Everyday Ethics

As cognitive science has become increasingly sophisticated, we have been able to give much more intricate explanations of human cognition.  One important side effect of this achievement has been the debunking of folk psychology and a tendency among philosophers of mind to disregard folk accounts of human cognition as overly simplistic and not in accordance with contemporary neuroscience.  However, there is an important sense in which folk psychology continues to provide a better explanation of cognition.  Folk psychology paints a much clearer picture of the phenomenology of intentional actions.

Folk psychology is not without its legitimate problems, and we should carefully limit what we mean in trying to defend it.  After all, folk psychology has been implicated in the horrific treatment of the mentally ill throughout history, including such absurdities as burning alleged practitioners of witchcraft alive or diagnosing schizophrenics as being possessed by demons.  This legacy of folk psychology is not the one that we will seek to defend.

Despite these shortcomings, folk psychology does a remarkably good job of explaining the intentional actions of humans.  By intentional action, I mean any human action that is purposeful, that has some specifiable goal in mind.  Neuroscience has a difficult time explaining intentional actions because things like beliefs and desires are not a part of the human brain.  Modern cognitive science must reduce beliefs and desires to brain states and neurotransmitters, because these are scientifically “real,” while beliefs and desires are epiphenomenal.*

Folk psychology actually does provide a good explanation of human action, despite its reliance on these scientifically unreal entities.  For example, suppose we are trying to explain why I get up from my chair, walk to the kitchen, and look in the cabinet for the cookies.  Folk psychology has a clear and straightforward account of this.  I desired a cookie, and I believed that there were cookies in the kitchen cabinet, so I went to the kitchen and checked.

This is a perfectly coherent explanation of my intentional action, and more importantly, it captures my phenomenal experience of acting intentionally.  I felt the desire for a cookie, was motivated to act based on this desire, and acted in the particular way that I did because I believed that looking in the cabinet was the best available means of fulfilling my cookie desire.  Folk psychological explanations have the appealing quality of getting the phenomenology of intentional action right.

The neuroscientist has a big problem with this type of explanation, because the brain doesn’t physically include anything like desires or beliefs.  He or she can try reducing these phenomena to the physical processes that underlie them, and the resultant explanation wouldn’t be inaccurate or mistaken.  But it would miss an important part of why I went in the kitchen and looked in the cabinet.  Our criticism is that a complete account of human cognition will have to say something about the role of beliefs and desires in explaining intentional actions because explaining cognition ought to include explaining the phenomenology of our experiences.  Reductive explanations fail miserably in this regard.

We are left with a picture of human cognition that is difficult to resolve.  On the one hand, the brain really doesn’t include anything like beliefs or desires, and the folk psychologist can’t simply ignore this significant physical fact.  On the other hand, explaining intentional action in terms of the efficacy of neurotransmitters on certain receptors in the brain misses something deeply important about human behavior.  We won’t attempt to resolve such a deep rift in the space remaining, since doing so continues to be a significant task for the field of cognitive science.  But in our next posting, we will try to respond to a couple of criticisms of the position that in certain cases, folk psychology is worth holding onto.

*(Not all branches of cognitive science are committed to this type of reductionism, but most reject folk psychological explanations of intentionality as obviously false, and this is the target of our criticism.)

About the Author

Elijah Weber is a graduate student at Bowling Green State University. He holds a Master's degree in philosophy from Colorado State University, and Bachelor’s degrees in sociology and philosophy from Chapman Univerity. He currently lives in Bowling Green, Ohio with his wife Laura, his newborn son Brandon, and his feline life-partner Monte.