Stephen Stich's From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief

Abstract

The aim of Stich's book is to further the controversial thesis that the conceptual framework of ‘folk’ psychology will have no significant role to play in a mature cognitive science. Skepticism about the scientific relevance of folk psychology has been voiced by others (behaviorists and nonbehaviorists alike); but Stich's critique is both novel and more fully developed than earlier ones. The charge is not–-or not simply–-that ‘folk theory’ is a “degenerating paradigm“ (Churchlands), or that, in general, the constructs of folk theory fail to refer altogether (Rorty; Dennett). Stich's thesis is subtler, and rests on the claim that the individuation of folk-psychological states is irremediably vague and context-and-observer relative in a way that makes a folk-psychological taxonomy ill-suited to the requirements of scientific explanation and systematization. Stich, of course, does not reject mentalism as such, as did the behaviorists: he merely rejects the assumption–-often tacitly accepted by cognitive scientists and by their philosophical interpreters–-that the mental states posited by a mature cognitive science will essentially correspond to the intentional, propositional attitude states of folk psychology. Thus, for Stich, there is no reason to suppose that cognitive science will turn out to be a sophisticated extension of folk psychology. The “Panglossian prospect” (p. 5) of a conceptual reunification of the scientific image of mind with the ‘manifest’ image under the banner of cognitivism is just what this book calls into question.