Abstract
The scientific status of folk psychology (FP) is a topic of ongoing debate (Hochstein 2017). One common criticism of the use of FP in the sciences is that FP accounts produce feelings of understanding when in fact they are poor guides to truth. For example, in the context of comparative psychology, Papineau and Heyes (2006) observe that it is “easy, perhaps irresistible” to interpret some experimental results in terms of FP (p. 188). Penn (2011) agrees, writing “there is no doubt, of course, that folk psychological explanations are ‘simpler for us’ to understand” (p. 259); however, “the job of comparative cognitive psychology was supposed to be to open up the black box of animal minds to functional and algorithmic specification—not simply reiterate the kinds of explanations the ‘folk’ use” (p. 259). Following Carl Hempel, many philosophers of science would agree that subjective feelings of understanding are poor guides to good explanation. According to this view, such feelings are at best epistemically irrelevant and at worse misleading (Trout 2002). Combined with the idea that FP is no more than a collection of platitudes about mental states and behaviour, the situation appears deeply problematic: platitudes lead to feelings of understanding, but such feelings are doing little more than tracking our common-sense knowledge, rather than providing insights into the workings of the mind. However, there are alternative ways of characterising both FP and the role of understanding in the sciences. First, FP has been described as a model, rather than a collection of platitudes (Godfrey-Smith 2005). Second, some argue that understanding is necessary for explanation (De Regt 2017). Under this latter view, understanding is not a mere ‘aha’ feeling but rather concerns the skills and judgments scientists employ when constructing explanations (what De Regt calls “pragmatic understanding”). Moreover, to explain a phenomenon is to fit it into a theoretical framework and models are crucial mediators in this process. Applying these ideas, we can construct an alternative account of FP: it facilitates pragmatic understanding in the construction of explanations in psychology. In this paper, I advance and defend this account of the role of folk psychology in scientific practice. References De Regt, H.W. 2017. Understanding Scientific Understanding. Oxford University Press. Godfrey-Smith, P. 2005. Folk Psychology as a Model. Philosophers’ Imprint. 5(6):1-16. Hochstein, E. 2017. When does ‘Folk Psychology’ Count as Folk Psychological? The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 68(4):1125-1147. Papineau, D., and Heyes, C. 2006. Rational or Associative? Imitation in Japanese Quail. In S. Hurley & M. Nudds (eds.), Rational Animals? Oxford University Press, pp. 187-195. Penn, D. 2011. How Folk Psychology Ruined Comparative Psychology: And How Scrub Jays Can Save It. In R. Menzel and J. Fischer (eds.), Animal Thinking: Contemporary Issues in Comparative Cognition. MIT Press, pp. 253-266. Trout, J. D. 2002. Scientific Explanation and The Sense of Understanding. Philosophy of Science. 69(2):212-233.
