added that this amounts to no more than the fact that there really are the
appropriate patternings in people’s behaviour.
(2)Categorisation: Secondly, and more interestingly, folk psychology is
committed to the existence of a variety ofdiVerencesbetween intentional-
state attitudes of various kinds. Above all, folk psychology is committed to
a broad diVerence between two major types of intentional state: belief-like
states and desire-like states. Roughly speaking, theWrst kind are infor-
mational andguideconduct, while the second kind are goal-directed and
motivateconduct. Common-sense psychology the world over recognises
the diVerence between these two broad categories of intentional state, even
though philosophersWnd it frustratingly diYcult to articulate the dif-
ference. It is possible that scientiWc psychology mightWnd no use for this
broad division, but we think that it is a very good bet that it will.
(3)Causation: Thirdly, intentional states are causally active. Folk psychol-
ogy is shot through with commitments to causal interaction, indeed. The
best-known case – and also the most hotly disputed – concerns the relation
between agents’ actions and their reasons for so acting. The main argu-
ment for claiming that reasons are causes of actions (Wrst presented in
Davidson, 1963) is that an agent can have a reason to perform a given
action, can perform that action, and yet that not be the reason for which
the act gets done. So to account for the force ofbecausein the standard
folk-psychological explanatory schema ‘X did it because X thought that
.../wanted to.. .’, we need to distinguish between apossiblereason and the
actuallyoperativereason. And how can that distinction be made except in
terms of the causal involvement of the intentional states which are the
agent’s reasons?
Suppose I agree to meet an old friend in an art gallery, for example. It
may well be that there is, and that I know there is, a painting in that gallery
by an artist whose work I admire; and I would like to see that painting.
Getting to see that painting is undoubtedlya reasonfor me to go to the art
gallery. But all the same, it may deWnitely be the case that when I go to the
gallery I gobecauseI want to meet my friend, and also that I would not
have gone unless I had thought that I would meet him there. The fact that I
have other attitudes whichmightmake sense of my action does not suYce
to make them my reason for acting unless they are causally involved in the
right way. (Compare the ‘Alice goes to the oYce’ case in Ramseyet al.,
1990.)
This argument for a causal connection between reasons and actions has
beenWercely resisted by many philosophers – particularly those in the
Wittgensteinian tradition (Winch, 1958; Peters, 1958; Melden, 1961;
The case for realism about folk psychology 35