Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 18:3 002 1-8308-82.50

Elimination, Enlightenment and the Normative Content of Folk Psychology

JANE BRAATEN

Not long ago, philosophers ofscience in high standing considered it their task to eliminate theoretical terms in favor of non-inferential expressions of experience. Recently, however, intentional representations themselves have come to be viewed, in eliminative materialist circles, as the theoretical entities of an obsolete theory - folk or common sense psychology. Eliminative materialism predicts the withering away offolk psychology, as we know it, by one ofroughly two means: retentive reduction, or reduction that retains the categories and generalizations of folk psychology, and gradual displacement, or reduction that displaces the categories and generalizations of folk psychology.

This paper takes a guarded sympathetic approach towards the millenialist enthusiasm of two of the most optimistic and prominent eliminative materialists - Paul Churchland and Patricia Smith Churchland.' The work of Paul Churchland, although not overtly committed to retentive reductionism, gives more credence to this view than does the work of Patricia Smith Churchland, who fairly consistently predicts that folk psychology will be displaced by a co- evolved theory from scientific psychology and neuroscience. The displacement view is more radical than the retentive view, since the former does not promise that our future understanding of human behavior will be recognizable from our present perspective.

I wish to defend the conjunction of two claims that have hitherto been assumed to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, I wish to defend the radical revisability of folk behavioral theory. Thus, I accept most of the basic contentions of the displacement view. On the other hand, I will argue that folk behavioral generalizations and explanations are inherently normative as well as descriptive, and that the former feature of folk explanations is non-displacable.

Several reviewers of Patricia Churchland's recent Neurophilosophy have expressed misgivings about eliminativism on the grounds that folk psychology

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performs at least some non-descriptive functions, few of which have been acknowledged by eliminativists.S I believe that their case can be made more forcefully, without doing so in a way that renders folk psychology immune from revision by developments in neuroscience. In addition, the following account provides an explanation for the widely held conviction that folk psychology is a part ofsocial life just as much as it is a theory intended to get the facts straight.

The argument proceeds from a fairly uncontentious characterization of folk psychology, which is developed and defended in the first two sections of this paper. I believe that both proponents and critics alike have overlooked the importance, to the debate on eliminativism, ofsome features of folk psychology that derive from the role that i t plays in social interaction. Although it would be bad a priori philosophy to suppose that folk psychology is meant to fulfill some particular purpose, since these, presumably, may vary, I shall assume that people need a coherent theory of human behavior(of some kind) in order to interact socially - we need to understand what is going on socially in order to find our places in the social world. The first and second sections will be primarily concerned with showing what a theory would have to contain in order to provide an effective basis for social interaction. In the first section, I argue that such a theory is an empirical theory, and one that is more comprehensive than is often supposed by philosophers. In the second section, I illustrate ways in which our folk behavioral theory contains deeply entrenched normative content. The argument that any theory of behavior employed in setting the terms ofsocial interaction must contain such normative content (and thus that normative content is non-displacable) will occur in the fourth section.

The third and fourth sections address the eliminative materialism of the two Churchlands. In the third section I shall address Paul Churchland’s claim that folk psychology can be enriched by the reduction of folk psychological terms to neurophysiological ones. I acknowledge here a t the outset, and shall not argue any further, that the actual course of research in the cognitive sciences is not encouraging to retentive reductionism. Except in the areas of study concerned with sensory and motor functions, retentive reductionism is failing as an empirical theory about theories.* My argument in this section is that the claim that a refeuantCy similar “image” of folk theory might appear in a successful reduction of folk psychology presupposes an artificial view of what is relevant. However, since the displacement view does not claim that a successful reduction offolk theory will contain accounts ofthe “same phenomena”, the displacement view escapes this objection.

Ifmy characterization offolk psychology and its social use is correct, then the social need for such a theory of behavior will function as a limiting constraint (albeit a very liberal one) on the displacement thesis - the thesis that folk psychology is slated for the ash-heap of history. In the fourth section, then, I shall argue that even given a generous and optimistic outlook for future neuroscience, the argument that folk psychology is altogether displacable is

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weak. My argument turns upon the normative content of folk psychology, which, I shall claim, is ineliminable from any theory of human behavior that provides understanding sufficient to inform the design of and participation in social institutions. I want to emphasize, however, that this argument need not and ought not be taken as a defense for instrumentalism about folk psychology.

1. FOLK PSYCHOLOGY IS A THEORY OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Folk psychology is the psychological theory of the ordinary person, untutored in theoretical psychology or neurophysiology. This psychological theory is not the product ofmere idle speculation; it has been constructed for a practical purpose, or a number of them. By most accounts, folk psychology is (more or less) a theory, or better, the theory that is commonly used to describe, explain and predict human behavior, in accordance with a few simple and pragmatically determined standards of systematicity.

The claim that folk psychology is an empirical theory, constructed for the purposes of explanation and prediction, has been contested. Kathleen Wilkes, for example, has rested her defense of common-sense psychology against eliminativism on the contention that i t is constructed for “a wider and more flexible range of uses than the austere scientific ones of systematic description and e~planat ion.”~ However, it can be admitted that folk psychology is intended as an empirical theory that provides systematic explanations without assuming that what counts as an explanation in folk psychology would pass as an explanation in the cognitive sciences, or vice versa. Furthermore, the pragmatics of explanation within two distinct theoretical pursuits can differ greatly without thereby entailing differing degrees of confirmation.

An important positive consideration in support of the claim that folk psychology is an empirical theory is the fact that we do make extensive use of a common sense explanatory theory of human behavior. The claim is well warranted that, until we are furnished with a different kind of background knowledge for use in social interaction, the availability of rough and ready folk theoretical explanations and predictions does enable the fulfillment of many basic individual and societal purposes. For example, such a theory is employed in individuals’ responses to the behavior of others, and in planning their own actions in order to elicit certain responses from others. At the societal level, without some commonly shared understanding of the causes of human behavior, we would be helpless to formulate and implement social policy - written or unwritten. If so, however, then the suggestion that the empirical correctness and explanatory use of folk theory are not at all central is unwarranted.

What must a theory contain in order to provide a sufficiently comprehensive and usable theory of human behavior? The required degree of comprehension

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will depend upon the magnitude of the range of practical pursuits engaged in within a particular society, and the complexity of its organizations and practices. The utility of the theory will depend upon its ability to explain and predict the behavior of individuals and of the collectives they comprise. Our own folk psychology makes use of a broad taxonomy of types that includes not only types of intentional states but also personality and moral character types, types of behavior, of ‘normal’ pursuits and the means of achieving them, and of rela tionships.

Once we begin to consider in any detail what, in particular, our folk psychology avails itself of in order to describe, explain and predict behavior even at a crude level, our conception of folk psychology begins to depart somewhat from the standard usage of the term in the philosophical literature. Judging by the examples used there, folk psychology is little more than the ordinary language philosophy of mind (containing synonomies between psychological predicates) or, in Mr. Churchland’s case, little more than a crude psychology of color, sound and heat perception.6 However, unless folk psychology is, after all, a whimsical product of armchair speculation, there is something amiss about characterizations that narrow its subject matter or equate it with what is written by analytic philosophers of mind. To use a distinction coined by Mr. Churchland, such characterizations capture some of the semantically important (roughly: ‘analytic’) sentences of folk psychology, but very few if any of the systemically important ones - the empirical generalizations that lend folk psychology its empirical nature.’ The ways in which, for example, a folk social psychologist, a folk personality psychologist, and a humanist or virtue ethicist do and make use of folk psychology diverge considerably from the analytic philosopher’s use of theory.

There is a notably artificial feel to the supposition that such disciplinary divisions as those between social, developmental and personality psychology exist in folk psychology. For this reason I prefer to speak of folk behavioral theory rather than of folk psychology. Our folk behavioral theory, however bad a theory it is, exists for practical purposes that call for a more or less unijed and comprehensive theory of persons and societies. We need not only to explain the behavior of individuals, but also the behavior of aggregates of individuals, organizations and aggregates of organizations, and folk theory contains a number of very rough intuitions about what sorts of generalizations apply to each of these entities. In general, moreover, accounts of behavior of organ- izations must not be incompatible with accounts of the behavior of the individuals comprising it, and accounts of individual behavior are aften meaningful only given background knowledge about the behavior of the organizations they belong to. Since the understanding required for successfully fulfilling such explanatory purposes is wholistic - i.e., it subsumes knowledge at several logically separable levels of explanation - it would be unwarranted,

Elimination, Enlightenment and the Normative Content of Folk Psychology 255 I believe, to assume that folk behavioral explanations can, without imposing artificial boundaries, be grouped under headings derived from academic departments. By the same token, however, it would be unwarranted to assume that folk psychology’s boundary on neuropsychology is, as a matter of necessity, any more distinct.

11. THE NORMATIVE CONTENT OF FOLK THEORIES OF BEHAVIOR

In this section I shall argue that our folk behavioral theory possesses normative content. That is, its generalizations and explanations express not only causal account and descriptions of regularities but also norms pertaining to human conduct - norms specifying what counts as normal, appropriate, and intelligible action. This proposal contains at least one significant implication for the study of descriptive ethics, which 1 shall not develop here: that the content of the moral imagination or ethos of a community is at least largely a part of its shared theory of behavior.8 The blithe assumption being made here, that a theory can be both an empirical theory and a normative framework for human conduct, might seem incoherent to some readers. In what follows I shall focus my efforts upon illustrating that folk behavioral theory does possess normative content, and later, I shall argue that this is essential to the purposes for which we have a folk theory of behavior at all. In doing so, however, I hope to add plausibility to the hypothesis that at least one kind of theory - folk theories of behavior - can be both empirical and normative.

The normative content of folk psychology can best be illustrated by examining some of our uses of the generalizations, explanations and predictions supplied by a folk theory of behavior. Among the many practical purposes fulfilled by folk theory are, in our own culture, ( I ) the provision of a source of inductive support for choices of norms, institutions and policies, (z)a means for the understanding ofsocial trends and events, and (3) the provision ofa means of institutional and behavioral criticism. In the performance of each of these functions, it is possible to discern the operation of a non-descriptive element in folk generalizations and explanations.

Firstly, the time-tested generalizations of folk psychology are adduced as inductive support for such things as moral principles (e.g. the Principle of Greatest Happiness), principles of institutional justice (e.g. Rawls’ two principles) and social and political policies (e.g., cutting welfare, and U.S. aid to the Contras in Nicaragua). Of course, the advice of specialists is sought in many ofthese matters, but from the eliminativest point ofview, such people are, in the main, specialized folk theorists.

Mill’s observation that “People seek happiness” contains some normative content, as becomes obvious when we try to explain the behavior of someone

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who is ‘self-destructive’. Rawls’ defense of his two principles of justice itself rests upon normatively loaded expectations about the ‘average’ individual underlying our particular natures. Critics of the welfare state may bring forth such generalizations as “People on welfare lack ambition”, an observation that not only (allegedly) describes, but also places a certain group of people with respect to the critic’s normative expectations. As yet another example, generalizations concerning what sorts of things make people indignant, and what sorts of things they do when they become indignant, are not merely descriptive, they also operate as norms governing what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior in that society, given the value it assigns to dignity. Such generalizations contribute to the coherence of our understanding of human behavior not only by supplying knowledge of general regularities in human behavior, but also by supplying normative standards as to what is desirable and appropriate in our responses. The normative content of folk generalizations contributes to the intelligibility of human behavior not only by classifying types of behavioral causes, but by classifying them in ways that reinforce social expectations, and provide guideposts in the process of socialization.

Secondly, folk behavioral explanations are adduced in making sense of social and cultural history, which otherwise would be confined to inventories, lists of memos and the like. They are essential to making sense of current affairs (why evangelism is on the rise, why the Palestinians are rioting). Likewise, they play a fundamental part in such diverse activities as childrearing, lending emotional support to someone, the management of a company department, and shopping for a suit of clothing. In brief, folk behavioral explanations provide the understanding that constitutes our present basis for reasoned responses to social events.

Explanations that provide common sense understanding are, in general, explanations that make people more or less rational, and sometimes we will go so far as to attribute unconscious beliefs in order to do so. Rational explanations do not only give folk accounts of the causes of actions; they also justify them as reasonable things to do. The normativity of behavioral explanations will be further discussed in the fourth section.

Thirdly, folk theory’s explanations serve at least a minimal critical function - they rationalize (or fail to rationalize) an action. Some explanations not only justify actions in this minimal sense, they include or imply evaluative judgments about the agent or the agent’s action. Some explanations, for example, employ approbative or disapprobative premises about the agent’s dispositions (“She stood her ground, because she’s courageous”); some explanations are intended, while explaining an event, to trace moral responsibility to certain individuals or organizations (“The mayor’s negligence can be thanked for the effects of the city’s new policy on the homeless”). Perhaps it is because one of the uses to which folk behavioral explanations are put is evaluative or critical, that

Elimination, Enlightenment and the Normative Content of Folk PsychologV 257 ‘thick’ moral terms, such as ‘courageous’ and ‘negligent’, and other evaluative terms do not seem out of place in folk theoretical explanation^.^ Some uses of evaluative terms such as ‘courage’, ‘sincerity’ and ‘ambition’ in folk explanations are openly normative. Even recently adopted technical terms, such as ‘neurotic’ and ‘sociopathic’, have acquired non-technical, yet not merely polemical evaluative senses. Our folk psychological taxonomy of character or dispositional types appears to be at least in part concerned, then, to distinguish various types of (moral and non-moral) worthiness and un- worthiness.

Norms and evaluative terms that apply to behavior specify what is worth doing or being, given some conception of worth or good. Thus, categorical imperatives aside, the rationality norm applies to actions that are worth doing because they maximize some good (though the good in question may not be one which others think ought to be regarded as a good). The normative element of some folk generalizations (such as those that describe the ‘socially well-adjusted individual’) seems to be more concerned with recommending the pursuit of certain goods (health, wealth) than with recommending the means to their attainment - such generalizations not only imply that people who pursue these ends are statistically abnormal, but also that they have gone astray in their choice of ends. Such expectations may be more or less pluralistic, but their presence is obvious from a cross-cultural perspective. Thus our folk behavioral theory contains not only normative standards which distinguish intelligible and appropriate actions, but also standards (albeit often very liberal) governing the choice of ends.

111. T H E PROSPECTS FOR RETENTIVE REDUCTIONISM

Obviously, neither of the Churchlands intend, in heralding the elimination of folk psychology, to imply that human experience in any form will become a thing of the past, or that the human engagement in theory construction will disappear through an intellectual black hole as the items from which theories are constructed are themselves found to be constructions out of prelinguistic, and ultimately, physical, events. This feature of their work has provoked accusations of inconsistency and self-refutation, since it might seem that eliminativism has taken Cartesian doubt one step beyond Descartes, and, one cannot have the self and doubt it, too.1° At worst, however, the Churchlands are in an oddly coincidental (but not self- refuting) position here, employing devices hitherto assumed to require a special ontological realm in order to challenge the validity of that very assumption.

In fact, both Churchlands appear to be quite interested in the ways that human experience can be enriched by the development of theories of human

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functioning with greater comprehensiveness and empirical adequacy. The notion that experience can be enriched by neuroscience has been the object of some amount of scorn, from critics who believe that although reducing theories may achieve gains in explanatory unification, they lose human significance to the point of poverty.

The claim that folk psychology can be enriched by retentively reducing its terms and generalizations to those of physiological theories is argued by Mr. Churchland in the following way, stated here in a very condensed form. Churchland argues that folk psychology is an empirical theory most or all of which can be reduced, ultimately, to neuroscientific theories. Although a reducing neuroscientific theory will not entail the observations that we make about our sensations, some subset of the reducing theory’s entailments will ‘mimic’ our observations - that is, it will capture all of the relevant distinctions made in our observations. A complete reduction offolk psychology, then, would include not only the reducing theory itself but also a set of correspondence rules to match the mimicking entailments to our folk psychological terms and beliefs. It is important to point out that the result would be a retentive reduction only in a modified sense, since folk psychology is to be indirectly, and not directly, deduced from neuroscientific theory.

One likely advantage of the reducing over the reduced theory is that it will offer descriptive refinements not contained in the reduced theory - e.g. our ‘theory’ of our mental states. For this reason, it would be advantageous to import the vocabulary of the reducing theory into folk psychology. Inde- pendently ofwhether or not any reducing theory would be capable of entailing mimicries ofall ofour mental states- including what we call reasons for acting, and complex emotional states - the position raises the possibility that many, at least, ofwhat we currently know as our ‘mental states’ can be understood more deeply and in greater detail by importing the results of neurophysiological research.

Mr. Churchland’s advice seems to come down to this: Replace the folk behavioral scientific taxonomy wherever the old taxonomy is recognizably crude; that is, whenever there is some rival taxonomy which seems to be capable of making or implying all of the same (relevant) distinctions but appears to allow for finer discrimination. Furthermore, the use of a taxonomy that is less crude should allow for greater explanatory scope and theoretical unification. There are, however, some difficulties in expressing the conditions under which folk psychology is recognizably more crude than neurophysiology. Most of Mr. Churchland’s own examples of candidates for replacement are taken from folk astronomy, folk optics, folk theory of sound propagation, and the like. These examples are helpful in a general way, but they are less helpful in illustrating the sorts of things with which folk psychological terms and generalizations would be replaced. On this

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matter, Mr. Churchland is relatively brief, predicting that folk psychological expressions will be replaced by expressions such as those that appear in the following passage:

Dopamine levels in the limbic system, the spiking frequencies in specific neural pathways, resonances in the nth layer of the occipetal cortex, inhibitory feedback to the lateral geniculate nucleus, and countless other neurophysical niceties could be moved into the objective focus of our introspective discrimination, just as Gm7 chords and A dim chords are moved into the objective focus of a trained musician’s auditory discrimination. We will ofcoune have to learn the conceptual framework of a matured neurocience in order to pull this off. And we will have to practke its noninferential application. But that seems a small price to pay for the quantum leap in self- apprehension.’ ’

One ofthe areas ofstudy in which some headway is being made in linking folk psychology with neuroscience is the study of the role played by neuro- transmitters and neuroactive peptides in the emotional lives of human beings. The following example will illustrate, in support of Mr. Churchland, that knowledge of brain chemistry can expand the horizons of folk psychology. The example is double-edged, however, and will tell against the possibility of a retentive reduction of the folk psychological terms in question.

Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer, two experimental social psychologists, conducted an experiment which led them to conclude that “emotional states are a function ofthe interaction ofcognitive factors with a state ofphysiological arousal”.12 The subjects were told that the object of the experiment was to determine the effect of a vitamin compound upon vision. In fact, they were injected with epinephrine, a neurotransmitter which induces a state of arousal. Some of the subjects were informed that the vitamin compound has arousing side effects, the others were given no information concerning the ‘side effects’ of the compound. Subjects from both groups were then divided into a group placed with a stooge behaving in a euphoric fashion, and a group placed with a stooge behaving in an irascible fashion. Their results showed that subjects who were not informed about the side effects were easily manipulated into feeling either euphoric or angry, while the informed subjects were relatively immune to the manipulations of the confederate.

We can expect that the explanations given by members of each of the two groups for their states ofphysiological arousal would differ in the following way. A member ofthe uninformed group would explain his or her physiological state as part ofan emotional response to passionate displays ofemotion. A member of the informed group, on the other hand, would explain the state as an artificially induced one. Both explanations are equally sound, given the differences in the knowledge available to each of the two groups. Yet in the former case the informed observer finds an element ofcompulsion in the subject’s behavior, due not to the artificially induced arousal, either alone or in the context of the stooge’s behavior (since even together, the epinephrine and the stooge’s display

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were insufficient to bring about a strong overt emotional reaction), but to the limited information in their possession.

The experiment illustrates the impact that background knowledge con- cerning the various causes of physiological and emotional states can have upon our introspective ability. Presumably, we might someday be expected to be able to discriminate introspectively between lower and higher levels of a t least some of the neuroactive hormones and neurotransmitters. However, this example plainly shows that a correspondence rule linking euphoria or anger directly with abnormally high levels of epinephrine would be false, since these levels underlie, in this case, emotional states that are clearly distinguished in folk psychology. ‘Joy’ and ‘euphoria’ are not retentively reducible, then, to ‘high epinephrine level’.

At first this may not appear to be of any concern at all to the retentive reductionist, since although there may be a distinction between the meanings of ‘joy’ and ‘high epinephrine level’, retentive reductionism doesn’t claim that the meanings of the terms ofreducing theories preserve the meanings of the terms in the theories that they reduce. Quite to the contrary, in the standard case the meanings of the terms that are paired in correspondence rules are quite distinct. A second line of defense for the retentive reductionist might be available: neuroscience might conceivably bring the ‘cognitive causes’ of these emotional states under its purview as well - it would be unfair to suppose that anything as primitive as the hypothetical correspondence rule considered above would be countenanced by future neuroscientific theory. I shall consider the first of these objections first.

Though retentive reductionism does not intend to save the meaning of folk terms and generalizations, the proposed correspondence rules are intended to capture the ‘relevant isomorphisms’, ‘relevantly adequate mimicries’, and ‘rough equipotences’ ( ( 1985), pp. 10 & I I ) that obtain between the paired terms, statements and explanations. Now, relevance and equipotence are relative properties, and they are relative, among other things, to explanatory success. Anger and euphoria successfully explain, in folk psychology, very different types of (folk psychologically classified) behavior. Most obviously, anger explains violent, aggressive behavior and euphoria explains placid, serene behavior. Retentive reductionism would be hard put to summarily dismiss the distinction as one that is irrelevant in fo lk psychologv. But if so, then the most promising strategy for the reductionist, here, would be to adopt the displacement view, and abandon the categories of folk psychology altogether.

The second objection puts the retentive view even further out on a limb, since it suggests that most, rather than some, of the distinctions made in folk psychology are retentively reducible. This follows because the subjects’ interpretive frameworks, or the means ofinterpreting introspected states, have now become the explanadum of the reducing theory, where before the question

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concerned the explanation of easily introspectible physiological states. But the retention by neuroscientific theory of the distinctions made at this rather more theoretical level as well as a t the observational level (apart from its extreme unlikelihood) would leave intact far more of folk behavioral theory than the eliminativist believes i t possible to defend.

The relevance or significance of many of our folk psychological distinctions might well be determined as much by their normative as by their descriptive, explanatory or predictive use. In expressing indignity, for example, a person is not only registering or describing a state of arousal but is also giving expression to a complex set of beliefs about what sorts of behavior are appropriate and inappropriate.I3 The character of indignity is captured only very crudely, at best, by descriptions of physiological arousal, which need to be supplemented with descriptions of cultural artifact such as ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’, concepts whose range of usage is largely normative (e.g. “A person’s dignity ought to be respected”, “It is appropriate to act indignantly only if one has been treated disrespectfully”). This normative content is not merely incidental, for it supplies information about the conditions under which i t is appropriate to act indignantly, and when it is not. The significance ofsuch normative content lies in its provision of standards for actions. I t is difficult to imagine a society in which it were possible to know one’s way around in a society as complex as our own without some set of guiding standards. This suggestion will be taken up again in the discussion of the displacement view. The point here is, simply, that folk-psychological distinctions may possess a non-explanatory relevance as well, a relevance quite obvious within folk theory, but not replicable by neurophysiological distinctions.

I t is likely that many of the metaphysical commitments of folk behavioral theory (self, personality, desire, belief, etc.) are part cultural artifact, part observation term, in the sense that the obsolete notion of ‘bile’ is part theoretical entity, embedded in an antique conception of character, and part observa- tional, referring to observed bodily fluids. Indeed, cross-cultural studies, such as those of Clifford Geertz in Java, have shown the cultural relativity of the content ofsuch notions as that of ‘self to be rather obvious, long hence.I4

To the extent that the metaphysical commitments offolk theories are cultural artifacts, then retentive reductionism fails. I t is impossible to retentively reduce such a construct. In this case, sameness of reference is not achieved unless sameness of meaning is achieved, since the reference is, barring a very exuberant ontology, largely a product of meaning. This point is loosely attributable to John Locke, in his discussion of mixed modes (concepts whose empirical content is so inscrutable that it plays no role in the determination of reference).15 More recently, it has been fortified in the debate over essentially contestable concepts - concepts such as that of justice, whose content appears open to constant revision, though on largely non-empirical grounds. I

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Theoretical contructs can, however, be displaced, or removed from currency altogether. The displacement view does not promise to describe and explain the same phenomena described and explained by exsisting folk theory, and thus avoids many of the philosophical problems faced by retentive reductionism. A displacing theory is a reducing theory only in a very weak sense- its adoption is a shift in metaphysical commitments, where the correspondences between the old and the new metaphysical commitments may be indeterminate. Modern folk psychology might be likened by a proponent of the displacement view to demonology, which has been in our own tradition, and still is in some parts of the world, a part of folk psychology. It is likely that there are no corres- pondences between the various sorts of demonic possession recognized by demonology and the psychological states or types recognized in modern North American folk psychology, and if there are correspondences, they are probably indeterminate.

Although the prospects for our present theory ofbehavior may not be good, I wish to argue that any theory of behavior capable of supporting the establish- ment of societal institutions would need to retain some normative content. In this sense, then, folk theory, as the theory of purposive behavior, is ineliminable.

IV THE INELIMINABILITY OF NORMATIVE CONTENT

Simply stated, the displacement view holds that everything folk theory says and does is, in principle, displacable. That is, it may turn out that the terms of folk theory fail to refer altogether, in which case folk theory is simply useless. The most frontal sort ofopposition to this view holds that there are certain terms in folk theory that both refer and are irreducible. My own response is less frontal. I shall argue here that folk behavioral theory is a radically revisable empirical theory, but that the use ofany theory ofbehavior in the establishment or defense of institutions and their duties entails that it has some normative content. I would like to venture the rather strong hypothesis, then, that the normative content of folk theoretical generalizations is ineliminable from any theory of human behavior that provides a basis for social interaction. The principal differences between this and other defenses of the nondisplacability of folk behavioral explanations (such as that of Donald Davidson) is that I shall place no special weight upon the notion of intentionality, or upon rationality, or features of rational explanations (e.g. as Donald Davidson does). I shall begin by briefly explaining my belief that this route is available.

I avoid adverting to the notion of intentionality because, to put i t rather baldly, I am aware ofno convincing arguments for the immunity ofthe content of this notion from revision. Dualists are rare nowadays, but some ‘stratified’ monists, such as Peter Manicas, have argued that intentional states are ‘real’ (causally efficacious), though emergent, and irreducible. As of now, there

Elimination, Enlightenment and the Normative Content of Folk Psychology 263 are no good grounds to deny that these states are ‘real’ in this sense, since there may be something that we are gesturing towards, in using intentional terms, that is causally efficacious. However, it is far more difficult to make a case for their irreducibility, since this implies the extremely strong claim that they cannot be displaced by more fine-grained revisions to our under- standing of mental phenomena from any of the sciences (including cognitive psychology!) loosely referred to as the cognitive sciences. Because I believe that a case can be made for the non-displacability ofnormative content, I shall focus on this and abstain here from the controversy over the status of intentional states.

The normativity of rational explanation has long been cited as the feature of rational explanations which distinguishes them from nomological explanations, and for many, the feature which renders them irreducible to physical explanations. I The suggestion that our present folk taxonomy of psychological causes (rational, irrational and non-rational) is open to revision by the cognitive sciences might be taken as threatening to the widely held conviction that the explanation of human behavior is ineliminably normative. But such threats ensue only if the normative attribution of rationality, irrationality or nonrationality to behavior is the only possible way of making human behavior intelligible. This, however, need not be assumed. Rationality may simply be ill- suited to the explanation of a great deal of intelligible, commendable behavior, such as some pursuits oflargely undefined goods (e.g. those to be accomplished by entering graduate school). Furthermore, the norm of rationality may not, in every case, specify the most optimal of our otherwise intelligible actions, as again in the case ofincompletely specified ends. Given such ends, it may not be possible to identify the optimal path at all. What is required for communities of social agents is that explanations of human action make that action intelligible, and any such explanation will inherently invoke some norm with respect to which it is intelligible - a norm that distinguishes actions that are worth doing in some respect from actions not worth doing, in that respect.

On the other hand, eliminative materialism challenges the assumption that talk of ‘intentional action’ is coherent at all. Scientific psychology will explain human behavior, not human action. The displacement view holds that human behavior need not, and, strictly speaking, cannot, be made intelligible in folk terms as goal-directed or rule-following behavior. Human behavior can only be made intelligible by demonstrating its nomic character, an achievement that would not invoke (except as a ‘virtual governor’) any sort ofnormative principle.

Eliminativist materialism predicts that future neuroscience will explain human behavior as the causal outcome of brain states and processes. It is conceivable, on this view, that talk ofends and pursuit ofends is misleading. For example, what we call ‘ends’ might correspond very loosely to a large heterogeneous set of brain processes which ensue in the molar behavior that we recognize, in folk terms, as ‘goal-directed behavior’. Folk theory already

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recognizes some heterogeneity in the causes of human ascriptions of value to objects. E.g., some causes are ‘appetitive’, others occur ‘on reflection’. It is conceivable, even likely, that we could assimilate finer discriminations among different types ofcauses ofdesires and ascriptions ofvalue without disturbance. It would be devastating, however, if talk of goal-directed behavior were dropped altogether.

A theory of behavior that contains a means ofdistinguishing actions that are worth doing from actions that are not, given some end, is essential in the design and pursuit ofsocial institutions, which regulate behavior. In order to regulate behavior, there must be a commonly held set ofstandards which type behavior in accord with its effectiveness in bringing about some end. The displacement theorist’s theory of human behavior, were it to simply drop categories of goal- directed behavior, could not be expected to provide us with the kind of information necessary for the integration ofour behavior to the pattern ofneeds and expectations acknowledged in community endeavors. What, essentially, is missing from such a theory are standards ofsuccessful cooperation in the pursit ofsome worthwhile end; standards that rest upon some measure of progress and regress in human affairs.

The need for a normative, and not merely descriptive, theory of human action is essentially derived from the conditions under which some kinds of orchestrated cooperative action is possible, namely, cooperation between creatures who share and attempt to further some evolving conception of well- being. In other words, it derives from our need to impose common standards upon human behavior, to guide or regulate it in ways that promote or preserve some good. That a theory of behavior contain normative content holds as a requirement only for those theories that are to be employed as part of the commonly held background knowledge necessary for the design and accept- ance of social institutions. However, a complex society like our own, which depends upon the standardized performance of a vast number of integrated tasks, would be hard put to do without one.

It would be mistaken to hold that this argument commits one to adopting an instrumentalist attitude towards folk theory, such as that held by Kathleen Wilkes, while holding onto a non-instrumentalist attitude towards neuro- scientific theory. The instrumentalist approach urges the greater importance, in the domain of politics and production, of successfully establishing a basis for human community, culture and cooperation over theoretical precision. Construed instrumentally, the imprecision of folk theory’s generalizations and the failure of reference of its terms can be indulged, so long as the theory is roughly empirically adequate and no one pretends that they’re doing science. This is, however, a worrying sort ofposition, and not only from the point ofview of the intellectually fastidious.

The argument that folk theory is capable of providing socially useful explanations and predictions of behavior, in spite of its ignorance of (or

Elimination, Enlightenment and the Normative Content of Folk Psychology 265 indifference towards) the details of neurophysiology, is no argument for its immunity to revisions that would improve its explanatory and predictive capacity. In all of the uses, mentioned in $2, to which we put folk behavioral theory, considerable importance would be attached to the truth (to the extent that this is possible) of the generalizations employed. The utility of a theory of behavior is not, simply because it is about behavior, unrelated to its degree of empirical adequacy. Ifhuman perceptual consciousness and understanding are plastic, then they allow for contraction as well as expansion, and the human race seems to be capable of tolerating the use of extraordinary fictions in the telling of its story. But this gives us all the more reason for welcoming its improvement.

I t is important to ackowledge that the fact that a particular folk term or generalization plays some socially important role in present society doesn’t entail that it is socially, or in any other way, indispensible. As the Stanley/ Schachter experiment illustrates, for example, many socially significant judgements concerning the appropriateness or inappropriateness of emotional responses presuppose certain limits on the perceptual and introspective capacity that we can expect ofourselves, and these limits can be expanded.

As another example, the folk distinction between compulsive and intentional behavior is widely acknowledged to be a makeshift one, open to revision. Courts of law are reluctant, for example, to hear insanity pleas, not only because i t is difficult to determine independently the past state of someone else’s mind, but also because of the vagueness of the properties of intentions and passions. Indeed, results in neuroscience may very well indicate that the folk distinction between compulsive and intentional behavior is inescapably crude and in some instances gravely misleading, in which case no one could reasonably protest against the advice that we change our views about the causes of human behavior and, ultimately, about how persons accused of certain criminal acts ought to be dealt with.

It would be a mistake to conclude from the argument that the normative aspect of folk theory is non-displacable that the wholistic and socially useful products of our mental or brain activity, such as theories of behavior and conceptions of well-being, cannot be subject to revision by neuroscience. On the other hand, it would be just as unsound to propose that taking materialism seriously entails abandonment to a future without any understanding ofhuman behavior as normatively governed behavior. It would be most jmportant to maintain a grasp, in making such revisions to our theory of behavior, on the purpose of making judgements of appropriateness and inappropriateness, that purpose being the fulfillment of some conception of individual or societal well-being. It is unlikely that if this could be achieved without retaining some metaphysical commitments unique to a folk behavioral theory - in particular, the commitment to our ability to make commitments to values and normative standards.

266 Jane Braaten

I t should be emphasized that the terms ‘commitment to values’ and ‘commitment to standards’ are the proper ones here. Commitments of any kind are treated, in some disciplines (such as economics), as a particular sort of preference. Nonetheless, the notion ofa commitment (as to a value or norm) is a finer one than that of a preference, which includes any cognitive or non- cognitive valuation revealed in behavior. Commitments to normative stand- ards typically override other kinds of preferences, and they play a predominant part in the social definition ofthe conditions under which these preferences may be satisfied.

V CONCLUSION

I have argued that the empirical content of folk psychology is open to radical revision. Given that the normative force of our norms of appropriate and inappropriate behavior is relative to our variable interpretive, observational and introspective capacities, the normative content of folk psychology is revisable as well. On the other hand, I have argued that a theory of behavior capable of generalizing about and providing justificatory explanations for purposive behavior is essential, so long as we design and participate in normatively regulated practices and institutions. Of course, what particular substantive content is or is not essential in this sense is firmly tied to our present grasp of the possibilities, and our conception of the best of them. And these, ex hypothesz, are radically revisable.

Areas of inquiry as remote from neuroscience as political philosophy may eventually be in for some adjustments, depending upon how deeply the content of liberalism rests upon the underspecified character that the future possesses from the intentional stance (the source, according to Dennett, of our sense of free will). But as long as some of our interventions in the causal processes underlying human behavior, as well as other natural processes, are to test our ability to discern differences between what is for the better and what is for the worse, we will be obliged to provide justificational explanations for our actions. Our very ability to refine the content of and expand the limits of human awareness - the expansion ofwhich is, according to the Churchlands, to be the principal beneficial outcome of adopting a liberal attitude towards the contributions of neuroscience - stands, in turn, to caution us against overzealous generalizations about the wholesale displacability of folk psycho- logy: The gains are gains for a creature capable not only ofimprovement, but of working for it.

Does this argument lead back to an instrumentalist view offolk psychology? I think not. At most, the position defended here might suggest that ascriptions of valuative significance, which take into account such wholistic phenomena as the ‘well-being’ of individuals and societies, may be such a high level process

Elimination, Enlightenment and the Normative Content of Folk Psychology 267 that reductions of the ability to do so may be far less informative, for evolving practical purposes, than reductions of lower level processes. I have tried to show that it is incorrect to characterize folk psychology as instrumentalistic if this implies that folk psychology is immune to revision, so long as it ‘fulfills our purposes’, for these purposes are themselves open to refinement based upon expanded knowledge.

Jane Braaten Dept of Philosophy California Lutherson University 60 W . Olsonto Thousand Oaks, CA 91360 U.S.A.

Acknowledgement I wish to express my gratitude to an anonymous reviewer and to Samuel Mitchell for helpful comments.

NOTES

I Churchland, Paul M., ‘Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection ofBrain States’, in: ThcJournalof Philosophy, 8 4 I ) , January, 1985, pp. &z8; and Scientific realism undthcplasficify of mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a UnifiedScience of the Mind/Bruin (Cambridge, Mass.: M I T Press, 1986)

See, e.g. P.M. Churchland (1985) where the suggestion is made that we can directly introspect our brain states, and can replace folk perceptual expressions with scientifically approved ones.

See, e.g., Keith Campbell, ‘Can Intuitive Psychology Survive the Growth of Neuroscience?’, and Kathleen Wilkes, ‘Nemo Psychologus nisi Physiologus’, in Inquiry, 09, 1986 ‘ See P.S. Churchland (1986), esp. Chapter 10. An indicative remark occurs on p. 286 “I think

it most unlikely that a theoretical unification ofneuroscience and psychology will involve a rcfmtiuc reduction of mental states as currently undersfood with neuronal states as currenth undersfood . . .” ’ Kathleen Wilkes, ‘Nemo Psychologus nisi Physiologus’, in: Inquiry, 29, June 1986, p. 181.

See P.M. Churchland (1g7g), pp. 91-3; (1985), pp. 1 6 1 7 , and discussion of ‘talking measuring instruments’ p. 40.) ’ P.M. Churchland (1979), pp. 51ff. Very roughly, sentences of semantic importance are

‘analytic’ sentences, sentences of systemic importance are synthetic generalizations, and sentences of both semantic and systemic importance are ‘synthetic a priori’ sentences.

This view of the efhos emerges in some of Clifford Geertz’s essays on the understanding of the moral imagination in other cultures. See esp. Ch. z and 3 of Local Knowledge, (New York: Basis Books, 1983).

A thick moral term is a moral term that, relative to other moral terms, possesses considerable empirical content. See Bernard Williams, Efhics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985) p. 129.

I O See, e.g., Richard Double, ‘On the Very Idea ofEliminating the Intentional’ inJoumlfor fhc Theory ofSocial Behauior 16(2), July 1986, pp. 20915, esp. p. 212. Cf. Geoffrey Madell, ‘Neuro- philosophy: A Principled Sceptic’s Response’, in Inquiry zg, June 1986, pp. 15348, esp. pp. 167-8.

P.M. Churchland (1979) p. zg Stanley Schachter, and Jerome Singer, ‘Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of

Emotional State’ in: Psychological Review, 69(5), September 1962. pp. 379-99. A review of replications was published in the same journal in 1g79,37(6). Placebo subjects were also used.

I

I

268 Jane Braaten

I ’ For an extended discussion of the evaluative content of emotion terms and emotional attributions, see ‘Evaluative Aspects of the Emotions’ in William Lyons, Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

I ‘ See Geertz, op. cit., pp. 59-60 for a briefdiscussion of these studies. I ’ See Book 11, Chapter XXII of John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Peter

Nidditch, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). ’ See W.B. Gallie, “Essentially Contestable Concepts”, in: Proceeding of the Aristotefian Sociep, Vol. 56 (London: 1955-6); W.E. Conolly, Term .f Political Discourse (Lexington, Mass: D.C. Heath, 1g74), Ch.1. For additional references, see John Gray, “On Liberty, Liberalism and Essential Contestability”, in: British JOuf?~al of Pofificaf Scimce, 8 (1979) pp. 385-402.

I ’ Manicas, Peter T., A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Oxford, New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987) Ch. 14.. esp. pp. 305-10. Stratified monism recognizes distinct and irreducible levels of explanation.

I n As for example Dray, Anscombe, and Davidson have argued. See W.H. Dray, Lnws and Explanation in Hisfory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957); Elizabeth Anscombe, Intention, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976); and Donald Davidson, Ewps on Actions and Events (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)