Haugeland, and Fodor and Lepore.) We must move on to making a
positive case for realism about folk psychology.
3 The case for realism about folk psychology
It is not really enough to make out just ageneralcase for some sort of
realism (of intention) with respect to folk psychology. If you think, as we
do, that folk psychology is built on a core theory, then what is really
wanted is detailed information about its principles and commitments. One
suggestion would be to follow Lewis (1966, 1970) in listing all the truisms
of folk psychology (it seems likely that this list would be a long one) and
saying thatthatthen constitutes our folk-theory of the mind. Unfor-
tunately, it is doubtful whether a list of truisms really constitutes a theory
(Botterill, 1996); and it seems plausible that any such folksy list would be
underpinned by a much smaller set of generative principles. However,
providing these principles in the form of items of general propositional
knowledge is likely to prove no easy task, since they may well be largely
implicitrather thanexplicit. We return to this point in chapter 4.
It might seem, however, that the realist position is hopeless anyway, and
that folk psychology is just obviously a veryshallowway of thinking about
human conduct and motivation. After all, there is no commitment in folk
psychology to the brain being importantly involved in cognitive functions.
Indeed, folk psychology is not even committed to people having brains at
all! Notoriously, Aristotle and some of his Greek contemporaries sup-
posed the brain to be an organ whose main function is to cool the blood. So
far as we know, this made no diVerence to their interpretations and
expectations of other people’s conduct in the ordinary aVairs of life.
Nowadays bits of scientiWc knowledge are suYciently well and widely
communicated that most educated adults know something about the way
in which regions in the brain are involved in various mental capacities. But
this general knowledge also has very little impact on everyday interaction
with other people – apart from making us more solicitous when someone
has had a bang on the head, and perhaps more worried about whether
there should be any such sport as boxing.
It is true that folk psychology is entirely silent about neural implemen-
tation. But it does have quite a lot to say about the way in which the mind
functions. With the aid of just a little reXection on our folk-psychological
practices we can tease out several signiWcant implications, particularly
concerning categorisation, causal activity, and conceptualisation. But be-
fore we go on to detail those, we will set out what we take to be a
persuasive general reason for thinking that folk psychology is committed
to a particular sort of inner organisation.
The case for realism about folk psychology 31