Folk Psychological Narratives
Folk Psychological Narratives The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons
Daniel D. Hutto
A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
© 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail
[email protected] or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Stone sans and Stone serif by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong, and was printed and bound in the United States. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hutto, Daniel D. Folk psychological narratives : the sociocultural basis of understanding reasons / Daniel D. Hutto. p. cm. “A Bradford book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-08367-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Attribution (Social psychology) 2. Cognition. 3. Cognition in children. 4. Social perception in children. 5. Philosophy of mind. 6. Social psychology. I. Title. HM1076.H88 2007 150.1—dc22 2007005539 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my son Justin Rais, desipere in loco
Contents
Preface ix Acknowledgements xix Abbreviations xxiii 1 The Limits of Spectatorial Folk Psychology 2 The Narrative Practice Hypothesis 3 Intentional Attitudes
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4 Imaginative Extensions
65
5 Linguistic Transformations
87
6 Unprincipled Embodied Engagements 7 Getting a Grip on the Attitudes 8 No Native Mentalizers 9 No Child’s Science
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10 Three Motivations and a Challenge 11 First Communions
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12 Ultimate Origins and Creation Myths Notes 249 References 291 Index 329
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1
Preface
The Cognitive Revolution . . . was intended to bring “mind” back into the human sciences after a long cold winter of objectivism. . . . Some critics, perhaps unkindly, argue that the new cognitive science, the child of the revolution, has gained its technical advantages at the price of de-humanising the very concept of mind it had sought to re-establish in psychology, and that it has thereby estranged much of psychology from the other human sciences and the humanities. —Bruner, Acts of Meaning
Folk psychology is a philosopher’s label for the practice of making sense of intentional actions, minimally, by appeal to an agent’s motivating beliefs and desires.1 It is the sort of thing one does, for example, when digesting Jane’s explanation of her late arrival at a meeting because she mistakenly thought it was being held in a different room. Taking our friend at her word (i.e., if we assume that she had genuinely wanted to attend the meeting on time), we will blame the content of her beliefs for the confusion on this occasion. This is something we do, and have the standing capacity to do, unthinkingly. We rely on it constantly. Established wisdom has it that this workaday ability is something we inherited from our ancient ancestors. Proponents of the hotly debated dominant offerings