Rethinking Commonsense Psychology

在日常生活中，我们花了很多时间与他人互动和协调。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非常感兴趣。大多数最新的方法都基于这样的假设：我们可以感知行为，但不能感知导致行为的内在心理状态。因此，为了理解、解释和预测他人的行为，我们需要以某种方式弄清楚他们的内心心理状态。人们普遍认为，我们通过掌握人类心理学来实现这一点。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，我们通过使用“常识”或“民间”心理学来理解彼此，这是一种关于心理状态的日常知识。关于这种“民间心理学”最主要的组成部分，人们达成了相当程度的共识。大多数研究这一主题的人认为，这是一个推断一个人的信仰和愿望的问题，这使人们能够预测他们未来的行为并解释他们过去的行为。关于民间心理学的争论关注的不是我们做了什么，而是我们如何做。有些人认为它是概念性知识或“理论”的集合，就像科学理论一样。另一些人则认为它是一种实践能力，而不是一种知识体系，更像是骑自行车，而不是理解牛顿力学。这种实践能力被认为是“模拟”他人的能力，即把自己置于他人的处境或心理困境中，设想自己在这种情况下会怎么做，并预测他人也会做类似的事情。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而实现的。所有这些描述都倾向于分享一个关于民间心理学的概念：人们通常声称，一种将内在心理状态归因的能力，几乎促进了人类所有的社会生活。我在《重新思考常识性心理学》一书中的目的就是要挑战这种观点。我认为，我们经常在与他人互动时不指定内部心理状态，我们之所以能这样做，是因为我们与他们共享各种社会规范。例如，“一个人在左边开车”和“一个人在商店付钱”。通常可以根据“人们在那种情况下会做什么”或“他们应该做什么”来预测某人会做什么。对共同规范的欣赏通常完成了人际解释的大部分甚至全部工作，而且根本不清楚为什么它需要对信仰和欲望的理解。我也质疑心理状态是内在的、隐藏的实体的假设，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上。为了捍卫这一主张，我求助于神经科学的证据和被称为“现象学家”的各种哲学家的工作，他们对经验的许多方面提供了丰富而深刻的描述。我接着认为，与他人互动是我们理解他人能力的核心，而从归因心理状态的角度来描述人际理解并不能适应这一点。此外，“信念”和“欲望”这两个词最初可能有一个明确的含义，但结果却非常模糊。我把所有这些观点结合起来，论证“民间心理学”的正统概念在许多重要方面是不充分的。我还注意到，称之为“常识”是误导人的。事实上，它并不比我所提供的关于共同规范、人与人之间的互动以及对精神状态的感知的描述更符合常识。

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.