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What anchors our understanding, as researchers, of intentional action, knowledge, intention and the rest?
option 1 : the researcher’s personal expertise
objection - diversity
objection - lexical fallacy (Fiske, 2020)
As philosophers see
folk psychology ...
‘When someone is in so-and-so combination of mental states and receives sensory stimuli of so-and-so kind, he tends with so-and-so probability to be caused thereby to go into so-and-so mental states and produce so-and-so motor responses.’
(Lewis, 1972, p. 256)
(my|your|his|her|their) phone
is trying to (excluding ‘kill me’) [283,000]
wants to [278,000]
hates [147,000]
likes [86,800]
thinks (e.g. ‘My phone thinks I’m in another city’) [53,400]
is pretending [16,000]
Is
folk psychology
a source of common knowledge of principles
that implicitly define ‘intention’, ‘knowledge’, and the rest
?
Lewis (1972) vs Heider (1958)
What anchors our understanding, as researchers, of intentional action, knowledge, intention and the rest?
option 1 : the researcher’s personal expertise
objection - diversity
objection - lexical fallacy (Fiske, 2020)
option 2 : philosophical accounts
obstacle - diversity
| INTENTION | yes | no |
| Is it a mental state? | Davidson (1978) | Thompson (2008) |
| Is it a belief? | Velleman (1989) | Bratman (1987) |
| Entails belief? | Harman (1976) | Levy (2018) |
| Linked to planning? | (Bratman, 1985) | |
| Incompatible with habitual? | Kalis & Ometto (2021) | |
| Entails non-observational knowledge | Anscombe (1957) | |
| Comes in two kinds? | Searle (1983) | Brozzo (2021) |
Two obstacles
- many incompatible theories, each only slightly different from nearby alterantives
- differences hard to operationalize
What anchors our understanding, as researchers, of intentional action, knowledge, intention and the rest?
option 1 : the researcher’s personal expertise
objection - diversity
objection - lexical fallacy (Fiske, 2020)
option 2 : philosophical accounts
obstacle - diversity
objection - n’ting good anchors philosophers’ understandings
Philosophical Folk Psychology
‘epistemic case intuitions are generated by [...] folk psychology’
Nagel (2012, p. 510)
‘some part of us finds it almost impossible not to categorise them as’ agents
Steward (2009, p. 229)
Philosophical accounts of minds and actions ...
... anchor a shared understanding of what knowledge, belief, joy and the rest are.
... could be (mis)used to characterise various models of mind.
What anchors our understanding, as researchers, of action, belief, knowledge and the rest?
option 1 : the researcher’s personal expertise
objection - diversity
objection - lexical fallacy (Fiske, 2020)
option 2 : philosophical accounts
obstacle - diversity
objection - n’ting good anchors philosophers’ understandings
option 3 : work back from operationalization
obstacle - which one? (Happé, Cook, & Bird, 2017; Beaudoin, Leblanc, Gagner, & Beauchamp, 2020)
objection - no single factor (Warnell & Redcay, 2019)