Radu J. Bogdan - Mind and Common Sense: Philosophical Essays on Common Sense Psychology

Philosophical Essays on Commonsense Psychology

Edited by

RADU J. BOGDAN

Tulane University

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Cambridge University Press 1991

First published 1991

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mind and common sense: philosophical essays on commonsense psychology / edited by Radu J. Bogdan. p. cm. Includes indexes. ISBN 0-521-40201-8 1. Psychology - Philosophy. 2. Philosophy of mind. 3. Commonsense. I. Bogdan, Radu J. BF38.M55 1991

150-dc20 90-48289 CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Mind and common sense : philosophical essays on commonsense psychology.

1. Psychology. Theories

I. Bogdan, Radu J.

150.1

ISBN 0-521-40201-8 hardback

Transferred to digital printing 2003

JONATHAN BENNETT, Professor of Philosophy, Syracuse University. Author of Rationality (1964), Linguistic Behavior (1976), and Events and

Their Names (1988).

RADU J. BOGDAN, Associate Professor, Tulane University, New Orleans. Editor of Local Induction (1976) and Belief (1986) and author of articles on philosophy of mind and epistemology.

PAUL M. CHURCHLAND, Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego. Author of Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979), Matter of Consciousness (1984), and A Neurocomputational Perspective (1989).

ROBERT CUMMINS, Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona, Tucson. Author of The Nature of Psychological Explanation (1983) and Meaning and Mental Representation (1989).

COLIN MCGINN, Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University, New

Brunswick. Author of The Character of Mind (1982), The Subjective View

(1983), and Mental Content (1989).

ADAM MORTON, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bristol. Author of Frames of Mind (1980) and of articles on epistemology and

philosophy of mind and language.

ALEXANDER ROSENBERG, Professor of Philosophy, University of

California, Riverside. Author of Microeconomic Laws (1976), Sociobiol

ogy and the Preemption of Social Science (1980), and The Structure ofBiolog

ical Science (1985).

KATHLEEN V. WILKES, Fellow, St. Hilda's College, Oxford. Author

of Real People (1988) and of articles on metaphysics and philosophy of

mind.

RADU J. BOGDAN

A distinguished wise man, Emil Cioran, with whom I share a country of birth and the thought that follows, said once that the two most interesting things in life are gossip and metaphysics. I can hardly think of a more self-evident and enjoyable truth, if wisely construed. This volume combines the two pleasures, for it is an exercise in the metaphysics of wise gossip, of how we make sense of each other, and how, as a result, we interpret, explain, rationalize, and evaluate our representations and actions. The body of wisdom that allows us to do all this is currently called folk or commonsense psychology. I will also call it psychofolklore or the folklore of the mind.

The folklore of the mind has probably been around for as long as minds have. People were so used to it that they rarely asked serious questions about its nature and modus operandi. Little appeared to be at stake. Not anymore; there is now a surprising surge of interest in our psychofolklore. The stakes are high. It is not that we want to understand the mind. We always wanted that. It is rather that now, unlike in the past, our psychofolklore has a role to play in our understanding of the mind. Why such a role, and what could it be? It is true that common sense provides the home language in which we conceptualize the mind. It is also true that, when cleverly reconstructed by philosophers and opposed to science, commonsense psychology appears to offer ideological support and protection by portraying the mind as special, unique, and different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matter and its laws.

But there must be more than that. The distant universe has always been of interest to ordinary people, which is why they came up with folk astronomy. In clever hands, folk astronomy too was put to useful ideological work: We are in the center of the universe, everything revolves around the earth, and other reassuring stuff like this. Folk astronomy wasn't a capricious invention. It was based on solid folksy evidence: It looked that way to most people. It still does. (One recent poll, reported in a recent Economist, reveals that only 34% of Britons know that the earth goes around the sun and that it takes a year to do so. One-fifth of the Britons are also reported to think the earth is hurtling around the sun once a day. Must be pretty dizzy in Britain.) And yet, folk astronomy has been effectively marginalized, mostly because its scientific counterpart works so much better, and visibly so.