can judge folk psychology to be an inadequate theory – ripe for elimination
and replacement by neuroscientiWcally informed theories – because of (1)
its massive explanatory failure, (2) its record of stagnation, and (3) its
isolation from and irreducibility to the growing corpus of scientiWc know-
ledge in psychology and the neurosciences. Several commentators have
pointed out that these are far from convincing grounds on which to
condemn folk psychology as a bad theory (Horgan and Woodward, 1985;
McCauley, 1986; McGinn, 1989).
(1) Considering folk psychology’s alleged explanatory (and predictive)
failuresWrst, the sorts of examples Churchland cites are folk psychology’s
failure to give us any grasp of how learning occurs, or of the mechanism of
memory. But to raise this objection is just to forget that we are dealing with
a common-sense or folk theory, which as such does not have the com-
prehensive and systematic concerns of scientiWc theorising. There are apt
to be gaps in what common-sense theories explain, because there are limits
to what common sense concerns itself with. But a failuretoexplain – where
there is no serious attempt at explanation – is not at all the same as an
explanatory failure. In the long history of folk psychology thousands of
generations of children have grown up without their cognitive advances
being tracked, probed and accounted for in the way that they have been by
developmental psychologists in the last few decades. No doubt parents and
elder siblings were too busy with other things to indulge any such curiosity
in a similarly systematic way. They were missing much of interest, of
course. But that only shows folk psychology does not go far enough, not
that there is anything wrong with it as far as it goes.
(2) The second complaint against folk psychology – that its lack of
change in essential aspects throughout recorded human history is a form of
stagnation and infertility indicative of degeneration – strikes us as par-
ticularly perverse. We will accept that (while there may be degrees of
cultural and historical variation – Hillard, 1997) the basic procedures for
explicating and anticipating human actions and reactions through the
attribution of contentful and causally eYcacious internal states have re-
mained stable for centuries. But why see this as a sign of decay and
degeneracy? It seems far more reasonable to take it as a testimony to how
well folk psychology has worked, at least for folk purposes. (As the old
adage has it:if it ain’t broke, don’tWxit.) As to the point about infertility,
this again misses the diVerence between folk theory and scientiWc theory.
They have a diVerent focus of interest. Theexplanandafor scientiWc
theories are themselves usually general, whereas folk psychology is de-
signed for application to the conduct of particular individuals, allowing us
to explore the details of their idiosyncratic attitudes, hopes and convic-
tions. In a way, one might say that folk psychology is the most fertile of
42 Folk-psychological commitments