From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief

by Stephen P. Stich

The average person has a rich belief system about the thoughts and motives of people. From antiquity to the beginning of this century, Stephen Stich points out, this "folk psychology" was employed in such systematic psychology as there "Those who theorized about the mind shared the bulk of their terminology and their conceptual apparatus with poets, critics, historians, economists, and indeed with their own grandmothers." In this book, Stich puts forth the radical thesis that the notions of believing, desiring, thinking, prefering, feeling, imagining, fearing, remembering and many other common-sense concepts that comprise the folk psychological foundations of cognitive psychology should not - and do not - play a significant role in the scientific study of the mind. Stephen P. Stich is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Research, Science

280 pages, Paperback

First published February 20, 1985

About the author

Stephen P. Stich is an American academic who is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, as well as an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and moral psychology.

Reviews

[Jeremy]

The view endorsed is passe, but there are some good arguments that cognitive science should not concern itself with semantic content. I was primarily interested in the conditions which Stitch thought belief would or would not be genuinely countenanced by cog. sci. He recants his main thesis in the first chapter of Deconstructing the Mind.

[Paul Gibson · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating means next to nothing.
This is only the second book I haven't finished in many years. I made it halfway through but I finally gave up. Welcome to a typical sentence in this book: "Recall that the narrow causal version of the mental sentence theory classifies mental sentence tokens as type identical if the tokens have the same (or similar) causal interrelations with other mental states, with stimuli, and with behavior."
From time to time I will read a book that is over my head. But this book is beyond me. I feel like I entered a room in the middle of an argument taking place in another language. I understand why philosophers use jargon. Much of the reason is to be clear. But if I can't explain a very complicated issue something using common (if relatively inaccurate) language, I either don't understand it or I have nothing to say to other reasonably intelligent people. Instead I speak to my peers, which is who this book is for. I’m sure it’s amazing to those in the field but I thought it might walk me from Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Oops.

[Larry · Rating 2 out of 5]

A defense of the idea that all the explanatory heavy lifting in content-based theories of mind such as C/RTM is done by the syntactic properties of the representations, not their semantic ones, and that the explanation via syntax generalizes ascriptions much better to exotic belief systems and other bordeline cases where folk intuitions break down. The final chapters examine cognitive dissonance as a case study, purportedly showing that there may not be one unique natural referent picked out by the folk concept of ‘belief’. Stich tries to hold a middleground position between Churchland's eliminativism and Dennett's instrumentalism.

One of the problems with the work is it functions too much by a series of: borderline thought-experiment followed by ‘consulting our intuitions’, and not enough by systematic argumentation.

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Using linguistics would have make more sense as it's a systematic study of language and clearly language and the mind are related. But using one language to craft an thesis is weak.

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the last couple of chapters in this today in the Library of Congress. Stich argues that ordinary, "folk psychological" concepts of belief, desire, etc. are pretty far removed from what goes by the name of "belief" and "desire" in cognitive science. He tentatively suggests that there can be a reconciliation of ordinary discourse about mental states and cognitive science, that the two are not in competition (in a kind of manifest image/scientific image relation to one another). He calls this a "Panglossian" view, and argues that it rests on some empirical assumptions that might very well turn out to be false (one of the assumptions is that there is some correspondence between ordinary mental concepts and the concepts employed by folk psychology; if it turns out that on our best scientific understanding of the mind there is nothing that corresponds even roughly to belief, then we may have to give up on folk psychology.

I was interested in Stich's position because Chomsky cites it repeatedly, as an example of the kind of attitude that one ought to have about the relation between ordinary language and the language of science. It turns out that Stich has a kind of contextualist view about belief, according to which there is no "property" picked out by "believes that p", because what counts as belief is context-dependent, but there are true utterances of "S believes that p".

Interesting.

[Ove Bager]

ok