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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Folk psychology (was: Is Common Sense Explicit or Implicit?)
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References: <1994Sep21.131455.3228@oracorp.com> <35q0l5$mgr@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 17:32:32 GMT
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In article <35q0l5$mgr@mp.cs.niu.edu>, Neil Rickert <rickert@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough) writes:
>>Using folk psychology to describe human behavior in terms of desires,
>>beliefs, emotions, and plans provides *enormous* explanatory and
>>predictive power.
>
>I would say that folk psychology has enormous explanatory power and
>negligible predictive power, when applied to humans.  On the other
>hand, when applied to rocks it has enormous predictive power, and
>negligible explanatory power.  Could this be because we are socially
>conditioned to accept folk psychological explanations when applied to
>humans, and to reject them when applied to rocks?

Whoa.  The size of the gap between these statements is itself remarkable
and calls out for explanation.  How can Daryl think that folk psychology
has "enormous" predictive power, and Neil think it's "negligible"?
It's hard to believe that the two of you have wildly different personal
experiences with prediction; it seems more likely that you're talking
about two different things somewhere along the line.

Neil goes on to suggest an informal reason why we might overestimate
the predictive power of folk psychology.  I'll suggest an informal reason
why we might underestimate it: namely, like language, it's normally
so sophisticated and accurate that we're hardly aware of its correct
functioning, only of its relatively rare errors.

Searle basically makes this same point: 
   Aristotle and Descartes would have been completely familiar with most of
   our explanations of human behaviour, but not with our explanations of
   biological and physical phenomena.  The reason usually adduced for this 
   is that Aristotle and Descartes had both a primitive theory of biology
   and physics ont he one hand, and a primitive theory of human behaviour
   on the other; and that while we have advanced in biology and physics, we
   have made no comparable advance in the explanation of human behaviour.
   I want to suggest an alternative view.  I think that Aristotle and
   Descartes, like ourselves, already had a sophisticated and complex theory
   of human behaviour.  I also think that many supposedly scientific accounts
   of human behaviour, such as Freud's, in fact employ rather than replace
   the principles of our implicit theory of human behaviour.  
   [_Minds, Brains and Science_, p. 59.]

Evolutionarily, this ability should be no great surprise.  Animals have
been closely observing (and predicting) the behavior of others in the 
flock or herd or pack for millions of years.  
