In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 The Narrative Practice Hypothesis What Does It Take to Be a Folk Psychologist? Not everyone has what it takes to be a folk psychologist. The birds and the bees don’t do it; chimps don’t do it. Even little kids don’t do it! This should not surprise us. Folk psychology is not easy—it is a quite sophisticated skill. Mastery of it rests on having met a number of prerequisites. At the very least, one has to have 1. A practical understanding of the propositional attitudes 2. A capacity to represent the objects that these take—propositional contents as specified by that-clauses 3. An understanding of the “principles” governing the interaction of the attitudes, both with one another and with other key psychological players (such as perception and emotion) 4. An ability to apply all of the above sensitively (that is, adjusting for relevant differences in particular cases by making allowance for a range of variables, such as the person’s character, circumstances, etc.) Any interesting explication of folk psychology should not only say what having this rich set of abilities entails, it should also say how it is acquired. On the assumption that these abilities do not come as a “package deal,” this chapter focuses on providing an acquisitional account of (3) and (4) in terms of the Narrative Practice Hypothesis (NPH). I will, therefore, be working, as it were, from the top down. I postpone discussion of what I take to be the right acquisitional account of (1) and (2) until the next chapter. The rival offerings—theory theory and simulation theory—are uninspiring in this respect. For, as later chapters will reveal, they do not provide any deep understanding of (3). All the existing theories presuppose some kind of commerce with the principles of intentional psychology, whether this is imagined to take the form of a tacit or explicit theoretical understanding or a practical capacity to manipulate one’s own mental states in accord with them (thus, quite literally, embodying them). But presupposing the existence of such abilities is not the same as adequately explaining how they first came to be in place. Eventually, I aim to show that the existing theories do not meet this explanatory demand. More than this, as far as I can see, they do not trouble themselves with giving an account of (4) at all. Before getting started, it is worth saying a few words about what distinguishes having an understanding of desires or beliefs (and even desires and beliefs) from having an understanding of reasons. Doing so will help us to properly characterize our true quarry. It is empirically well established that children make propositional attitude ascriptions before they learn to explicate , explain, or predict actions in terms of reasons. For example, at around two years of age, children are in secure possession of “an early intentional understanding of persons having internal goals and wants that differ from person to person” (Wellman and Phillips 2001, 130; Bartsch and Wellman 1995, chap. 4).1 The two-year-old understanding of desires can be rather sophisticated: children understand, for instance, how desires relate to emotions and perceptions and what would relevantly and consistently satisfy specific desires—thus they exhibit some fluency with counterfactual thinking of a limited sort. As impressive as this is, it goes without saying that these abilities do not amount to an understanding of beliefs. Nor would an understanding of desires and beliefs conjunctively equal an understanding of reasons. These are all logically distinct abilities. We can see the main point at issue if we consider that for a great many coordinating purposes it is often enough to know simply what it is that McX likes or wants. Young children are certainly capable of noting this sort of thing and making good use of it—it is what enables them to make certain low-level, inductively driven predictions about what others are likely to do. But this capacity in itself is quite different from understanding why McX might have acted for a reason. More is needed for that—in particular, the child would have to be able to understand that McX’s action issued from a complex “state of mind,” one having a particular kind of implicit structure. Said structure is what one alludes to when one says McX not only likes, say, yogurt but is eating it for breakfast because he believes it will make him healthy—implying, of course, that good health...

Share