Intentionality 2

In the last article, we briefly examined intentionality, and the intentional states that are the objects of our investigation. Now I want you to turn your attention to folk psychology, the intentional aspect of our everyday conception of the mind. The question at hand is, “What is folk psychology?” I intend to table a number of candidate ideas, drawn from contemporary literature in the philosophy of mind, and probe their strengths and limitations, and the ramifications of endorsing any given position.

A simple, natural interpretation might be that folk psychology is a theory of mind, akin to a scientific theory. Obviously its history—since the Ancient Greeks used the terms belief, desire and so on—is not that of a theory within the strict, modern scientific tradition, but no matter: if it can be construed as a scientific theory, that’s good enough. One argument in favour of this view might be that it looks like a scientific theory. There is a set of laws, relating mental states to sensory input and behaviour; it subsumes a variety of complex phenomena into a unified structure; it offers novel predictions about the future actions of agents. Under this view, intentional states—beliefs, desires and the like—would be a higher-level description of phenomena that are also describable at ‘lower’ levels: neurophysiology, and ultimately, physics.

It also offers a good explanation as to why we hold the views that we do about other minds. I operate, just as you presumably do, on the assumption that other human beings have minds like mine, and that consequently they relate to the world in a similar fashion. The question is, why do I hold this belief? If we view folk psychology as a scientific, or proto-scientific theory, it brings with it an explanation: we believe other people have minds because that’s what our powerful explanatory theory (that allows us to explain and predict others’ behaviour) says.

Unsurprisingly, this view is often the preferred one of materialists. If only the physical exists, we should be able to explain everything in terms of the physical structure of the universe. When it comes to folk psychology, materialist opinion diverges. On the one hand, reductive materialists argue that intentional states are reducible to strictly physical phenomena. On the other, eliminative materialists claim that intentional states don’t exist at all: folk psychology is a “radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.”¹

We’ll leave the questions raised by eliminative materialism for another time, and take a tour round some of the other positions on the status of folk psychology. Daniel Dennett has argued² that folk psychology is a predictive calculus from the intentional stance, which is quite a mouthful, so let’s try to unpack it somewhat. The intentional stance is a way of looking at a system, a way of thinking that can explain how something works. It can be counterposed with the physical stance, where we explain phenomena in terms of their physical constituents: a good way of talking about subatomic particles, but probably not a very good way to describe the behaviour of an extraordinarily complex system like a human being.

The intentional stance is, then, a better way of looking at some systems, describing them as agents with intentional states that link them to the external world. You could describe an electron from the intentional stance, but it would offer no explanatory benefit over a description from the physical stance, and such a description would bring with it the risk of confusion. If you started talking about what the electron believed and desired, even though in a sense it’s only a figure of speech, people would start to look at you askance. When it comes to people, however, talk of beliefs and desires is more commoplace. Folk psychology is thus recast as a purely predictive tool: a way of working out what other people (or animals, for that matter) are going to do next. It’s a tool with great social utility, which explains why it’s so embedded in our lebenswelt.

There are obvious advantages to such an interpretation: it allows us all the predictive power of folk psychology, without committing us to the view that intentional states are real entities that exist beyond our descriptions. The question we might raise, then, is this: if folk psychology accurately describes human behaviour in the way we think it does, why is the description merely that of behaviour? If I were to use General Relativity to predict the movement of the planet Mercury, it would seem a little odd if—my prediction having turned out to be correct—I said that General Relativity was merely a predictive tool, and it shouldn’t be taken as in any way describing the underlying physical reality. If we are consistent, taking Dennett’s line seems to demand that we also commit to a general anti-realism about science.

Interpretations of folk psychology are not limited to the two I’ve just outlined; far from it. However, I think we’ve gone on long enough: there’s a lot here to digest. Next time, I’m going to talk about a thought experiment that some feel causes serious problems for intentionality.

References & Footnotes

1. Churchland, P. ‘Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes’, Journal of Philosophy 78 (1981)
2. Dennett, D. ‘Three Kinds of Intentional Psychology’, from Richard Healy (ed.), Reduction, Time and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975)