beaches of Spain, we will start to doubt whether that attribution was
correct.
There must be something wrong with the Davidsonian view, however,
because our overall project, as folk psychologists, is not just one of
interpretation. We are just as much interested in generating predictions
concerning people’s likely behaviour, and in forming expectations as to
what they may think or feel in various circumstances. The point here is not
that, in laying so much emphasis on retrospective interpretation, David-
son’s account makes folk psychology predictively useless. It is rather that it
is a mistake toprioritiseinterpretation over prediction. One way in which
this can be seen, is that we can surely have conWdence in a great many
attributions to someone of belief and desire, in advance of having observed
any of their behaviour to form a target of interpretation. This is because
our folk psychology provides us with many principles for ascribing mental
states to others (such as: ‘what people see, they generally believe’), which
do not depend upon observations of behaviour.
Moreover, the constitutive norms of rationality which Davidson posits
are somewhat mysterious. In attributing beliefs to others, is it agreement
with ourbeliefswhich should be maximised, or withtruth? Of course, since
we take our own beliefs to be true, we have no way of trying to maximise
the latter without trying to maximise the former. But we do realise that
there may be some divergence between our beliefs and the truth. So if we
have some false beliefs about some objects, thenourbest interpretation
may very well be one which misidentiWes the subject matter of some better
informed interpretee’s thoughts. Besides, we can interpret and explain the
actions of other people who hold theories and world-views which force us
to attribute to them hosts of false beliefs. On our view Davidson makes the
mistake of giving too central a place to the heuristics of folk psychology.
What is right about his interpretationalism is a reXection of the extent to
whichsimulationhas a role to play in folk psychology, particularly in
relation to inference (see chapters 4 and 5 for explanation of this point).
In addition, Davidson faces notorious problems in allowing for even so
much as the possibility of irrational action. Since the norms of rationality
are supposed to be constitutive of the possession of beliefs and desires at
all, it is diYcult to see how people could ever be credited with intentions
which conXict with their goals. But we folk psychologists believe that this is
a familiar (and all too depressing) fact of daily life. Consider, for example,
the case of the man who knows that petrol is highly inXammable, and who
knows that lighted matches ignite, but who nevertheless strikes a match
over the mouth of his petrol tank in order to see whether or not it is empty
- with disastrous results. In order to explain such cases Davidson is forced
to say that they manifest two distinctsystemsof belief and desire within the
28 Folk-psychological commitments