ABSTRACT
In some respects this central chapter is an interlude in the argument of the book. It is more closely argued than much of the rest and readers whose interest in philosophy is not professional may wish to skip it. But it is, I believe, necessary to confront a view which has a deal of backing amongst philosophers, a sort of universally acknowledged cliché; it is that our ordinary mental predicates form a a proto-scientific theory of the mind, a theory which takes mental entities to form an inner mechanism or essence. Obviously this is not a view I can accept consistently with what I have argued earlier and I shall attack it on a very broad front by denying that folk psychology, as it is described, is a theory at all. As I have intimated, philosophers with a yen for conceptual reform are nowadays prone to describe our ordinary, common sense, Rylean description of the mind as ‘folk psychology’, the implication being that when we ascribe intentions, beliefs, motives and emotions to others we are offering explanations of that person’s behaviour, explanations which belong to a sort of prescientific theory. Though the term is in vogue, the philosophers whose belief in folk psychology make their writings very acceptable clay pigeons are Paul and Patricia Churchland and Stich.1 All three contrast folk psychology with a pukka theory about the mind and its workings which is either broadly materialist or more specifically based on the computer model. For all three, folk psychology is thought of as a Stone Age relative of more respectable scientific theories. For all three, folk psychology is as theoretical an enterprise as the explanation of the reflex contraction of the pupil in the face of a bright light in terms of a neural network. The origin of these ideas
seems to lie in Wilfred Sellars’s work of a couple of decades ago;2 I shall argue that our policy should be caveat emptor.
