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Folk Psychology and Mental Simulation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Martin Davies  and
Tony Stone
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Extract

This paper is about the contemporary debate concerning folk psychology–the debate between the proponents of the theory theory of folk psychology and the friends of the simulation alternative. At the outset, we need to ask: What should we mean by this term ‘folk psychology’?

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 43 , March 1998 , pp. 53 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1998

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References

1 Much of the relevant literature is gathered in three collections: Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate, ed. Davies, M. and Stone, T. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995)Google Scholar; Mental Simulation: Evaluations and Applications, ed. Carruthers, P. and Smith, P. K. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar

2 Nagel, T., The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 5Google Scholar: ‘A view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual's makeup and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is.’

3 Stich, S. and Nichols, S., ‘Folk Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?’ in Folk Psychology, ed. Davies, and Stone, , p. 133Google Scholar. See also S. Stich and S. Nichols, ‘Second Thoughts on Simulation’, in Mental Simulation, ed. Davies and Stone; S. Nichols, S. Stich, A. Leslie and D. Klein, ‘Varieties of Off-Line Simulation’, in Theories of Theories of Mind, ed. Carruthers and Smith.

4 The debate (particularly in its early stages) seems to have been conducted under two assumptions. One is that there is a single question to be asked about folk psychology. The other is that the theory theory and the simulation alternative offer the only two viable approaches to answering that question. But both of these assumptions are flawed. As against the first assumption, we would say that there are many different, and fairly independent, questions to be asked about folk psychological practice, each one of which might be given a theory theory or a simulation theory style of answer. (See T Stone and M. Davies, 'The Mental Simulation Debate: A Progress Report’, in Theories of Theories of Mind, ed. Carruthers, and Smith, , pp. 119–20Google Scholar, for nine such questions. No doubt there are more.) As against the second assumption, we would make two brief points. One point is that we cannot simply assume that the two terms, ‘theory theory’ and ‘simulation theory’, even when quite generously construed, cover the whole space of possible answers to the questions that are at issue. The other point is that, even for a single question, and even when the theory theory and the simulation alternative are the only approaches in view, the correct answer might be a hybrid, drawing on both approaches.

5 Elsewhere (Stone, and Davies, , ‘The Mental Simulation Debate: A Progress Report’, p. 120Google Scholar), we have put the question this way: ‘What resources do mature adult humans draw upon as they go about the business of attributing mental states, and predicting and explaining one another’s mental states and actions?' We called it the explanatory question about normal adult folk psychological practice. We have now opted to call it the basis question lest the term ‘explanatory’ suggest that the question relates only to the explanation strand of folk psychological practice.

6 The general principle is that pressure is proportional to (absolute) temperature and inversely proportional to volume. In the present context, the volume is constant. If, instead, the temperature is regarded as constant then the resulting principle, that volume is inversely proportional to pressure, is known as Boyle's law.

7 This kind of prediction by simulation in imagination is closely connected with the use of thought experiments in science. Thought experiments are often important in the development of theory, and so it may seem implausible to say that simulation in imagination draws on theory. We need to note, once again, that an inclusive notion of theory is in play, and that in some cases the propositions drawn on will simply be intuitive assumptions about what kinds of thing do, or do not, tend to happen in the physical world. See, for example, Sorenson, R., Thought Experiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 52–4Google Scholar, for an account of Stevinus's use (in 1605) of a thought experiment to determine the force needed to keep a ball from moving down an inclined plane. One of the assumptions at work in this case was that perpetual motion does not happen.

8 See Goldman, A. I., ‘Interpretation Psychologized’, in Folk Psychology, ed. Davies, and Stone, , p. 85Google Scholar, for the distinction between theory-driven and process-driven simulation.

9 The whisky example is discussed by Heal, Jane, ‘How to Think About Thinking’, in Mental Simulation, ed. Davies, and Stone, , p. 48Google Scholar, and by Moran, Richard, ‘Interpretation Theory and the First Person’, Philosophical Quarterly, 44 (1994), p. 163CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Müller-Lyer illusion is discussed by Gordon, Robert, ‘Reply to Stich and Nichols’, in Folk Psychology, ed. Davies, and Stone, , pp. 175–6Google Scholar. The example of emotional response to a story is discussed by Walton, Kendall, ‘Spelunking, Simulation and Slime: On Being Moved by Fiction’, in Emotion and the Arts, ed. Hjort, M. and Laver, S. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and Ravenscroft, Ian, ‘What Is It Like to be Someone Else?: Simulation and Empathy’, Ratio, 11 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The case of inference is central in Heal's discussions. We take the example from Allan Gibbard, ‘Brains, Thoughts, and Norms’, unpublished manuscript.

10 Stich, S. and Nichols, S., ‘Cognitive Penetrability, Rationality and Restricted Simulation’, Mind and Language, 12 (1997), p. 302CrossRefGoogle Scholar, call this ‘actual-situation-simulation’. It is important to avoid a possible confusion here. In some important examples, a protagonist has a false belief about her situation: there is a difference between the situation as it actually is and the situation as the protagonist takes it to be. A subject who is asked to predict what the protagonist will think or do may make an incorrect prediction by focusing on the situation as it actually is rather than the situation as the protagonist takes it to be. (This is what very young children tend to do. There is a substantial empirical literature on the false belief task. See, for example, Wimmer, H. and Perner, J., ‘Beliefs About Beliefs: Representation and Constraining Function of Wrong Beliefs in Young Children's Understanding of Deception’, Cognition, 13 (1983), pp. 103–28CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.) But this predictive strategy is not what Stich and Nichols mean by ‘actual-situation-simulation’ (and not what we mean by ‘simulation in reality’). Rather, actual-situation-simulation would involve placing myself into the same situation as the protagonist and making myself (perhaps per impossibile) subject to the same false belief.

11 Williams, B. A. O., ‘Imagination and the Self’, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 This point is stressed, for example, by Goldman, , ‘Interpretation Psychologized’, p. 85Google Scholar, and by Heal, , ‘How to Think About Thinking’, pp. 34–5.Google Scholar

13 See Stone, and Davies, , ‘The Mental Simulation Debate: A Progress Report’, pp. 136–7.Google Scholar

14 See Blackburn, S., ‘Theory, Observation and Drama’, in Folk Psychology, ed. Davies, and Stone, , p. 283Google Scholar: ‘Theorizing under a normative umbrella is still theorizing. It could, it seems, be done quite externally, in the light of a sufficient stock of principles telling what it would be right or wrong to think or feel in some situation…’. Levin, Janet, ‘Folk Psychology and the Simulationist Challenge’, Acta Analytica, 14 (1995), p. 91Google Scholar, also makes the point that if we use a normative theory to predict what inferences a person will make then this does not yet seem to involve anything that is ‘in any serious sense a simulation’.

15 Burge, T., ‘Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 96 (1996), pp. 98–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Burge, , ‘Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge’, p. 99Google Scholar: ‘A non-critical reasoner reasons blind, without appreciating reasons as reasons. Animals and children reason in this way.’

17 The general idea here is familiar from discussions of the principles involved in radical interpretation. Some advocates of mental simulation contrast the simulation approach with the rationality approach, and so would not adopt the account of the epistemology of psychological prediction that is sketched here. See, for example, Goldman, ‘Interpretation Psychologized’. On the other hand, R. M. Gordon, ‘Simulation Without Introspection or Inference from Me to You’, in Mental Simulation, ed. Davies and Stone, can be seen as resisting the idea that the epistemology of prediction by simulation is the same as that of prediction by way of empirical theory.

18 ‘Folk Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?’, ‘Second Thoughts on Simulation’, and ‘Varieties of Off-Line Simulation’. We note again that Stich and Nichols use the term ‘theory’ in an extremely inclusive sense.

19 ‘Folk Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?’ p. 150.

20 Ibid.

21 In section I, we noted the similarity between gas cylinder simulation in reality and the use of experiments to establish generalizations about how gas cylinders in a certain class generally behave. The present point, that simulation in reality yields predictions that are insulated from antecedently held theory, is analogous to the point that experiments are apt to yield results that conflict with antecedently held theory.

22 Someone using simulation in reality as a prediction method may, of course, refuse to accept the result of a simulation if it conflicts with an antecedently held theory, and may judge that the simulation must be flawed in some way. The same goes for experimentation.

23 These two examples are discussed by Stich, and Nichols, , ‘Folk Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory?’ p. 151Google Scholar, along with the example of belief perseverance; see Nisbet, R. and Ross, L., Human Inference (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), pp. 175–9Google Scholar. In ‘Second Thoughts on Simulation’, pp. 101–2, they introduce the further example of failure to predict how subjects will behave in Milgram's obedience experiment. Nichols, S., Stich, S. and Leslie, A., ‘Choice Effects and the Ineffectiveness of Simulation’, Mind and Language, 10 (1995), pp. 442–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also discuss an example of subjects' failure to predict how they themselves will behave when asked to put a price on an article that they own.

24 Nisbet, and Ross, , Human Inference, p. 207.Google Scholar

25 Langer, E., ‘The Illusion of Control’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32 (1975), pp. 311–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The example is discussed at length in Nichols et al., ‘Varieties of Off-Line Simulation’.

26 Gordon, , ‘Reply to Stich and Nichols’, p. 176.Google Scholar

27 Harris, P.L., ‘From Simulation to Folk Psychology: The Case for Development’, in Folk Psychology, ed. Davies, and Stone, , p. 218.Google Scholar

28 Nichols, et al. , ‘Varieties of Off-Line Simulation’, pp. 49–52.Google Scholar

29 See for example, Kühberger, A., Perner, J., Schulte, M. and Leingruber, R., ‘Choice or No Choice: Is the Langer Effect Evidence Against Simulation?’, Mind and Language, 10 (1995), p. 433CrossRefGoogle Scholar: ‘[I]t is difficult to ensure that simulator participants are provided with sufficient information about exactly the right combination of factors that produces the Langer effect.’ Kühberger et al. refer to the requirement that ‘the imagined situation captures the relevant features of the simulated person's actual situation’ as the requirement of imaginative adequacy (p. 424).

A theory theorist may object that the use of the wrong inputs response by the friend of mental simulation is ad hoc and that the defender of the simulation theory in the face of examples of prediction failure should be willing to state in advance under what conditions the requirement of imaginative adequacy would be met. (See Stich, and Nichols, , ‘Second Thoughts on Simulation’, p. 102Google Scholar.) But it is not clear that the theory theorist's own approach to examples of prediction failure is any more principled. The theory theorist's explanation of prediction failure is in terms of the predictor's use of an incomplete or false theory about psychological matters, or the predictor's use of incorrect initial conditions to instantiate correct generalizations. But no independently motivated account of the exact nature of the predictor's failure is provided. (This point is made in an unpublished paper by Ravenscroft, Ian, and also by Stich, and Nichols, , ‘Cognitive Penetrability, Rationality and Restricted Simulation’, p. 323Google Scholar, who credit it to Meredith and Michael Williams.)

30 Alternatively, I could drink a pint of whisky myself, combining simulation of the subject's beliefs in imagination with simulation of the subject's whisky drinking in reality. This might enable me to make a correct prediction, if whisky has the same effect on my reasoning from hypothesised contents as on the subject's reasoning from believed contents. However, it is important to note that the effects of my drinking the whisky will not be restricted to my simulation of the subject; my reasoning in my own person will be perturbed as well. This might be a disadvantage if I need to think carefully and accurately about how best to act towards the subject.

31 Heal, J., ‘Replication and Functionalism’, in Folk Psychology, ed. Davies, and Stone, , p. 48Google Scholar; Harris, , ‘From Simulation to Folk Psychology: The Case for Development’, p. 219.Google Scholar

32 So-called non-rational influences may have their effects in a very direct way - by-passing reasoning altogether - as, perhaps, in the case of the shoppers. But they may also work by making something that is not in fact a reason for acting in a certain way nevertheless appear to be a reason. We are not committing ourselves to any specific account of the various examples of prediction failure. Indeed, we are not even committed to the idea that the examples of prediction failure all involve non-rational influences. Perhaps subjects in the Langer-style experiment have good reasons for setting their sell-back prices, but those reasons are somehow obscured from subjects in the prediction experiment. In that case, a defender of simulation will, in the end, be right to use some version of the wrong inputs response. What we are pointing out is just that there is a different kind of response – in terms of non-rational influences - that is, in principle, available to the simulation theorist. See Heal, J., ‘Simulation and Cognitive Penetrability’, Mind and Language, 11 (1996), pp. 60–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 Heal, , ‘Simulation and Cognitive Penetrability’, p. 56.Google Scholar

34 Kahnemann, D. and Tversky, A., ‘On the Psychology of Prediction’, in Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, ed. Kahnemann, D., Slovic, P. and Tversky, A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 67–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The example was used by Ned Block (in conversation) to make the objection under discussion here. Essentially the same objection against Heal's circumscribed version of simulation theory is pressed by Stich and Nichols, ‘Cognitive Penetrability, Rationality and Restricted Simulation’.

35 Dan Sperber (in conversation) pressed the objection in this form.

36 Hempel, C., Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar, who provides the seminal account of the deductive-nomo-logical model of explanation, regards the distinction between prediction and explanation as being merely pragmatic.

37 We are committed to the possibility that there may be both normative and empirical principles cast in very similar terms. Both kinds of principle would make use of ceteris paribus clauses; but those clauses would be interpreted differently in the two cases.

38 Heal, , ‘Replication and Functionalism’, p. 52Google Scholar. See also, McDowell, J., ‘Functionalism and Anomalous Monism’, in Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. LePore, E. and McLaughlin, B. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), p. 389Google Scholar: ‘[T]he concepts of the propositional attitudes have their proper home in explanations of a special sort: explanations in which things are made intelligible by being revealed to be, or to approximate to being, as they rationally ought to be.’

39 Thus, for example, Gordon, , ‘Simulation Without Introspection or Inference from Me to You’, p. 56Google Scholar quotes Kant (Critique of Pure Reason, A353) approvingly: ‘It is obvious that, if I wish to represent to myself a thinking being, I must put myself in his place, and thus substitute, as it were, my own subject for the object I am seeking to consider (which does not occur in any other kind of investigation).’ For an illuminating discussion of issues not far removed from those of the present section, see Moran, ‘Interpretation Theory and the First Person’.

40 Collingwood, R. G., ‘Human Nature and Human History’, in The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Revised Edition 1992), p. 215Google Scholar. As is quite widely remarked, the simulation approach to psychological understanding has marked affinities with the hermeneutic tradition of Vico, Herder, Dilthey, Weber and Croce, as well as Collingwood. See Verstehen and Humane Understanding: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 41, ed. O'Hear, A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

41 Gardiner, P., ‘Collingwood and Historical Understanding’, in Verstehen and Humane Understanding, ed. O'Hear, , pp. 117–18.Google Scholar

42 Ibid., p. 118.

43 Blackburn, , ‘Theory, Observation and Drama’, p. 283.Google Scholar

44 These responses may have consequences, not only for my reasoning within the scope of my simulation of C, but also for my reasoning in my own person. Cf. footnote 30 above.

45 If my prediction about C's thoughts and actions is to count as knowledge then it should not depend on the flawed normative judgement that this is the thing to think, or to do, in these circumstances. In this case, knowledgeable prediction seems to require some recognition of the fact that one's reasoning is indeed being perturbed.

46 Gordon, R. M., ‘The Simulation Theory: Objections and Misconceptions’, in Folk Psychology, ed. Davies, and Stone, , p. 103Google Scholar. Since understanding is a kind of knowledge, there will once again be a need for me not to be wholly in the grip of the re-enactment (cf. footnote 45 above).

47 Nichols, et al., ‘Varieties of Off-Line Simulation’, pp. 59–67Google Scholar, discuss empathy and in particular the role of memory in empathetic emotion. What we are concerned with here, however, is remembered emotion, not emotion aroused by memory.

48 See Jane Heal‘s paper in this volume.