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Chapter 2. Baby Humans and Adult Chimpanzees: Propositional Attitude Attribution in Philosophy and Psychology
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2 Baby Humans and Adult Chimpanzees: Propositional Attitude Attribution in Philosophy and Psychology Why is it we don’t see skin-bags but husbands and wives and children—people with thoughts and feelings, beliefs and desires like ours. . . ? —Alison Gopnik, Andrew Meltzoff, and Patricia Kuhl From Philosophy to Psychology In the last chapter, I suggested that a common assumption of Standard Folk Psychology (SFP) is that folk psychology consists primarily of the attribution of propositional attitudes. A propositional attitude will take the form Person-Attitude-Proposition: Brian hopes that the Chiefs will win; Sam believes that he will visit the Giza pyramids; Anne hates that classes start on Tuesday. According to SFP, we use the attitudes to anticipate what others will do next and to explain why people did what they did, and the attitudes are seen as both a cause of behavior and a tool that we use to understand others and ourselves. Indeed, the ability to attribute propositional attitudes, and especially the ability to attribute belief, is taken to be necessary for understanding other minds. I challenge the claim that the ability to attribute propositional attitudes and having the concept of belief are necessary for successfully engaging in our folk psychological predictive and explanatory practices. The emphasis on the need to attribute beliefs and desires to others, and to engage in a calculation to predict or explain behavior, is part of a larger trend in philosophy and cognitive science associated with information-processing models of mind, and its influence has also been felt in developmental and comparative psychology. In this chapter, I first demonstrate that while it is widely held that a folk psychologist is someone who is skilled at the practices of predicting, explaining, and interpreting behavior, it is also generally assumed that folk psychology consists of the attribution of propositional attitudes. I then 14 Chapter 2 turn to the research on children’s emerging understanding of belief to undermine the conjunction of these two claims. Since we are taking the practices of folk psychology to be central to the notion, a tension between the two claims should lead to a rejection of the assumption that a folk psychologist must also be a belief attributor. Until recently, psychologists thought that children do not have the ability to attribute belief until around four years, because it is not until then that they have an understanding of belief as representational (Wellman et al. 2001). However, this view has been challenged based on the growing body of evidence that even young infants are capable of tracking an actor’s false belief (Baillargeon et al. 2010). I argue that these studies do not offer compelling evidence that infants have a folk understanding of representational belief and that there are other methods they can use to make predictions and form expectations about how a person with a false belief should act. Further, I argue that even at four years, children do not have anything like a robust understanding of representational belief. I conclude that during childhood, children continue to develop and refine an understanding of representational belief, all the while acting as fully fledged folk psychologists who predict, explain, justify, and coordinate behavior with others. The interpretation of the children studies owes much to the tradition in philosophy that emphasizes the role of belief and desire as a cause of action, and as the way of understanding others’ actions, so let us begin there. Belief Attribution in Philosophy The view that behavior is both caused by beliefs and desires and understood through their attribution can be traced back at least to classical times. In looking to understand animal and human behavior, Aristotle (1987) postulated that desire is the fundamental cause of action. For Aristotle, it is desire in conjunction with the ability to perceive the world that leads humans and other animals to action. I desire to eat, so when I perceive food, I will move toward it; but when I desire to avoid a fight, I move away from my potential opponent. Desire alone will not lead to these actions, though, because if desires were the complete cause of behavior, the only thing that would stop us from acting on a desire would be a stronger, conflicting desire. But we sometimes avoid fulfilling our desires even while lacking a stronger desire in the other direction. Aristotle concludes that desire, while necessary for action, cannot be sufficient. Instead desire must [3.147.62.92] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:37 GMT...