Folk Psychology as a Social Institution

I now turn to the third, final, and decisive step of my overall argument. In the Interlude, I introduced and explained one theory about social institutions. In Chapter 8, I gave a summary of the debate over folk psychology and suggested that all major positions in this debate are, tacitly or openly, committed to different brands and versions of individualism. In the present chapter, I shall connect the main themes of these two earlier chapters. I shall argue that folk psychology is a social institution in the sense explained in the Interlude. This means, first and foremost, that folk psychology has a self-referential and self-validating structure, and that folk psychology is a fundamental collective good. I shall also invoke evidence to the effect that our folk psychology is not universal in all its features: Even core elements of our Western folk psychology-such as our concept of ‘belief-are absent from the folk psychologies of other, non-Western cultures. Moreover, I shall make a specific proposal concerning several of the most basic intuitions that underlie conflicting theoretical positions in the folk psychology debate: to wit, that these diverging intuitions all become plausible once we understand folk psychology as a social institution. I shall conclude by suggesting that some central folk-psychological kinds are ‘artificial kinds’—entities shaped and formed by folk-psychological practices-and that some of our most cherished intuitions concerning privileged access and self-creation are due to mistaken renderings of the ‘grammar’ of folk psychology.