The Presence of Mind .sx Daniel Hutto on Causation , Naturalism and Folk Psychology .sx The current climate in contemporary philosophy of mind is one of disbelief .sx More surprisingly it is the reality of beliefs themselves which philosophers are more and more inclined to doubt .sx Several major contemporary thinkers do not regard beliefs as real entities .sx This threat to our everyday 'folk psychological' concepts of belief and desire may come as a surprise to many .sx What is meant by 'folk psychology' ?sx Whatever the current philosophical disagreements about folk psychology's exact definition the common denominator in all accounts is that folk psychology involves the explanation of our actions by appeal to beliefs and desires .sx Thus , if you explain your attending-the-meeting-late behaviour by saying , 'I thought it was at 4.00 clock and I did honestly want to be here on time' , then you are engaging in a bit of folk psychology .sx It is also generally accepted that these ascriptions of mental states are theoretical .sx In other words , it is always possible for them to be wrong .sx There are many psychological experiments which show that even in our own case we do not always give the correct belief ascription for our actions .sx And there are also more sophisticated philosophical arguments concerning the indeterminacy and holism of belief and desire ascriptions which also support this claim .sx The idea is that more than one coherent set of belief/desire ascriptions can always be provided to explain exactly the same behaviour - and if introspection is not infallible then there is no principled way of choosing between these various belief/desire sets of explanations .sx Those interested in examining this line of thinking should read the work of Stich , Dennett and Davidson .sx Folk psychology is important as it underwrites much of what we hold to be true about ourselves not just in philosophy and ordinary discussion but also in psychology , the social sciences , our legal systems and moral discourse .sx The elimination of 'folk psychology' would radically change our view of ourselves ; just as our view of the world changed when we stopped treating trees and stones as thinking agents .sx We could imagine ( in fact I have been told about one such legal case ) a situation where a person is completely relieved of responsibility for his acts because of his genetic make-up .sx What made me do it ?sx It must be in my DNA , or the flashing of my motor neurons ; but it wasn't me .sx Why should anyone wish to eliminate our talk of beliefs and desires ?sx It is not just a way of dodging moral responsibility .sx Since about 1963 a movement including such philosophers as Feyerabend , Rorty , Patricia and Paul Churchland and Stephen Stich ( and psychologists such as Skinner ) have been arguing that any view which postulates mental entities such as beliefs and desires is as radically mistaken as the theories of alchemy and astrology .sx Their goal has been to show that our ordinary talk about 'mental life' ( and all that follows from it ) is but one amongst other competing theories in the domain of action explanation ; and that it is in fact a bad one .sx Their suggestion is that there really are no such things as beliefs and desires .sx The strongest 'eliminativist' argument is motivated by the desire not only to unify all theories with science , but also to improve the quality of human knowledge .sx Eliminativists see themselves as revisionaries who are clearing our lives of stagnant and superstitious bad theorising .sx The common sense theories we hold to be true are in fact out of step with the superior physical sciences - thus they should be eliminated .sx Since it is unlikely that beliefs and desires will reduce suitably to the entities of physics we must do away with beliefs and desires if we wish to speak truly about the causes of behaviour .sx Stich offers a more sophisticated argument for the elimination of folk psychology .sx He argues that whenever we assign content to someone's ( or some beast's ) beliefs and desires in order to explain their behaviour we are engaging in a bit of 'domestic anthropology' .sx 'Content' here just means what the belief is about ; i.e. 'The chair in the corner' , 'Socrates' hemlock' , etc. When describing what others believe and desire we are making sense of them by ascribing beliefs which we might have ; thus we can only employ our folk psychology on subjects who are similar to ourselves .sx But a serious psychology would need to make sense of exotic subjects as well , such as children , animals , confused people , etc. Thus , we should concern ourselves with the internal causes of behaviour when attempting a serious psychology as these are not parochial .sx And if folk psychology is a form of domestic anthropology then it is not likely that the internal causes of our behaviour and our beliefs will turn out to be the same things .sx And if they do not , then beliefs will slowly be removed from our explanations of behaviour .sx Why shouldn't beliefs turn out to be the internal causes of our behaviour ?sx Well as Stich points out they are likely to be identified in different , sometimes conflicting , ways .sx For example , consider his case of a contemporary of ours and , say , a Victorian chap who are both associated , by description alone , with two different politicians of their own times .sx Both know of their politician as 'Ike' and they are acquainted with exactly the same limited details about the habits , tastes and character of these men .sx So perfect is the match in descriptions that both our man and the Victorian fellow will answer in exactly the same way to any question about 'Ike' .sx If that is the case then our serious psychology would and should say that both men believe the same thing .sx But we , as good folk psychologists , would say 'Rubbish' .sx Of course they don't believe the same thing because their beliefs are about men of completely different historical periods ( there are plenty more examples like these in the literature , cf .sx Putnam , Burge , Kripke) .sx But times and places are not the type of things that we find inside one's skin .sx Thus , if we avail ourselves of such things when identifying the content of our beliefs while doing folk psychology , then we are not concerned principally with the internal causes of behaviour while doing folk psychology .sx Therefore , argues Stich , such things as beliefs and desires , which make use of these external features of the world , have no business in a serious psychology .sx The implication is , of course , that a serious psychology will eventually replace our folk psychology even in our ordinary speech .sx To avoid this consequence some philosophers have held that reasons , that is , beliefs and desires , are not causes .sx Ironically , that is the eliminativist conclusion , but unlike the eliminativists these philosophers also hold that whether science recognises beliefs and desires as real or not just doesn't matter and could never really matter to us .sx But whether or not it is true that it wouldn't matter to us is beside the point .sx Surely we want our reasons to be causes - especially if cause is to mean , as it does in the OED , " what produces an effect " .sx Why did you hit that man ?sx I thought he was poking fun at me ( and I wanted to teach him a lesson) .sx Why did you eat that cake ?sx I wanted some chocolate ( and I thought the icing was chocolate) .sx These are paradigms of causal explanations if , by causal , we mean 'what made something happen' .sx They are not paradigms of scientifically respectable causal explanations , mechanistically conceived .sx So what would it be like if reasons were not causal ?sx Given the definition of cause ( not my definition ) we would have to answer questions such as 'What made you do that ?sx ' by forever saying - certainly not for a reason .sx For those types of question are , by definition , causal questions .sx It won't do to change the 'what' to a 'why' if the 'why' is asking the same type of question .sx Let's not be thwarted by surface grammar .sx The fact that we can give more than one answer to these types of question does not make them any less causal in nature .sx Consider these statements :sx ( 1 ) A chemical imbalance in his brain has depressed him .sx ( 2 ) The belief that his attentions were rejected has depressed him .sx ( 3 ) Wilder Penfield's ( a psychologist ) firing of his neurons for him has depressed him .sx Why should we think that only the second description in non-causal ?sx Surely this would be arbitrary and desperate .sx We should not seek to protect reasons by claiming that they are non-causal ; to do so would be to completely undermine explanations in terms of reasons .sx That we talk in this way and give these types of explanations is , I think , beyond dispute .sx Consider a statement which is amenable to the substitution of cause for reason .sx ( 4 ) I have ( reason/cause ) to believe .sx Some philosophers claim that a wider analysis will reveal cases which do not lend themselves to this type of description .sx We might find cases in which the words are not interchangeable such as in the expressions :sx ( 5 ) Give me one good ( reason/cause) .sx But even if this is true , even if there are exceptions to this common usage , it does not change the fact that our explanations in terms of beliefs and desires are casual in just the way previously described .sx One has but to examine the way in which the terms are used in these cases .sx To argue against one ordinary piece of discourse by having located a handful of others is to forego description and to attempt a form of ordinary language legislation .sx What's more , viewing reasons as causes is the only way to save our belief/desire explanations from the charge of being explanatory miracles and the only way to give them some hope of a respectable account of their origin .sx We are left with a quandary :sx be true to our selves or our science .sx Never the twain shall meet .sx Some , the scientific realists , choose the latter path .sx Others , those who find the very suggestion of eliminating of what is so obviously real , choose the former .sx But I find both responses deeply unsatisfactory .sx Surely we can do better than this .sx We must explain how the following three claims can all be true together and yet harmless if we are to overcome the arguments of the eliminativists and yet maintain that reasons are causes .sx Claim ( i) :sx Beliefs and desires will likely not appear as entities at the level of physics ( Paul Churchland's argument) .sx Claim ( ii) :sx Beliefs require a principled way of tying external features of the world to the internal causes of behaviour ( Stich's argument) .sx Claim ( iii) :sx Explanations in terms of beliefs and desires are causal explanations .sx ( The Ordinary Language argument as I have construed it) .sx Let's look at claim ( i) .sx Why should beliefs and desires show up at the level of physics ?sx No one should expect to see them there .sx This would be like doing algebra badly .sx It is analogous to reducing only one side of the equation .sx The price of giving exact physical definitions of our movements is that we no longer enter into the picture .sx The only way to get these predictively exact definitions is to reduce , on both sides , to a purely physical vocabulary ( i.e. in terms of electrons , protons , ) .sx Thus it is legitimate to ask whose actions will be uniquely predicted .sx Ours ?sx We , as agents , don't appear in the matter at all .sx Fear not .sx This is also true of geology and meteorology ( and a host of other respectable sciences as well) .sx The only way to exactly predict the motions of a lightning bolt is to sacrifice talk of it as a 'lightning bolt' altogether .sx And if that's correct physics can never , even in principle , predict our ( or the lightning bolt's ) actions .sx Thus physics does not compete with folk psychology .sx Lots of ontologically real objects ( tables , chairs , rocks , etc. ) don't exist in the language of mature physics .sx We don't exorcise their causal powers because of it .sx But the scientific realist does not want to admit that chairs and tables really exist either .sx