In the Introduction we saw that much of the appeal of individualism derives from intuitive general views about explanation, causation, and causal powers. These views are the basis for an influential argument for individualism developed by Jerry Fodor (1987:ch. 2) that claims that individualism in psychology follows from the nature of scientific explanation. Its central claim is that scientific taxonomies satisfy a general constraint of which individualism in psychology is a particular instance.

STATING THE ARGUMENT

The argument can be summarized as follows. Sciences typically individuate their explanatory categories and kinds by causal powers, and the causal powers that anything has supervene on that thing's intrinsic physical properties. So, if psychology is to be a science, mental states must supervene on the intrinsic physical properties of individuals; thus individualism is a constraint on psychology.

Both those who have criticized this argument as unsound (Braun 1991; Egan 1991; van Gulick 1989) and those who have been more sympathetic to it (Crane 1991; McGinn 1991; Owens 1993; Williams 1990) have assumed that the argument is at least valid. I shall argue, by contrast, that this argument for individualism equivocates on ‘causal powers’, and that this equivocation is not simply inherent in a particular formulation of the argument. Rather, the equivocation points to a deep and recurrent problem for those who claim that individualism in psychology follows from generally acceptable claims about explanation, causation, and causal powers.

In Chapter 1, I distinguished two questions. The first was whether individualism imposes a constraint on psychology. In Part I, I examined the most influential and interesting arguments for individualism and found them wanting; in Part II, I dug deeper into the intuitions underlying these arguments and did some positive work towards making sense of mental causation without individualism; in Part III thus far, I have provided a more direct argument against individualism. The answer to this first question in light of the discussion to this point appears to be ‘No’.

The second question concerned the role of content within psychology: Should psychological explanations refer to an individual's mental contents? Can psychology be intentional or must it be contentfree? Although I have not discussed this second question explicitly so far, because it is distinct from the first, an individualistic psychology can be either intentional, based on a notion of narrow content, or content-free. In broad outline, these are the two positive visions of an individualistic psychology that I shall discuss in this chapter. In §2 and §3, I examine the most clearly articulated and complete expression of the content-free vision of an individualistic psychology, Stephen Stich's syntactic theory of the mind; in §§4–7, I focus on the intentional vision of an individualistic psychology by considering proposals that are part of the narrow content program. To begin, I want to motivate the content-free vision by addressing the question of why one would even want to consider the possibility of a psychology that made no significant use of the notion of content.

This is a book about individualism in psychology, a view that has generated much debate in the philosophy of mind over the last twenty years and that is pivotal for other issues in contemporary philosophical psychology: the naturalization of intentionality, the autonomy of psychology, the supervenience of the mental on the physical, the nature of mental causation, the viability of commonsense or ‘folk’ psychology, and the forms the cognitive sciences can and should take.

I have adopted a perspective on individualism that has not, in my view, received its due, one that approaches individualism in psychology from the viewpoint of the philosophy of science and attempts to identify and discuss the chief metaphysical intuitions that individualism rests on. I have also tried to make the book more accessible to those working in the cognitive sciences without compromising its philosophical audience so as to put some substance into the often glib hope expressed on jacket covers of books in the philosophy of mind: ‘This book will be of interest to psychologists and cognitive scientists’. Although the reader will find a healthy dose of quotations to illustrate views that I discuss and the occasional comparison of my particular views to those of others, I have made only brief textual citations to relevant literature in the field and have kept notes to a minimum. This way, I should manage to annoy everyone.

I have benefitted from detailed comments in the early stages of this project from Sydney Shoemaker and Robert Stalnaker, to both of whom I am grateful.

‘Folk psychology’ designates our commonsense knowledge about the mental causes of the behavior of agents who are rational in much the way that we ourselves are. We use this knowledge to predict and (especially) to explain the behavior of both ourselves and others by attributing beliefs and desires to such agents. Jane went to the refrigerator because she wanted a golden throat charmer and believed that the refrigerator was a conveniently close repository for such a drink. Peter doesn't drive when it snows because he thinks that under those conditions the roads are dangerous, and he wants to avoid harm both to himself and to others. In this chapter I focus on the place that folk psychology has in explaining human behavior, with three questions signifying the parameters of my discussion.

THREE QUESTIONS

First, how is folk psychology related to computationalism in psychology? Part of the motivation for discussing this first question comes from an interest in a more general question: What is the relationship between folk psychology and the cognitive sciences? The computational paradigm dominates much contemporary psychology and has served as an impetus for the cognitive sciences more generally. As a guide to the relationship between folk psychology and the cognitive sciences, I focus on the question about computationalism; such a focus has served as a surrogate for discussion of the more general question in much of the philosophical literature.

It has often been thought (Devitt 1990, 1991; Egan 1992; Fodor 1981a, 1987; Segal 1989a, 1991) that individualism in psychology receives support from the computational theory of mind, a view taken by many philosophers and cognitive scientists to be a foundational assumption of contemporary research in cognitive science (Cummins 1989; Pylyshyn 1984). The computational theory of mind, or computationalism, can be summarized as the view that psychological processes and states are essentially computational. It makes an empirical claim about the nature of cognitive processing and suggests to many a methodological claim about how cognitive psychology or the cognitive sciences more generally ought to proceed.

A question that arose in the conclusion to Chapter 2 was: Given that global individualism is not a general constraint on scientific explanation, what is different or special about psychological explanation that makes individualism a constraint on it? Computationalism provides the basis for an answer to this question: What is special about psychology is that it theorizes about mental processes qua computational processes, and computational processes must be individualistic. An appropriately refined version of this argument will be the focus of discussion in this chapter.

COMPUTATIONALISM IN PSYCHOLOGY

One could view the computational argument for individualism as having the same form as the argument from causal powers: The latter claims that mental processes are individualistic because of psychology's scientific nature, and the former claims that they are individualistic because of cognition's computational nature.

Individualism in psychology is a view about what mental states are, a view about how mental states are to be individuated, classified, taxonomized, or typed. It is a substantive, plausible, and controversial view that, over the last twenty years, has been the focus of much debate in the philosophy of mind. This introductory chapter has four aims: to clarify what individualism is; to explore why it is an extremely plausible view; to explain why, nonetheless, individualism is a controversial thesis about individuation in the sciences of the mind; and to set out the scope and limits of this book.

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE CHARACTERIZATIONS OF INDIVIDUALISM

In a frequently quoted passage, Tyler Burge characterizes individualism as the view that ‘the mental natures of all a person's or animal's mental states (and events) are such that there is no deep individuative relation between the individual's being in states of those kinds and the nature of the individual's physical or social environments,’ (1986a:3–4). According to Burge's formulation, individualism makes a negative claim: that the way mental states are individuated is not significantly affected by factors external to the individual who instantiates those states. Individualism is a view about the nature of mental states, a view about what's not strictly relevant to their individuation.

What Jerry Fodor calls methodological solipsism provides the same sort of negative characterization of individualism.

In Chapter 2 I considered an a priori argument for individualism, the argument from causal powers; Chapter 3 focussed on an empirical argument for individualism, the computational argument; in this chapter I consider two methodological arguments for individualism. What is the methodological clout of individualism? More particularly, are there methodological reasons for adopting individualism as a constraint on the study of cognition?

A PRIORI, EMPIRICAL, AND METHODOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS

Methodological arguments have remained very much in the background of the debate over individualism, in part because such arguments rely less directly on general, intuitive considerations that support individualism, and because the distinction between individualistic and wide psychology has not typically been drawn in terms of methodology. If there are facts about how narrow and wide explanations operate or must be developed that imply the methodological coherence or the empirical fruitfulness of only the former, then there is reason to think that research in the cognitive sciences ought to be individualistic. Such arguments are stronger than either the a priori or empirical arguments we have examined in that, if sound, they leave no further room for an appeal to explanatory practice in psychology.

We can also view these three arguments – the a priori, the empirical, and the methodological – as forming a series of possible concessions to the anti-individualist; in this respect, each of these arguments is weaker than that which precedes it.

We have seen that metaphysical constraints on properties that can be causally explanatory lead to grief for many kinds of nonpsychological explanations that are routinely and successfully accepted as causal explanations. This result suggests – rightly, in my opinion – that the Standard View conception of causal explanation is too restrictive. In response, I propose a test for a certain common and important kind of causal explanation. After defending the test against objections, I argue for the autonomy of intentional explanations, and then use the resulting thesis – that intentional explanations are not replaceable by physical explanations of the constituents of the intentional phenomena – to undermine the motivation for the Standard View of causal explanation. I argue that it is not in virtue of being brain states that beliefs are causally explanatory – even if they were brain states. Finally, I argue that the Standard View does not show how beliefs can be causally explanatory in any case. In the next chapter, I propose an alternative to the Standard View.

A TEST FOR EXPLANATORY ADEQUACY

A great deal rides on our finding causal explanations of such intentional phenomena as the defection of the working class from the Democratic party, Ross Perot's appeal, child abuse, the growth of the deficit. Hence it seems methodologically misguided to begin with a Standard View metaphysics that precludes the causal explanations we want, need, and are willing to pay millions to find.

Just as the Standard View finds its home in a particular metaphysical picture, so does Practical Realism. In Chapter 8, I sketch the larger metaphysical picture from which my account of belief is an abstraction. In this chapter, however, I want to defend Practical Realism from objections based on the metaphysics of the Standard View. The first objection is that the account of the attitudes is not “naturalistic”: It does not provide (nor does it aim to provide) nonintentional and nonsemantic conditions for having an attitude. The second objection concerns scientific psychology: It may be charged, on the one hand, that Practical Realism renders attitudes unsuitable for any theoretical role in science and, on the other hand, that, anyway, psychological research relies on (and hence indirectly confirms) the conception of beliefs as brain states. The third objection is that Practical Realism may be incompatible with materialism. The last objection is that Practical Realism is no realism at all.

NEED INTENTIONALITY BE “NATURALIZED”?

Many philosophers suppose that there is an important pretheoretical distinction between intentional and nonintentional properties. Say that a property is intentional if and only if either it is a propositional-attitude property – for example, the property of believing that such and such – or its instantiation presupposes instantiation of propositional-attitude properties. Whereas nonintentional properties, such as the property of being constituted by H2O, seem to reside safely in molecular reality, intentional properties seem to be uncertainly rooted in the physical world.

For the past couple of decades, issues concerning the nature of the mind have held center stage in philosophy. Traditional philosophers of mind, philosophers of psychology, cognitive scientists, and metaphysicians have approached the mind with the conviction that the mind is the brain: Whatever mental states there are ultimately should be understood as states of an individual's brain. Typically, philosophers have seen their task as one of working out the details of this conception.

In this book, I propose an alternative approach to the mind – one compatible both with scientific study, of the mind and with the assumption of materialism. Several years ago, I published a critique of the dominant assumptions about the mind, Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Here I try to deepen the critique and to offer a constructive proposal that, I hope, will contribute to a different way of conceiving of the mind.

Explaining Attitudes is the outcome of several years of lecturing at colleges and universities, participating in conferences, and publishing articles in journals. So a number of the ideas have not only been market-tested (so to speak) but also transformed by the comments and criticisms of many people. I am especially indebted to Derk Pereboom for his patient and perceptive reading of multiple drafts of this book and to Gareth B. Matthews and Katherine Sonderegger for searching discussion of a wide range of philosophical issues.

Proponents of the Standard View divide into two camps: non-eliminativists, who set about showing how brain states can be beliefs, and eliminative materialists, who doubt that brain states can be coherently identified with particular beliefs, and hence deny that there are beliefs or other attitudes. By denying that there are any beliefs, eliminativists bypass the problems discussed in Chapter 2. The arguments for eliminative materialism, however, all depend on construing commonsense psychology as a kind of folk theory – dubbed ‘folk psychology’ – in competition with scientific psychology. Although I do not dispute anything eliminativists say about the scientific psychology that they envisage, I think that they are seriously mistaken about the nature and function of commonsense psychology: It is not a folk theory in competition with science.

The arguments for eliminative materialism proceed from a premise with which I am in sympathy to a conclusion I reject. From the premise

the eliminative materialist concludes:

The truth of (S) depends upon the fate of a particular research program in psychology. If sentential theories, according to which beliefs are syntactically structured entities tokened in the brain, were supplanted by, say, certain kinds of neurophysiological or connectionist theories, which generalize over nothing describable as beliefs, then (S) would be established.

Proponents of the Standard View who countenance beliefs – non-eliminativists – have the task of showing how beliefs may be scientifically respectable internal states suitable for causal explanation. Since beliefs are identified by content, the task is to show how content may be assigned to internal physical states in such a way that beliefs can be causally explanatory. Although assignment of content to brain states is a purely technical problem – and as a result, this chapter is a fairly technical discussion – it is a problem whose solution is required if there are beliefs as construed by the Standard View. Eliminative materialism, discussed in Chapter 3, is not faced with these problems since it does not recognize beliefs anyway; but the problem of content and causation is an urgent one for noneliminative proponents of the Standard View.

Without trying to survey all the recent work on content, I consider three different approaches to the problem of assigning content to internal states. Two appeal to a language-of-thought hypothesis. The first, proposed by William G. Lycan, tries to show that brain states are syntactically structured entities; the second, proposed by Jerry A. Fodor, looks to a new kind of semantic property – narrow content – to be causally explanatory. The third approach, Fred Dretske's, offers an account of belief as indication, without appeal to a language of thought. I argue that none of these theories is satisfactory: They all have technical (but interesting) difficulties that seem insoluble.

Part of the power of the Standard View of the attitudes is that it seems the inevitable result of a particular well-entrenched metaphysical outlook that takes science as the arbiter of knowable reality. In challenging the Standard View, I have also challenged some of the background assumptions about the nature of reality and knowledge that generate it. Now I want to locate the conception of unreified belief in an equally comprehensive metaphysics – one importantly different from the metaphysics of proponents of the Standard View but still compatible with various forms of materialism – in which the alternative conception of belief finds a natural home.

Practical Realist metaphysics differs from Standard View metaphysics primarily in its assessment of the cognitive status of what I shall call the ‘commonsense conception of reality’. According to Standard View metaphysics, common sense is a patchwork of folk theories in potential competition with scientific theories. As we saw in Chapter 3, one prominent proponent of the Standard View, Paul Churchland, put it this way: “[T]he network of principles and assumptions constitutive of our commonsense conceptual framework can be seen to be as speculative and as artificial as any overtly theoretical system.” According to Practical Realist metaphysics, the commonsense conception is not theoretical in the same way that the sciences are; yet it is a reliable source of truth. A key feature of Practical Realism is that it strongly resists devaluation of reality as disclosed by everyday life.

The Standard View of the attitudes – shared by reductive, nonreductive, and eliminative materialists – takes beliefs, if there are any, to be constituted by brain states. In Part I, I criticized the Standard View directly, in both its eliminativist and noneliminativist versions. In Part II, I examined a central motivation for the Standard View – namely, the view that the causal explanatoriness of belief requires the Standard View – and found that the conception of causal explanation on which that motivation rests is too restrictive. To accommodate causal explanations that are successfully deployed in science and in everyday life, I proposed a general test for causal explanatoriness, which, I argued, belief explanations easily pass. In this chapter, I ask, How should the attitudes be understood if they are to play their explanatory roles? If beliefs are not brain states, what are they? I offer what I am calling ‘Practical Realism’ as an alternative to the Standard View.

WHAT ARE BELIEFS?

According to Practical Realism, believing that p is an irreducible fact about a person. Although it may be extended to things other than organisms, Practical Realism (like the Standard View) in the first instance applies to paradigmatic believers: human beings. The first claim of Practical Realism is that a belief is a global state of a whole person, not of any proper part of the person, such as the brain.