Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!uunet!psinntp!scylla!daryl
From: daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough)
Subject: Re: Folk psychology (was: Is Common Sense Explicit or Implicit?)
Message-ID: <1994Sep27.141324.5893@oracorp.com>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Inc.
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 14:13:24 GMT
Lines: 67

markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:

>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.

Somehow I missed Neil's response to my post, but I agree with what
Mark is saying here. Folk psychology is (I repeat) *enormously*
successful at predicting the behavior of humans, so successful that it
is taken for granted, and only its failures are noticed.

Take almost any example of a simple interaction involving two humans.
If you tell somebody that "You left your car lights on." or "You left
your car window down, and it's starting to rain." and you can predict
with good accuracy how that person will react. Why is that? I think it
is because you assume that the person has certain desires (not to run
down his battery, not to get the inside of his car wet), and that he
will act on them based on the information he has available. If
somebody asks you "Why did that person go back to his car?" you will
be able to tell them "To turn off his lights" or "To roll up his
windows". These are trivial predictions, but if you consider how very
complex human behavior is, it is a tremendous success to be able to
make such predictions. The idea that some advanced theory of the brain
will supplant folk psychology in reasoning about such things seems
completely ridiculous to me. Not because I doubt that there will be
such advances, but because the folk psychology explanation is the
*correct* explanation already. If you had answered the question "Why
did that person go back to his car?" with an answer such as "Because
synapses fired, causing an electrochemical pulse to travel to his leg
muscles" people would have considered you insane. Not that the answer
is wrong, only that it is inappropriate, at the wrong level.

To me, folk psychology defines the subject matter of cognitive science
and Artificial Intelligence. A system will never be considered
intelligent or conscious unless some kind of folk psychology applies
to it. Computers surpass humans in chess-playing ability, and maybe
someday they will surpass us in mathematics and all other kinds of
reasoning. But they will not be considered to have minds unless they
have something that we can recognize as goals, beliefs, desires, plans
for the future, memory of the past. In other words, they must be
understandable in terms of folk psychology.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY
