9 - Individualistic visions of psychology: prospects and problems

Summary

In Chapter 1, I distinguished two questions. The first was whether individualism imposes a constraint on psychology. In Part I, I examined the most influential and interesting arguments for individualism and found them wanting; in Part II, I dug deeper into the intuitions underlying these arguments and did some positive work towards making sense of mental causation without individualism; in Part III thus far, I have provided a more direct argument against individualism. The answer to this first question in light of the discussion to this point appears to be ‘No’.

The second question concerned the role of content within psychology: Should psychological explanations refer to an individual's mental contents? Can psychology be intentional or must it be contentfree? Although I have not discussed this second question explicitly so far, because it is distinct from the first, an individualistic psychology can be either intentional, based on a notion of narrow content, or content-free. In broad outline, these are the two positive visions of an individualistic psychology that I shall discuss in this chapter. In §2 and §3, I examine the most clearly articulated and complete expression of the content-free vision of an individualistic psychology, Stephen Stich's syntactic theory of the mind; in §§4–7, I focus on the intentional vision of an individualistic psychology by considering proposals that are part of the narrow content program. To begin, I want to motivate the content-free vision by addressing the question of why one would even want to consider the possibility of a psychology that made no significant use of the notion of content.