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Is Folk Psychology a Theory?

Folk psychology, or commonsense psychology, is something that we are all familiar with, and that we all use in everyday life. It is the way that we ascribe people with such things as ‘beliefs’, desires’, and so forth. It is claimed that it plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behaviour of ourselves and others. If it is being used to predict and explain behaviour than it can be seen to be a theory of human cognition. This essay shall attempt to discuss some of the issues, which have been raised over the problem of whether or not Folk Psychology is a theory.

Folk psychology is the way we explain the behaviour of other people. We express these usually in the form of propositional attitudes: X believes that Y, X hopes that Y etc. This is clearly summarised by Paul Churchland:

We explain their behaviour in terms of their beliefs and desires, and their pains, hopes and fears. We explain their sadness in terms of their disappointment, their intentions in terms of their desires, and their beliefs in terms of their perceptions and inferences.[i]

The problem then is whether or not Folk Psychology is a theory, and is a sound basis for cognitive science. So, why should we believe that Folk Psychology is a theory? Is it just that thinking of it as a theory makes it more intelligible, or is it actually equivalent with other scientific theories? This ideas was called by Adam Morton ‘the ‘Theory Theory’ of commonsense psychology – i.e. the theory that commonsense psychology is a theory,’[ii] and it has caused a lot of debate. The main argument for Folk Psychology being a theory is that it is explanatory, predictive, and that it has laws. These laws can be seen to be structurally similar to those of science: so X hopes that Y is structurally equivalent to X has a length Y. This, at least for Churchland is the most obvious reason for considering it to be a theory:

Not only is Folk Psychology a theory, it is so obviously a theory that it must be held a major mystery why it has taken until the last half of the twentieth century for philosophers to realise it. The structural features of Folk Psychology parallel perfectly those of mathematical physics; the only difference lies in the respective domain of abstract entities they exploit – numbers in the case of physics, and propositions in the case of psychology.[iii]

So, in structure, the propositional attitudes of one resemble the other. However, the issue is whether Folk Psychology propositions are actually being treated and used in a law-like manner to explain and predict the behaviour of other people. To most people the claim that they are using a theory would seem a little strange: ‘what could be meant about the claim that our ordinary ideas about the mental involve some kind of theory? And even if they do, why should it be a theory of internal causes of behaviour?’[iv] The simple answer being that this is how we use it. We attribute internal causes such as beliefs and desire to the manifestation of overt behaviour. There is some debate over how this notion of mental causation should be taken; do beliefs and desires actually cause behaviour? However, I shall not be dealing with that particular issue in this essay.

So, we are using Folk Psychology in order to predict behaviour. If I see someone running toward a train at a platform, I think to myself (although not in so many words) ‘they are running because they fear that the train will leave without them, and they hope that running will cause them to catch it.’ I am not entirely clear how far Folk Psychology can actually go towards predicting behaviour. In the above case we attribute beliefs and desires, but it is due to the behaviour rather than predicting it. We can, however, predict that anyone who fears that they will miss the train, believes that the train is ahead of them will, all things being equal, run to catch it. This is not a law as such in that it is completely reliant on the ceteris paribus clause (all things being equal) in order to rule out the possibility of their having conflicting beliefs etc. Although the other sciences use such clauses, they do not appear so totally reliant on it. For example, if I believed that my asthma was particularly bad, then I would not run. Since any person always has a large number of beliefs and desires etc. working on them at any one time, the generalisations of Folk Psychology would seem to be a gross simplification, or at least only trivially true. This is one of the main problems with considering Folk Psychology to be a theory.

There is also behaviour that Folk Psychology cannot explain. If it is a theory then it ought to encompass everything within its domain. For example:

So much of what is central and familiar to us remains a complete mystery from within Folk Psychology. We do not know what sleep is, or why we have to have it, despite spending a full third of our lives in that condition.[v]

Although sleep can easily be argued to not be related to overt behaviour, and therefore not in the realm of Folk Psychology, there are other things which also cannot be explained, such as the young, the mentally ill, and the alien. The best example is that of mental illness. Our ordinary predictions would fail in the face of someone whose beliefs and desires are completely different from our own. In this respect Folk Psychology could be considered normative, in that its generalisations only seem to work on a set norm; from which there is undeniably variation.

Churchland argued against Folk Psychology because he was intent on proving that it was a false theory. I shall, for the purpose of this essay, however, be using the same arguments as arguments against it being a theory. He had three main arguments against Folk Psychology. Firstly that it had limited explanatory power, as has already been discussed. Secondly, it appears to show no development as a theory, and finally that it fails to combine with the other sciences – there is no neat reduction:

A successful reduction cannot be ruled out, in my view, but Folk Psychology’s explanatory impotence and long stagnation inspire little faith that its categories will find themselves neatly reflected in the framework of neuroscience.[vi]

Folk Psychology is a long running ‘theory’. It has presumably, been used for a few thousand years in much the same way. It has not shown the same development as the other sciences. Churchland deemed this ‘stagnation’. This argument is fairly weak. Folk Psychology has been shown to have changed (these days notions of unconscious desires are also attributed etc.) although not at such a fantastic rate of change as science. It should also be considered that Folk Psychology is not something that is studied by specialists, unlike the other sciences it is just used rather than developed.

The final argument is that if Folk Psychology were a theory then it ought to be possible to reduce it to some other science, such as neuroscience. The terms of one should correlate with the terms of the other: ‘Commonsense ascriptions of mental states must map onto theoretical divisions within a successful scientific account of states of the head or perish.’[vii] If Folk Psychology were a theory and it failed to meet up with other scientific theories, then belief and desire would be in jeopardy. Churchland’s proposition is that Folk Psychology must be reducible to a theory:

Instead he argues directly from the premise that Folk Psychology probably is not reducible to neuroscience to the conclusion that Folk Psychology probably is false… He is just mistaken to assume that Folk Psychology must be reducible to neuroscience in order to be compatible with it.[viii]

Here Horgan and Woodward are suggesting that there is no reason why they should map to the same thing. After all neuroscience and Folk Psychology are not necessarily looking at the same thing. A good example was given by Searle:

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 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 reducibility of such entities is irrelevant to the question of their existence.[ix]

Or alternatively we can consider that there are terms which we use in everyday language such as bush or bug ‘which do not pick out natural kinds as judged by scientific concerns, but still delineate a genuinely existing set of objects… It does not follow that there are no bushes or bugs.’[x] It can be seen then that whether or not Folk Psychology is a theory, it is unlikely to provide a neat reduction to neuroscience. If it did, however, it would go a long way towards proving the validity of Folk Psychology as a theory.

We have covered some of the main points about whether Folk Psychology is a theory. It has obvious limitations as a theory, as was shown by its vast generalisations, limited predictive power, and the general dissimilarity between it and other scientific theories. In fact the only similarity that holds is that of the similarity between its propositions and that of science. But even that can be brought into question:

The actual capacities that people have for coping with themselves and others are for the most part not in propositional form. They are, in my sense, background capacities… You distort these capacities if you think of them as theories.[xi]

So on the one hand we have the argument that Folk Psychology just is not a theory, and is probably not that useful as a basis for cognitive science, or that it is just a theory which although very limited in its predictive power can serve as a good basis for modelling cognition. There are advantages to using Folk Psychology as a theory compared to other theories however:

In one respect, though, commonsense psychology seems to have an advantage over scientific psychology: its apparent greater stability. Theories and concepts of systematic psychology come and go… Still, the rough regularities codified in commonsense psychology appear considerably more stable.[xii]

Due to its very ‘stagnant’ nature it is a solid building block. Unlike other psychological theories, we can imagine it still holding true in years to come. The other argument is that there is no point in discarding Folk Psychology as a basis, because we have as yet no better alternative. ‘We can’t do away with propositional attitude psychology because, on the one hand, propositional attitude psychology works and, on the other hand, nothing else does.’[xiii]

It almost makes the question of whether or not Folk Psychology is a theory seem irrelevant, because cognitive science is already reliant upon it. If it is a theory it would make cognitive science more ‘respectable’, but it does not seem likely that there are many other alternatives which can usefully model human cognition:

Cognitive science must, of course, rely on a folk-psychological understanding at every stage, for we need to see how the mechanisms we study are relevant (even in a merely casual sense) to our performance in various cognitive tasks.[xiv]

Personally I suspect that Folk Psychology cannot be classified as a theory. I don’t imagine that ‘our ancestors sat around a campfire and just speculated that human behaviour would be usefully explained with ideas of belief and desire?’[xv] However there is nothing to suggest that Folk Psychology is not instead just a network of principles – rather than laws – which hold as a basic model for human cognition. There is also the possibility of the Simulation Theory becoming less sketchy, so that the view that we simulate in our own minds the possible mental processes of other people, may yet achieve dominance other the theorising of Folk Psychology.

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[i] Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, MIT Press 1988, p58
[ii] Tim Crane, The Mechanical Mind, Penguin Books 1995, p63
[iii] Paul Churchland, Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes, Mind and Cognition, Ed. William Lycan, Blackwell Publishers 1990, p209
[iv] Andy Clark, Microcognition, MIT Press 1989, p38
[v] Paul Churchland, Matter and Consciousness, MIT Press 1988, p45
[vi] Paul Churchland, Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes, Mind and Cognition, Ed. William Lycan, Blackwell Publishers 1990, p212
[vii] Andy Clark, Microcognition, MIT Press 1989, p41
[viii] Terence Horgan and James Woodward, Folk Psychology is Here to Stay, Mind and Cognition, Ed. William Lycan, Blackwell Publishers 1990, p404
[ix] John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press 1994, p60
[x] Alvin Goldman, Consciousness, Folk Psychology and Cognitive Science, The Nature Of Consciousness, Ed. Ned Block, MIT Press 1997, p115
[xi] John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, MIT Press 1994, p58
[xii] Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind, Westview Press 1998, p110
[xiii] Jerry Fodor, Banish DisContent, Mind and Cognition, Ed. William Lycan, Blackwell Publishers 1990, p420
[xiv] Andy Clark, Microcognition, MIT Press 1989, p53
[xv] Andy Clark, Microcognition, MIT Press 1989, p41

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