Folk psychology does not exist

Abstract

There have been many disputes in philosophy and psychology in the past 25 years over the nature of something that is variously called "folk psychology", "theory of mind", "mindreading" and other things. (Those names are not in fact real synonyms; each carries a different load of presuppositions. For a brief history of the topic, and finer distinctions within it, see Morton forthcoming-a.) There can be a right answer to such questions only if we are dealing with something that might have a nature. If not, the questions we ask may be like "what is the true nature of luck?" or "let's find the essential properties of the constellations". In this paper I shall explore the possibility that we apply the "folk psychology" label to too varied a bundle of capacities and phenomena for there to be a single tidy account of it. Of course there still might be tidy accounts of particular capacities in the bundle, but we should then be very careful how we label them. They wouldn't be anything like general accounts of how people understand people. My argument is not meant to be conclusive. My conclusion will be that the non-existence of folk psychology, as a single unitary capacity, is a possibility that we ought to take seriously. We are weighing conjectures here - as we usually are in philosophy, even when it presents itself as delivering the results of inescapable argument - and this conjecture is part of a larger and more conjectural thought, which I shall mention to give the discussion some perspective, and then not return to. Folk psychology is supposed to be the means by which people in ordinary life understand the minds of other people. "Mind" covers a lot of ground: motivation, belief, consciousness, emotion, character and more. How much unity does this list have, besides a vague causal link to the nervous system? Are questions about the nature of "the mental" and its relation to physical reality well-formed? I am not convinced, either way. It seems to me entirely possible that when future cultures try to read our books they will need long glosses on the scattered variety of contexts in which we talk of mind. (Just as when we philosophers go into popular bookstores and see a section marked "mind and spirit" we shudder and ask for the distinction to be explained to us. Many non-academics use "mind" to refer to a cluster based on intellect and character and spirit to refer to a cluster based on consciousness and emotion. Perhaps, just perhaps, that is a better way to do it.) The structure of my argument is as follows. I first present a picture of the activities that folk psychology is supposed to perform that makes it clear that they can be performed by a very loosely connected bundle of abilities. I then discuss the role the folk psychological vocabulary can play in holding such a loose bundle together. I then connect the discussion with imagination-based or simulationist accounts of folk psychology. And then to end the chapter I extract a rhetorically definite position from the preceding pros and cons. © 2007 Springer.