Lecture 17--Folk Psychology and Eliminative Materialism
Folk Psychology:
Also called common-sense psychology, it is the common-sense conceptual framework from which we work when discussing human consciousness and behavior. Minimally, folk psychology consists of "(a) a set of attributive, explanatory, and predictive practices, and (b) a set of notions or concepts used in those practices" (von Eckardt, p. 300).
The Content of Folk Psychology (see von Eckardt)
Propositional Attitudes:
Our folk psychology involves invoking such conscious mental states as pains, beliefs, desires, intentions, happiness, and fears. Such attitudes are intentional states, i.e., they are about things and are describable in propositional terms--hence the term "propositional attitudes" to describe such states.
Actions and Perceptual Stimuli:
Folk psychology is also concerned with explaining the connection between our propositional attitudes and how we act--e.g., the connection between beliefs, desires, intentions, and action; and folk psychology is concerned with the connection between propositional attitudes and perceptual stimuli--e.g., the impression made upon us by the external world and beliefs formed.
Approaches to Folk Psychology
Folk Psychological Realism:
Our folk psychological language describes some fact about the way the world really is. That is, we really do have beliefs, desires, pains, etc.
Folk Psychological Anti-Realism:
Folk psychological language is hopelessly misguided. Talk about propositional attitudes cannot be scientifically vindicated. Common-sense psychology will go the way of phlogiston theory and a geocentric view of the universe.
Folk Psychological Instrumentalism: Folk psychological language is useful, but it is not the domain of scientific psychology. Thus, folk psychology may be preserved, but it only means that we have attitudes that can be construed as having propositional content.
Eliminative Materialism:
The common-sense framework from which we traditionally have worked will be eliminated. Identity theorists are mistaken when they contend that a one-to-one match up will be found between our mental states understood in folk psychological terms and concepts and neuroscience.
Arguments for Eliminative Materialism
Folk Psychology will go the Way of Various Archaic Theories:
Other "folk" theories in the past have been surpassed by better more scientifically satisfying theories. There is no good reason why folk psychology should be thought to be immune from such a process of being rendered superfluous or false.
Folk Psychology Lacks any Explanatory or Predictive Efficacy:
References to our propositional attitudes as explaining why we behave as we do cannot provide any guarantee that why we acted is because of some alleged belief and desire state. Similar problems occur when referring to propositional attitudes and explaining actions and the connection between propositional attitudes and explanations of perceptual stimuli and the states they produce within us. Providing a purely neurophysiological explanation will not suffer from such problems. If we can know how certain neurophysiological states match up with certain types of behavior, then we can have a more effective means of matching up behavior to brain states. Similar results obtain for perceptual stimuli.
Arguments Against Eliminative Materialism
Introspection Supports Folk Psychology:
Folk psychological concepts seem to more adequately describe our experiences when we introspect.
Folk Psychology is not All-or-Nothing:
It may be the case that some of our folk psychological language may be discarded, while some of it may remain useful. Or we can go the instrumentalist route and simply say that such language is helpful.
Folk Psychology may be Reduced Without Being Eliminated:
It may be that what our propositional attitudes are reducible to neurophysiological states that call for us to redescribe what propositional attitudes are without discarding such notions.
