this lack of micro-congruity is no more bad news for folk psychology, than
is the fact that money can be diVerent sorts of stuVis for economics, or
than is the fact that successful predators do not share a common and
distinctive biochemistry is for zoology.
(Please do not suppose that in consequence we believe in emergent
powers, or that psychology is a dimension of reality which does not
supervene on physics. People sometimes take that as a consequence of
irreducibility. But to do so is woolly thinking, failing to distinguish be-
tween type and token. Everyparticularevent describable in psychological
terms is, we presume, also an event which can be explained in terms of
physics.)
4.2 Stich: elimination in prospectWe conclude that Churchland’s case for ‘elimination now’ is weak. Stich’s
view cannot be dismissed in the same way. As a bet on future scientiWc
developments it cannot be dismissed at all: we will just have to wait and
see. Stich thinks that it is likely that what we will learn about the real
underlying processes of cognition will show that folk-psychological cate-
gories, and in particular the category ofbelief, cannot be empirically
defended.
As realists, we will have to grant that this is a possibility. A commitment
to the causal eYcacy of intentional states would be entirely hollow if it
were consistent with any possible discoveries about internal psychological
processes. So far the main concrete suggestion in this area has been that
connectionism may be the correct model of cognitive processing, and that
the way information is stored within connectionist networks is not consis-
tent with those networks containing anything which could be a realisation
of a belief-state (Ramseyet al., 1990). But the alleged incompatibility
between connectionism and folk psychology has been questioned (Clark,
1990; O’Brien, 1991; Botterill, 1994b). We return to this issue in chapter 8.
As yet we see no good reason to be so pessimistic as Stich about the
prospects for a successful integration of folk psychology, scientiWc psy-
chology, and neuroscience. On the contrary, we think that folk psychology
works so well (admittedly, within its own limitations) that the causally
eYcacious intentional states with which it deals probably do approximate
to the states which actually cause behaviour. Fodor (1987) puts this more
boldly (as usual!), arguing that the ‘extraordinary predictive power’ of
belief/desire psychology is an argument for taking folk psychology to be
correct, at least in its major commitments.
We are in substantial agreement with Fodor’s view, but a little needs to
44 Folk-psychological commitments