Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons

Preface

Preface The Cognitive Revolution . . . was intended to bring “mind” back into the human sciences after a long cold winter of objectivism. . . . Some critics, perhaps unkindly, argue that the new cognitive science, the child of the revolution, has gained its technical advantages at the price of de-humanising the very concept of mind it had sought to re-establish in psychology, and that it has thereby estranged much of psychology from the other human sciences and the humanities. —Bruner, Acts of Meaning Folk psychology is a philosopher’s label for the practice of making sense of intentional actions, minimally, by appeal to an agent’s motivating beliefs and desires.1 It is the sort of thing one does, for example, when digesting Jane’s explanation of her late arrival at a meeting because she mistakenly thought it was being held in a different room. Taking our friend at her word (i.e., if we assume that she had genuinely wanted to attend the meeting on time), we will blame the content of her beliefs for the confusion on this occasion. This is something we do, and have the standing capacity to do, unthinkingly. We rely on it constantly. Established wisdom has it that this workaday ability is something we inherited from our ancient ancestors. Proponents of the hotly debated dominant offerings for understanding folk psychology—known as theory theory and simulation theory—typically hold that our ancient cognitive endowment takes one of three forms. It is (1) a very special kind of subpersonal mechanism that literally contains the relevant mentalistic theory, (2) a basic starter theory that is modified by theory-formation mechanisms that fashion a mature theory of mind during ontogeny, or (3) a series of subpersonal mindreading mechanisms that enable direct manipulation of the relevant mental states themselves. To accept any of these views (or some hybrid combination of them) is to accept that our folk psychological abilities are essentially (or at least in important respects) a kind of biological inheritance. That some such account must be true is encouraged by the apparent fact that, after a fairly stable pattern of staged development—though one that can be subject to specific delays—all normal human children of all cultures come to understand actions in terms of reasons using the same basic mentalistic framework and its conceptual ingredients. In other words, many believe that the human capacity to use mature folk psychology is a universal trait of our species. An important exception is those individuals who have autism. They exhibit a distinctive set of impairments—impairments that, inter alia, severely restrict their capacity to develop a folk psychological understanding, to the extent that they are able to do so at all. These considerations fuel the idea that such abilities must be written into the very fabric of our being: a gift from our evolutionary ancestors. Against this idea, this book provides an elaborate defence of the claim that our capacity to understand intentional actions in terms of reasons has a decidedly sociocultural basis. It advances and explicates the hypothesis that children only come by the requisite framework for such understanding and master its practical application by being exposed to and engaging in a distinctive kind of narrative practice. I call this the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH). Its core claim is that direct encounters with stories about persons who act for reasons—those supplied in interactive contexts by responsive caregivers—is the normal route through which children become familiar with both (1) the basic structure of folk psychology and (2) the norm-governed possibilities for wielding it in practice, thus learning both how and when to use it. The overarching aim of this book is to introduce this possibility into the mix, thus breaking some new ground. My purpose is to make as strong case as is possible for the underexamined idea that our interpretative abilities may well be socioculturally grounded. This requires not only spelling out the positive contours of the NPH, which is the task of chapter 2, but also challenging certain widely held assumptions that might otherwise make it look like a less-than-serious contender for explaining the basis and origin of our mature folk psychological abilities. Consequently, apart from extolling the virtues of the NPH, a fair bit of space is given over to putting its dominant rivals under appropriate pressure. I make no apologies for this since overturning assumptions that prevent us from thinking clearly about important issues is a legitimate, indeed unavoidable...