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Chapter 7. What Is Folk Psychological Explanation?
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7 What Is Folk Psychological Explanation? I may have said the same thing before . . . but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different. —Oscar Wilde A Preliminary Account of Folk Psychological Explanation At this point, we have seen many reasons to reject the claim that folk psychology should be understood as the attribution of the propositional attitudes, because we do have robust success in predicting behavior without having to attribute beliefs. Though in some cases we do need to appeal to propositional attitudes, I argue that we do so largely when making prognosticating or deliberate predictions rather than in our typical and largely automatic quotidian predictions. Turning now to folk psychological explanation, we will see that attributing propositional attitudes is a common way of explaining behavior, but it is by no means the only method we use. In turn, explanatory pluralism raises a challenge against the view that the folk take propositional attitudes to be the cause of all intentional behavior. Before defending these points, I must first make clear what we are doing when we offer folk explanations of behavior. So far we have been working with a preliminary account of folk psychological explanation (or FP explanation for short) as something that fulfills a person’s drive to understand another person or as an answer to a folk psychological why-question. This working definition of FP explanation is unsatisfying for a number of reasons. For one, it is rather vague. For another, it might appear to be subjective. In this chapter, I intend to address these issues and develop a fuller account of FP explanation that is descriptively accurate, rather than normative. As in the discussion of predicting behavior, what I am interested in here is how we in fact explain 116 Chapter 7 behavior, rather than in developing a prescriptive theory about how we should be explaining behavior. The account I develop will be compared with the descriptive accounts derived from theory theory and simulation models, and I argue that my account is more empirically adequate than the others. To illuminate what is at stake in FP explanation, it may be useful to compare it with scientific explanation. Compared to FP explanation, an enormous amount of philosophical work has been done on the notion of scientific explanation. To a certain extent, I think a theory of scientific explanation has simply been imported into the standard account of FP explanation, to the detriment of our understanding of FP explanation. I hope to show how the goals of FP explanation are different from the goals of scientific explanation, to set the stage for developing an empirically adequate model of FP explanation that is distinct from models of scientific explanation. Scientific explanation has as its object of understanding the actual physical world, and it purports to offer something more than a description of the world. The standard way of drawing the distinction between a description and an explanation is to say that descriptions are accounts of singular events, whereas explanations refer to underlying principles to offer a general account of why things happen as they do. In science, an explanation is part of a larger theoretical model, and one goal of science is to find true theories that cite the laws of nature. One purpose of science is to uncover the truth, so evaluating explanations in science demands a strong veristic criterion. On the other hand, we have the kinds of explanations people offer when engaged in nonscientific inquiry about others and their actions. While science has truth as its goal, FP explanation does not share this single-minded focus. Empirical evidence demonstrates that people offer explanations of their own and others’ behavior to fulfill a number of pragmatic goals; we explain behavior to impress other people, to condemn other people, and even to reduce the discomfort associated with having seemingly inconsistent beliefs about a person. These goals are more central to typical behavior explanation than is the goal of truth, and while our FP explanations tend to be consistent with the other things we know, we have no veristic requirement for whether something counts as an FP explanation or not. Psychologists who study our explanatory behavior do not analyze explanations in terms of justification or truth. As Heider puts it, regardless of whether a person’s explanations are true, they are that [44.201.131.213] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:18 GMT) What Is Folk Psychological Explanation? 117 person’s explanations and “must be taken into account...