Introduction to Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches
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Introduction to Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches Kristin Andrews1 · Shannon Spaulding2 · Evan Westra1 Received: 11 August 2020 / Accepted: 17 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research program encompassing both revisionary and more traditionally inspired approaches to folk psychology. After reviewing the origins of pluralistic folk psychology, the papers in the current issue are introduced. These papers fall into three thematic clusters: Folk-psychological strategies beyond propositional attitude attribution (Section 2.1); Enculturation and regulative folk psychology (Section 2.2); and Defenses of pluralism (Section 2.3). Keywords Folk psychology · Pluralism · Theory of mind · Mindreading · Mindshaping · Social cognition
Dedicated to Ron Giere (1938–2020), who forged the path.
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Evan Westra [email protected] Kristin Andrews [email protected] Shannon Spaulding [email protected]
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Department of Philosophy, York University, S448 Ross Building, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
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Department of Philosophy, Oklahoma State University, 246 Social Sciences & Humanities Building, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA
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Synthese
1 The origins of pluralistic folk psychology “Folk psychology” refers to the way that ordinary people come to understand and navigate the social world around them. Contemporary philosophical discussions of folk psychology grew out of a series of philosophical and empirical debates in the 1980s and 1990s about the mechanisms and processes underlying our capacity to reason about the mental states of others, and, on that basis, explain and predict behavior (Carruthers and Smith 1996). Reading these debates of the 1980s and 1990s, one could easily come away with the impression that the key to understanding folk psychology was to explain how people predict and explain behavior by employing concepts of a limited subset of propositionally structured mental states—namely, beliefs and desires. Philosophers engaged in these debates widely presumed that we can make substantial progress toward a complete account of folk psychology by resolving the dispute between the two main theories of propositional attitude attribution: the Theory Theory (prominently defended by Jerry Fodor, Paul Churchland, and Alison Gopnik) and the Simulation Theory (prominently defended by Alvin Goldman, Robert Gordon, and Jane Heal). These two approaches to folk psychology represented “the only two games in town” (Stich and Nichols 1
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