with the programme behind the term. © 2007 Springer.