Telling Tales

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Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Philosophical Psychology Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2009, 227–235 Telling tales Downloaded By: [York University Libraries] At: 14:56 7 February 2010 Kristin Andrews Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons DANIEL D. HUTTO Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008 352 pages, ISBN: 0262083671 (hbk); $38.00 In the twenty-five or so years since Paul Churchland (1981) proposed its elimination, defenders of folk psychology have argued for the ubiquity of propositional attitude attribution in human social cognition. If we didn’t understand others in terms of their beliefs and desires, we would see others as ‘‘baffling ciphers’’ (Dennett, 1991, p. 29) and it would be ‘‘the end of the world’’ (Fodor, 1990, p. 156). Because the world continues, and we seem to predict and explain what others do with a remarkable degree of accuracy, the advocates of folk psychology tend to accept that we do rely on a third-person attribution of propositional attitudes as the central means for understanding other people. Based on this shared assumption, a central project in folk psychology since Churchland’s paper has been focused on the cognitive architecture that subsumes this understanding. Humans attribute propositional attitudes to predict and explain, but how do they do it? Is our understanding of others’ behavior theoretical, as Churchland originally argued? Is our folk psychological information generated via some simulative process? Or are we a little bit theoretical and a little bit simulative? Recently, the assumption that underlies these questions has been challenged (see, e.g., the articles in Hutto & Ratcliffe, 2007). Folk psychology as the attribution of the propositional attitudes may not be ubiquitous, and still we could carry out our interpersonal projects. Rather than seeing propositional attitudes as the currency of social cognition, the new approach holds that there are other cognitive processes that allow us to predict and even explain much behavior. But this isn’t to deny any role to Kristin Andrews is Associate Professor in Philosophy at York University. Correspondence to: Kristin Andrews, York University, Department of Philosophy, 4700 Keele St., Toronto ON M3J 1P3, Canada. Email: andrewsk@yorku.ca ISSN 0951-5089 (print)/ISSN 1465-394X (online)/09/020227-9 ! 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/09515080902843581 Downloaded By: [York University Libraries] At: 14:56 7 February 2010 228 K. Andrews the attribution of the propositional attitudes; rather, according to the recent challenges it merely plays a smaller role in social cognition, and one of the goals of this new approach to folk psychology is to determine what exactly that role is. Daniel Hutto’s Folk Psychological Narratives is an example of this new approach. While Hutto defines folk psychology along traditional lines as ‘‘the practice of predicting, explaining, and explicating intentional action by appeal to reasons . . . using belief/desire propositional attitude psychology’’ (pp. 2–3), he deviates from the tradition by claiming that the majority of our social interactions are not driven by folk psychology. Our understanding of other people is not primarily concerned with their reasons in terms of beliefs and desires, but in how well others’ behavior fits into our pretheoretical expectations, which for Hutto is a form of embodied nonpropositional understanding. These embodied expectations account for normal social interaction, whereas folk psychology allows us to make sense of atypical behavior that calls for explanation. As Hutto points out, in familiar situations we have no need to appeal to propositional attitudes to predict what someone will do next, and there is no reason to ask for an explanation. Because most of our social interactions, including those that make up the standard examples in traditional folk psychology, are thoroughly familiar, we need not appeal to a person’s reasons to understand most behavior. To predict that a thirsty person will drink, or that mother will arrive for a planned visit this Tuesday, requires no knowledge of the actor’s beliefs or desires. Our treatment of such quotidian social interactions doesn’t make use of third-person spectatorial folk psychology, but is based partially on biology and partially on a shared socialization process that arises from the society’s norms of behavior. In the same way, Hutto makes sense of much nonhuman animal social behavior. What may look like sophisticated mindreading on the part of chimpanzees, Hutto takes to be the result of nonpropositional embodied expectations. While Hutto’s deflationary account of the cognitive capacities underlying many of our social interactions is at odds with the standard approach to folk psychology, it is his account of explanation that is the focus of the book. It is in explaining behavior that we enter the domain of folk psychology and understanding others in terms of their beliefs and desires. While we can anticipate what someone will do next without knowing their reasons for acting, when we explain deviations from the expected behavior we often need to say something about beliefs and desires, and we cannot understand another’s reasons without knowing what they believe and desire. The central goal of the book is to defend a view of the acquisition of folk psychology that Hutto calls the narrative practice hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, language plays a necessary role both in engaging in rational action and in seeing others as engaged in rational action. Once we have gained competence with a language, we develop the ability to act from reasons. Since folk psychology involves understanding others as acting from reasons, our folk psychological abilities are based on our linguistic ones. This is where narratives come into play. People learn about the functional role of the attitudes by being told stories and engaging in conversations about people’s reasons for action. The narratives we tell our children do not just teach them the norms of society, but the entire structure of the folk psychological Philosophical Psychology 229 Downloaded By: [York University Libraries] At: 14:56 7 February 2010 framework that we come to use when explaining why people act as they do. Stories, not theories, are the basis for understanding ourselves and others alike. Despite this deviation from standard approaches to folk psychology, in other ways Hutto’s account of folk psychological explanation is quite familiar. To explain intentional action in terms of a person’s reasons, one must meet at least four requirements: 1. A practical understanding of the propositional attitudes 2. A capacity to represent the objects that these take—propositional contents as specified by that-clauses 3. An understanding of the ‘‘principles’’ governing the interaction of the attitudes, both with one another and with other key psychological players (such as perception and emotion) 4. An ability to apply all of the above sensitively (p. 23) Hutto develops these criteria to argue that only language users can be folk psychologists who understand that others act for reasons, because language is necessary for thinking in terms of propositional contents. Indeed, for Hutto language is the key to folk psychology, but not for the traditional reasons. In keeping with his dismissal of folk psychology as primarily third person and spectatorial, Hutto rejects the idea that folk psychological explanations are a variety of theoretical explanation. That is, our explanations of people’s behavior do not rely on covering laws, and they do not take the form of arguments. Narratives that provide a background of understanding take the place of covering law explanations, and fitting a behavior within a narrative has the effect of normalizing, and hence explaining, behavior that previously seemed to be abnormal. What makes Hutto’s view unique is this joint insistence on the necessity (but not sufficiency) of language use for propositional attitudes along with the view that the ability to attribute propositional attitudes does not offer the traditional evolutionary advantages over and above the advantages associated with language use. For example, Hutto’s view is at least prima facie in conflict with the social intelligence hypothesis account of the evolutionary advantage associated with gaining a mastery of the concepts of belief and desire. On Hutto’s view, it isn’t clear that being able to attribute mental states would assist one in making better predictions of behavior— especially predictions of behavior that is not subsumed by reasons. In a community lacking any folk psychologists, being the first to develop a folk psychology wouldn’t start an evolutionary arms race, because behavior that isn’t caused by reasons can be readily predicted via other means. For Hutto, the traditional benefits of having a theory of mind, such as predicting behavior and engaging in deception, can exist for those who lack a folk psychology, and even by those who lack rationality and beliefs. Hutto defends his deflationary view of cognition in part by criticizing Fodor and Bermudez’s accounts of how content can be supplied without language, and by arguing for a nonrepresentational modification of biosemantics that can account for all nonverbal cognition and intentionality. What Hutto calls ‘‘biosemiotics’’ is, he says, ‘‘simpler, and more attractive’’ (p. 50) than Millikan’s biosemantics. Downloaded By: [York University Libraries] At: 14:56 7 February 2010 230 K. Andrews While biosemantics entails the existence of some representational mechanism that allows one to think in terms of propositional attitudes, Hutto’s biosemiotics only requires nonrepresentational ‘‘sensitivities’’ to elements of the natural world. As nonrepresentational, there is no propositional content in the biosemiotics account; Hutto relies on what he calls ‘‘intentional attitudes’’ to do the work propositional attitudes do for biosemantics. I wonder about the force of Hutto’s disagreement with Millikan, since intentional attitudes play the same functional role as propositional attitudes, and we are offered little in the way of explanation of the mechanisms underlying these intentional yet nonrepresentational sensitivities. Hutto’s defense of his position amounts to an argument from simplicity, but this virtue must be considered along with other virtues of an empirically adequate theory, including explanatory coherence, fecundity, and independent testability. Accepting Hutto’s view results in some conclusions about the rationality and cognitive abilities of children, our ancient ancestors, nonhuman animals, and even some individuals from other cultures, that may not do so well with these other virtues. For example, on Hutto’s view there is no content without propositional attitudes, and since content is required for both practical and theoretical reason, those who lack propositional attitudes lack rationality. But according to Hutto even rational agents engage in much arational behavior, since only those actions that are motivated by reasons that the actor could express in propositional attitude terms can count as rational, and much of our behavior is not subsumed by motivating reasons. Arational action allows individuals to engage in behaviors we might describe as predicting, deceiving, and even explaining what others do (so long as those explanations do not rely on propositional attitudes, such as explanations in terms of past behavior or personality traits). On Hutto’s view, Western adult humans engage in behavior that, though appearing rational, is in fact arational. Hutto also thinks that, ‘‘it is far from given that all cultures make sense of intentional actions in terms of reasons . . . even an understanding and use of the concept of belief does not come automatically to all’’ (p. 188). Folk psychology, as a sociocultural skill, should only exist in cultures that have the right kind of storytelling practices, Hutto suggests. He thinks there is reason to believe that there are some cultures that lack the necessary practices, at least to some extent, given the results of false belief tasks conducted across cultures. Because 8-year-olds from places like Mofu and Papua New Guinea fail false belief tasks, Hutto suggests that these children lack the concept of belief. Because it is difficult to see how on Hutto’s view one could form and combine propositional attitudes in the way required for rational action without a practical understanding of the attitudes, the view suggests that such children should be seen as fully arational. Western children, on the other hand, pass the false belief task by about 5 years-old, and passing the task is interpreted by Hutto not as evidence that the child is a folk psychologist who understands reasons, but rather that the child has ‘‘an explicit understanding of false belief,’’ and nothing more (p. 26). Hutto thinks that failing the Downloaded By: [York University Libraries] At: 14:56 7 February 2010 Philosophical Psychology 231 false belief task, on the other hand, has greater implications. In discussing the experiments on chimpanzee theory of mind, Hutto claims that the failure of chimpanzees to pass a nonverbal version of the false belief task indicates that chimps are not metarepresentationalists, and that they lack the concept of belief and a theory of mind (p. 201).1 According to Hutto, children can pass false belief tasks without understanding reasons for action, just as chimpanzees can predict the behavior of a dominant without having folk psychology—both these actions can be account for via embodied expectations rather than propositional attitude attribution. The difference between the two is that children need to have a functioning understanding of false belief in order to pass the task, but the chimpanzees need have no understanding of mental states to predict behavior. However, the same sort of reasoning that leads Hutto to reject the interpretation of chimpanzee behavior as indicating some understanding of mental states can be used to account for the child’s ability to pass the false belief task without ascribing any understanding of false belief to the child (Andrews, 2005). If we accept his reinterpretation of nonhuman animal behavior, then the same logic should lead us to reject Hutto’s interpretation of passing the false belief task as indicating that children have a handle on the concept of belief.2 In this case, neither 5-year-old children nor nonhuman animals would have the concept of belief that appears to be necessary for rational action. Indeed, there is reason to think that passing the false belief task doesn’t indicate a full understanding of the belief concept, since children who pass the task can still fail to recognize the referential opacity of propositional attitudes. Research on children’s ability to attribute beliefs to others suggests that it isn’t until middle-childhood that we are sensitive to the difference between sense and reference. At 5 years, children who know that an object has two descriptions do not appear to realize that others may only be aware of one description of the object (Apperly & Robinson, 1998, 2003; Hulme, Mitchell, & Wood, 2003). If we are to accept this data, then conjoined with the implications about what is required for acting for reasons and understanding that others act for reasons, humans do not act for reasons until middle childhood—perhaps as late as 8 years of age. These implications of Hutto’s theory are consequences of his view that thought without language is not representational, and that his biosemiotics can fully account for all the cognitive capacities of individuals who lack a symbolic communication system. However, since his defense of biosemiotics over Millikan’s biosemantics is based on an argument from parsimony, the more controversial these implications are, the less we have reason to accept biosemiotics. Anyone who is hesitant to deny rationality to young people from Papua New Guinea, to 6-year-old Western children, or to nonhuman animals will not be convinced by Hutto’s argument in favor of biosemiotics. The deflationary account of cognitive processes is relied upon as a foundation for Hutto’s defense of his narrative practice hypothesis, which is presented as an alternative account of the development of folk psychology given by both the theory theory and the simulation theory. Both theory theorists and simulation theorists Downloaded By: [York University Libraries] At: 14:56 7 February 2010 232 K. Andrews think that folk psychology is necessary for predicting behavior as well as for understanding others in terms of reasons. Of course Hutto has argued that predicting behavior in many cases requires no understanding of reasons, and so the main role for the attitudes is an explanatory one. The narrative practice hypothesis is designed to account for our ability to offer reasons for behavior, our own reasons, as well as the reasons we supply to others. Children must have a host of sophisticated cognitive abilities before they recognize that there are reasons for actions; they must be able to engage in ‘‘co-cognition’’ by replicating another’s thoughts in their own mind, they must have facility with propositional attitudes, and they must have a degree of linguistic competence. Once they have these kinds of abilities, they are able to learn how attitudes are combined to form reasons for action by engaging in narrative practices with other members of the community. These practices include listening to stories as well as engaging in conversations with others about their reasons for acting. Such narrative practices are a necessary condition for a child to come to explain behavior in terms of attitudes. As the child is told, for example, the story of Little Red Riding Hood, she learns about the role of beliefs in action, and how having a false belief can lead to danger. The acquisition account is thought to describe the phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic development of folk psychology, and there is a question that arises for both accounts. Children learn from verbal interactions with their caregivers, and our ancestors leaned from being ‘‘attentive listeners’’ (p. 245). Hutto’s update of Sellars’ (1956/1997) ‘‘myth of Jones’’ has Jones not developing an understanding of belief and desire by recognizing that people have reasons for action even when they don’t state those reasons. Rather, on Hutto’s version, Jones listens to the stories of his colleagues and from those stories learns about beliefs and desires, much in the same way children currently learn about beliefs and desires from hearing their parents recite the story of Little Red Riding Hood. But if this account is to differ from Sellar’s account, we are left wondering how Jones’s buddies developed this ability to discuss the attitudes. While Hutto relies on Merlin Donald’s (1991) mimetic account of the development of language and social cognition to help fill in the details, the dramatic nonlinguistic narratives that we see in early mimetic cultures are not taken by Hutto as sufficient for these cultures to have folk psychology. For Hutto, the symbols that refer to ‘‘belief’’ and ‘‘desire’’ are necessary parts of folk psychology, and watching or listening to stories doesn’t by itself account for Jones’s first conceiving of these concepts. In both the case of ontogeny and phylogeny, there remains a question about the origin of attitudes. There also remains a question about the kind of ability we gain when we become folk psychologists. Explanations are funny things. As Hutto points out, we seek explanations for other’s behaviors primarily when the behaviors are unexpected or anomalous. When we learn about reasons for action, we learn them in the context of normal behavior through folk tales and people’s descriptions of their own reasons for action. But it isn’t clear that learning about the attitudes through these kinds of narratives will help us to explain just the kind of behavior we are most interested in, namely those behaviors that appear to be in violation of the norms of society. Downloaded By: [York University Libraries] At: 14:56 7 February 2010 Philosophical Psychology 233 This poses a problem when it comes to explaining others’ actions, something Hutto acknowledges when he states that third-person speculative explanations are ‘‘unlikely to hit the mark in any case of real need’’ (p. 21). It is in second-person contexts, for example, in conversations, that we are more likely to gain true explanations about behavior. However, there is a real worry that our explanations for our own anomalous behavior may be just as speculative as our explanations for others’ anomalous behavior. The social psychological literature on confabulation that stems from the seminal work of Nisbett and Wilson (1977) suggests that privileged access to our reasons for action may be largely a philosopher’s fiction. This claim should cause concern about the accuracy of second-person folk psychology as well. If our folk psychological explanations are largely inaccurate for both others and ourselves, and if we do not need to rely on folk psychology in order to predict behavior, then the function of folk psychology seems quite limited, so much so that elimination of the propositional attitudes may be seen as benign. But on Hutto’s view eliminativism has serious consequences, since it entails that people are not acting from propositional attitudes—or reasons—at all. Hutto sees the ability to predict behavior without ascribing propositional attitudes as evidence that the actor is not acting from propositional attitudes in such situations. But if the actor also fails to correctly report her reasons for acting, or constructs post hoc reasons for her past behavior, then we should also take this as evidence that the actor is not acting from propositional attitudes. Since acting from propositional attitudes is necessary for rationality, such a position further undermines the essential rationality of human actors. Here again Hutto’s view leads to the conclusion that many prima facie rational actions—and prima facie rational individuals—may in fact lack rationality. This conclusion suggests an antirealism about the attitudes and the view that reasons are causes of action. As nothing but a cultural construct, folk psychology may be a pleasant lie that has some evolutionary advantages—a shared narrative about humans as believers and desirers who act for reasons that helps to promote social cohesion by reinforcing an in-group identification. But if folk psychology is an inaccurate though useful strategy for keeping individuals safe in larger groups, we can still examine whether rational thought and belief can be retained as independent cognitive processes. Hutto’s intentional attitudes would be a fine place to start such an account. The picture Hutto leaves us with portrays social cognition as rich and powerful without any need for folk psychology. This leaves little in the way of a causal role for folk psychology, besides perhaps granting its possessors with the title of rational. Folk psychological narratives, suggests the title of the book, allow humans to understand reasons. But Hutto’s theory makes me wonder if these cultural narratives don’t allow us to understand reasons that were already there, but rather lead us to construct reasons out of thin air. While Hutto has made a good start in challenging the traditional approaches to folk psychology, he doesn’t follow his arguments to their natural, and radical, conclusion. Downloaded By: [York University Libraries] At: 14:56 7 February 2010 234 K. Andrews His conclusions suggest that the attribution of the attitudes applied sensitively to make sense of others’ behavior is a cultural construct that is independent from the ability of individuals to live richly social and cognitive lives, and it leaves little role for beliefs, desires, or rationality. But he does have another option, and that is to recognize the kind of rationality that is involved in cognition that doesn’t operate over the propositional attitudes. If Hutto could divest himself of his Davidsonian commitments to the necessity of language for belief and rationality, his view that the attribution of the attitudes doesn’t contribute to the majority of our social interactions could be retained without denying that the majority of our actions are rational. This leads to a less radical conclusion, but it is one that takes seriously a real similarity between the cognitive capacities of human adults and some nonhuman animals. Notes [1] [2] While Hutto claims that ‘‘there is now a well-established consensus that chimpanzees are not metarepresentationalists’’ (p. 201), this is overstating the position held by researchers in the field. Rather than concluding that chimpanzees lack an understanding of belief, many researchers think instead that there isn’t currently convincing evidence that chimpanzees do understand belief. Even the skeptic Daniel Povinelli takes this position, stating that, ‘‘the research paradigms that have been heralded as providing evidence that they do reason about such mental states, do not, in principle, have the ability to provide evidence that uniquely supports that hypothesis’’ (Povinelli & Vonk, 2004, p. 2). While Hutto thinks that passing the false belief task doesn’t indicate that the child has a theory of mind or facility with folk psychology, he does think that it indicates that the child has an understanding of false belief. Presumably, Hutto would accept that passing the task indicates that the child has a concept of belief simpliciter, insofar the concept of belief is part of the concept of false belief. References Andrews, K. (2005). Chimpanzee theory of mind: Looking in all the wrong places? Mind & Language, 20(5), 521–536. Apperly, I. A., & Robinson, E. J. (1998). Children’s mental representation of referential relations. Cognition, 67, 287–309. Apperly, I. 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