Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments First and foremost, I offer sincere apologies to my wife, Farah, and three boys—Alex, Rais, and Emerson—for lost family time, unhealthy levels of household stress, and the general distractedness of their husband and father. I fear, like Victor Frankenstein, “Study had before secluded me from the intercourse of my fellow creatures and rendered me unsocial” (Shelley, Frankenstein, 2003/1817, 55). Equally, my parents, Margaret and William Hutto, deserve special mention. They have been absolute pillars of moral support not only during this project but in everything leading up to it. I owe them far more than I can possibly express. I am especially grateful to the Edwards family for supplying me with a ticket to an abundance of sustaining caffeine—and to the staff in Caffé Nero, Chesham, for providing me with a place where I could think in peace away from builders (and make free use of electricity) during the early stages of the work. Our research assistants, Michael Paulin, Kim van Gennip, and especially Hanne De Jaegher, provided invaluable support, copyediting and supplying comments on the manuscript in ways that enabled me to get the final version of it in good order. I am extremely grateful to them for this. Intellectually speaking, I am grateful to the following researchers either for invigorating discussions or for comments on material relating to this project: Fred Adams, Jens Allwood, Kristin Andrews, Sherry Asgill, Ignar Brinck, Filip Buekens, Mark Cain, Ron Chrisley, Tim Crane, Gregory Currie, Adrian Cussins, Hans Dooremalen, Ralph Ellis, Shaun Gallagher, Vittorio Gallese, Peter Goldie, Alvin Goldman, Bob Gordon, Peter Hobson, Tomasz Komendziński, Heidi Maibom, Bertram Malle, Victoria McGeer, Richard Menary, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Erik Myin, Keld Stehr Nielsen, Matthew Ratcliffe, Mark Rowlands, Anthony Rudd, Chris Sinha, Barry Stocker, Marc Stors, Karsten Stueber, Penny Vinden, Bill Wringe, Dan Zahavi and Jordan Zlatev. The correspondence I had with Donald Davidson and Ruth Millikan has had and continues to have a profound influence on my thinking. Although they would probably be aghast at my attempted fusion of their approaches, I remain deeply indebted to both of them for their generous advice and formative comments. More generally, I thank my colleagues at Hertfordshire and the staff at the following departments who allowed me to make preliminary trials of my ideas: Leeds (February 2002), Lund (September 2002), New Hampshire (December 2003), Durham (February 2004), Reading (February 2004), Sussex (October and November 2004), Tilburg (November 2005), Gothenburg (December 2005), Lund (December 2005), and Copenhagen (October 2006). In a similar vein, I thank the organizers and audiences of the following workshops and conferences: European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP) (Salzburg 2001); Philosophy, Phenomenology and Psychiatry (Gothenburg 2003); Joint Session of the Mind/Aristotelian Society (Kent 2004); Joint Conference of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP)/ESPP (Barcelona 2004); “Phenomenology, Intersubjectivity and Theory of Mind” (Orlando 2005); The Royal Institute of Philosophy “Narrative and Understanding Persons” conference (Hertfordshire 2005); ESPP (Lund 2005); “Examining Folk Psychology” (Toronto 2005); “Theory of Mind, Representation and Action” (Antwerp 2005); Philosophy, Psychiatry and the Neurosciences (Leiden 2006); “Situated Cognition” (Durham 2006); ESPP (Belfast 2006); “Embodied and Situated Cognition” (Torun 2006). I am grateful to the editors and publishers of the following journals/ anthologies for allowing me to reuse material (often reworked) in this book: “Folk Psychological Explanations: Narratives and the Case of Autism,” Philosophical Papers 32, no. 3 (2003), 345–361; “The Limits of Spectatorial Folk Psychology,” Mind and Language 19, no. 5. (2004): 548–573; “Knowing What? Radical versus Conservative Enactivism,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 389–405; “Starting without Theory,” in B. Malle and S. Hodges, eds., Other Minds: How Humans Bridge the Divide between Self and Others, 56–72 (New York: Guilford, 2005); “Unprincipled Engagements: Emotional Experience, Expression and Response,” in R. Menary, ed., Consciousness and Emotion: Special issue on Radical Enactivism (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006) (I have also used elements from the following replies made to commentaries on that target paper: “Against Passive Intellectualism: Reply to Crane”; “Embodied Expectations and Extended Possibilities: Reply to Goldie”; “Four Herculean xx Acknowledgments Labours: Reply to Hobson”; “Narrative Practice and Understanding Reasons: Reply to Gallagher”); “Folk Psychology without Theory or Simulation ,” in D. Hutto and M. Ratcliffe, eds., Folk Psychology Reassessed (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007); “The Narrative Practice Hypothesis: Origins and Applications of Folk Psychology,” in D. Hutto, ed., Narrative and Understanding Persons, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement (Cambridge: Cambridge...