ABSTRACT
Many branches of philosophy are characterized as the philosophy of something else – from the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of economics to the philosophy of criticism. Broadly speaking, these all investigate the philosophical foundations of the relevant disciplines, exploring the highlevel conceptual and empirical issues that cannot be tackled using the techniques and resources of those disciplines alone. The philosophy of psychology can also be described in these terms – as an investigation of the philosophical foundations of psychology. But the philosophy of psychology is distinctive, because the domain of investigation of the discipline whose foundations are being investigated overlaps with the domain of enquiry that philosophers have traditionally taken as their own. Philosophers have always taken it to be part of their brief to investigate the nature of mind and the nature of cognition. This sets up a parallelism of concern and corresponding scope for a two-way interaction that we do not find, for example, in the philosophy of economics or the philosophy of criticism. On the view developed in this book, the philosophy of psychology is the systematic study of the interplay between philosophical concerns and psychological concerns in the study of cognition. This interplay comes about because there are certain key concepts that feature both in the philosophical study of cognition and in the psychological study of cognition and that we cannot understand using the resources of either discipline on its own.
