Rethinking Commonsense Psychology

在日常生活中，我们花了很多时间与其他人互动和协调。为了做到这一点，我们必须能够理解它们，哲学家、心理学家和其他人对人际理解涉及的问题有相当大的兴趣。最新的研究方法始于这样的假设，即我们可以感知行为，但无法感知导致行为的内在心理状态。因此，为了理解、解释和预测别人会做什么，我们需要以某种方式弄清楚他们的内在心理状态。人们普遍认为，我们是通过对人类心理的把握来实现这一点的。这不可能是一种科学的心理学，只有一小部分人熟悉，因为我们几乎所有人都在日常生活中使用它。因此，有人声称，我们通过运用“常识”或“民间”心理学来相互理解，这是一种关于心理状态的日常知识。关于这种“民间心理学”最核心的组成部分，有相当大程度的共识。大多数研究这一主题的人认为，这是一个推断一个人有什么信仰和愿望的问题，这允许一个人预测他们未来的行动，并解释他们过去的行动。关于民间心理学的争论，与其说是我们做了什么，不如说是我们如何做。有些人认为它是概念性知识或“理论”的主体，就像科学理论一样。其他人认为这是一种实践能力，而不是一门知识，更像是骑自行车，而不是理解牛顿力学。据说，这种实践能力在于“模拟”他人，把自己放在他们的处境或心理困境中，计算出一个人在这种情况下会做什么，并预测他们会做类似的事情。也有“混合”的方法，这表明民间心理学是由概念知识和实践能力的混合体实现的。所有这些描述都倾向于分享一个关于民间心理学是什么的概念：人们经常声称，将内在心理状态归因于一种能力，是促进人类几乎所有社会生活的能力。我在《反思常识心理学》一书中的目的是挑战这一观点。我声称，我们经常在没有指定内在精神状态的情况下与他人互动，我们之所以能这样做，是因为我们与他们分享了各种各样的社会规范。例如，“一个人在左边开车”和“一个人在商店里买东西”。通常可以根据“人们在那种情况下会做什么”或“这是他们应该做的”来预测某人会做什么。对共同规范的欣赏通常会完成大部分甚至所有的人际解释工作，而且完全不清楚为什么它需要理解信仰和愿望。我还挑战了这样一种假设，即心理状态是内在的、隐藏的实体，并认为我们在某种程度上可以‘看到’他人的情绪、手势和表情；他们的心理状态部分地体现在他们的行为中。为了支持这一主张，我呼吁神经科学的证据，以及被称为“现象学家”的不同哲学家的工作，他们对经验的许多方面提供了丰富而有洞察力的描述。我继续认为，与他人互动是我们理解他人能力的核心，而用归因心理状态来描述人际理解并不能适应这一点。此外，“信念”和“欲望”这两个词最初可能看起来含义明确，但结果却极其含糊。我把所有这些观点综合在一起，是为了论证“民间心理学”的正统观念在各个重要方面都是不充分的。我还注意到，将其称为“常识”是一种误导。事实上，它并不比我提供的关于共享规范、人与人之间的互动以及对精神状态的感知的描述更具常识性。

In everyday life, we spend much of our time interacting and coordinating with other people. In order to do so, we must be able to understand them and there is considerable interest amongst philosophers, psychologists and others in the question of what interpersonal understanding involves. Most recent approaches start off with the assumption that we can perceive behavior but not the internal mental states that cause it. Thus, in order to understand, explain and predict what others will do, we need to somehow work out what their internal mental states are. 1t is generally maintained that we achieve this through a grasp of human psychology. This cannot be a scientific psychology, familiar to only small Proportions of the population, as almost all of us use it in our day to day lives. Hence it is claimed that we understand each other by employing a 'commonsense' or 'folk' psychology, an everyday knowledge of mental states. There is a remarkable degree of consensus concerning what this 'folk psychology' most centrally consists of. Most of those working on the topic maintain that it is a matter of inferring what beliefs and desires a person has, which allows one to anticipate their future actions and explain their past actions. Debates about folk psychology are not concerned so much with what we do but with how we do it. Some think that it is a body of conceptual knowledge or 'theory', like a scientific theory. Others think it is a practical ability, rather than a body of knowledge, more like riding a bike than understanding Newtonian mechanics. This practical ability is said to consist in 'simulating' others, by putting oneself in their situation or psychological predicament, working out what one would do in such circumstances and predicting that they will do something similar. There are also 'hybrid' approaches, which suggest that folk psychology is enabled by a mixture of conceptual knowledge and practical abilities. All these accounts tend to share a conception of what folk psychology is: An ability to attribute internal mental states, it is often claimed, is what facilitates almost all of human social life. My aim in Rethinking Commonsense Psychology is to challenge this view. I claim that we often interact with others without assigning internal mental states and that we can do so because we share all sorts of social norms with them. For example, 'one drives on the left' and 'one pays for things in shops'.It is usually possible to predict what someone will do on the basis that 'it's what people do in that situation' or 'it's what they ought to do'. An appreciation of shared norms usually does most or even all of the work of interpersonal interpretation and it is not at all clear why it should require an understanding of beliefs and desires. I also challenge the assumption that mental states are internal, hidden entities and suggest that we can, to some extent, 'see' other people's emotions, gestures and expressions; their mental states are partially embodied in their behaviors. In order to defend this claim, I appeal to evidence from neuroscience and to the work of various philosophers known as 'phenomenologists', who have provided rich and insightful descriptions of many aspects of experience. I go on to argue that interacting with other people is central to our ability to understand them and that characterising interpersonal understanding in terms of attributing mental states fails to accommodate this. Furthermore, the terms 'belief' and 'desire' might initially appear to have a clear meaning but turn out to be extremely vague. I bring all these points together to argue that the orthodox conception of 'folk psychology' is inadequate in various important respects. I also note that it is misleading to call it 'commonsense'. In fact, it is no more commonsensical than the account of shared norms, interactions between people, and perception of mental states that I offer in its place.