ABSTRACT
Each of the four pictures of the mind discussed in previous chapters offers a different response to the interface problem. This is the problem of explaining how the commonsense psychological explanations that stand at the top of the hierarchy of explanation can be integrated with levels of explanation lower in the hierarchy. Each picture of the mind is driven by a different model of the vertical relations holding between personal and subpersonal levels of explanation. These different models are themselves intimately bound up with different ways of construing commonsense psychology. We looked at how the thesis of a radical discontinuity between personal and subpersonal explanation emerges from construing commonsense psychology as an essentially normative enterprise governed by distinctive standards of rationality and coherence. If, on the other hand, commonsense psychological explanation is understood to be governed primarily by causal laws, rather than by normative principles of rationality, then a functional understanding of the interface between personal and subpersonal levels becomes attractive. A particular way of thinking about what it is required for propositional attitudes to be causally explanatory in virtue of their content has inclined many theorists towards some version of the representational picture of the mind and the language of thought hypothesis. And we saw how the thought that personal-level psychological explanation of behavior cannot be understood independently of our subpersonal understanding of how the mind works leads to different versions of the neurocomputational picture of the mind.
