2 Folk-psychological commitments
How are folk psychology and scientiWc psychology related? Are they
complementary, or in competition? To what extent do they operate at the
same explanatory level? Should scientiWc psychology assume the basic
ontology and some, at least, of the categories recognised by folk psychol-
ogy? Or should we say that in psychology, as elsewhere, science has little to
learn from common sense, and so there is no reason why ‘a serious
empirical psychologist should care what the ordinary concept of belief is
any more than a serious physicist should care what the ordinary concept of
force is’ (Cummins, 1991)? The present chapter begins to address these
questions.
1 Realisms and anti-realisms
Before we can determine what, if anything, scientiWc psychology should
take from the folk, we must have some idea of what there is to take. This is
a matter of considerable dispute in the philosophy of mind. SpeciWcally, it
is a dispute betweenrealistsabout folk psychology and their opponents.
The realists (of intention– see below) think that there is more to take,
because they believe that in explaining and predicting people’s actions and
reactions on the basis of their intentional states (beliefs, desires, hopes,
fears, and the like) we are committedbothto therebeingsuch things as
intentional states (astypesorkinds– we return to this point later)andto
these states having acausal eVect. Opponents of this sort of folk-psycho-
logical realism come in various forms, but are all at least united in rejecting
the claim that folk psychology commits us to the existence of causally
eYcacious intentional state-types.
Many diVerent forms and varieties of both realism and anti-realism can
be distinguished; but one of these is fundamental – this is the distinction
between the realisticcommitmentsof a body of belief (realism of intention),
and thetruthof those commitments (realism of fact). It is one thing to say
that the folk are committed to the existence of causally eVective mental
state-types, or that the folk intend to characterise the real causal processes
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