11.4.1—
The Verstehen Argument

The claim that mentalistic discourse does not even attempt to provide causal explanations has had important advocates in both the analytic and the continental traditions. It includes the Verstehen tradition in the Geisteswissenschaften on the continent, Ryle and Wittgenstein, and lately a related sort of view has attracted interest from analytic philosophers like Alvin Goldman (1992, 1993a, 1993b,). On this view, intentional explanation involves giving reasons, and giving reasons is different from giving causes. The kind of "explanation" we are involved in when we allude to people's beliefs and desires is not causal explanation, but something like interpretation . The goal of investigation framed in the intentional idiom is not knowledge of general laws of thought, but in Verstehen, or interpretive understanding, of human beings.

In a certain way, I am very sympathetic to this view, especially in the ways in which it stands in contrast to the theory-theory. It is no doubt true that "commonsense psychology" involves a "theory" in the weak sense that we make generalizations about how people are likely to think and act, and that these expectations, were we to express them, would be expressed in the intentional vocabulary. But it seems a bit dubious to equate this with an attempt to formulate causal laws, and very highly questionable to refer to intentional states as "theoretical entities" as that expression is sometimes used in the philosophy of science (i.e., to signify entities posited through a process of retroduction). Particularly when we refer to dispositional states such as beliefs, it seems quite reasonable to say that what we are doing is trying to paint a picture of the person's thoughts that makes sense of their words and deeds, and it would be somewhat strained to say that we are trying to provide the causes of their

actions, much less that we are tacitly assuming universal laws formulable in the intentional idiom.

Nevertheless, it seems important here to separate two very different sorts of issues. We might, on the one hand, concentrate on issues relating to the nature of commonsense intentional psychology. On the other hand, we might undertake quite a different sort of inquiry into the prospects for a causal-nomological intentional psychology. It is useful here to distinguish four very different questions:

(1) Is the theory-theory an accurate representation of the nature of commonsense psychology? (That is, is commonsense psychology really an attempt at a scientific theory based on causal laws?)

(2) Is there a viable enterprise of interpretive psychology whose goal is Verstehen?

(3) If so, should we call it "science"?

(4) Is there a viable causal-nomological psychology that makes use of generalizations at the level of cognitive states and processes?

The reason that it is useful to separate these questions is that the answer to the fourth question—our main focus here—is really quite independent of the answers one gives to the other three. In point of fact, I think that one might have to give a somewhat mixed answer to the first question, since the characterization of commonsense views is likely to be a somewhat complicated undertaking; but I am inclined to side more with Ryle and Wittgenstein here than with the theory-theory. I take it that the second question can best be answered by looking at what is accomplished by attempts at interpretive psychology (e.g., psychoanalysis as interpreted by Ricoeur [1970]) in the long run. The third question is in large measure a matter of wrangling over words. In some ways, I think the German approach has some real advantages: if you have two categories of Wissenschaften you can then ask serious questions about how they differ; whereas if your distinction is between "science" and "nonscience," there is an unfortunate tendency to assume that everything that is nonscience is also nonserious and nonrigorous, and that all such enterprises are nonserious and nonrigorous in the same ways. All in all, though, I find this fight less interesting than I used to, and do not intend to belabor it here.

What seems crucially important here is that the viability of a causal-nomological intentional psychology is in no way threatened either by the

possibility of interpretive psychology or by the possibility that commonsense psychology is not accurately conceived of as protoscience. One might demonstrate this point by way of a thought experiment. Suppose, for example, that someone were convinced by writers like Wittgenstein and Ryle that the "because" of intentional explanation (in ordinary usage) is not the "because" of causation. Suppose, furthermore, that she believed that ordinary intentional explanation was part of a project of interpretive understanding (Verstehen ), and that there were disciplines—the Geisteswissenschaften —that attempted to approach such interpretative understanding in a systematic way. She might think, for example, that Ricoeur's Freud was an active and even an occasionally successful practitioner of such a discipline. Suppose now that one day she comes across something like Colby's (1975) attempts to implement models of Freudian theories in the form of computer programs. Upon examining these she might well feel that she has discovered a new possibility for explanation in the intentional idiom: in addition to the possibility of an interpretive psychology, it might be possible to systematically explain causal relationships among intentional states as well. It might even turn out that there are important connections between them—for example, that rules for deriving new cognitive state tokens are so formed as to preserve truth and maximize coherence and relevance. Our fictitious person could thus discover the idea of a nomological intentional psychology as a project quite orthogonal to commonsense psychology and interpretive psychology, but in no way in competition with them.

What I think this shows is that neither the Ryle-Wittgenstein view of intentional explanation nor the Geisteswissenschaft approach to psychology should be viewed as counting against the viability of a nomological intentional psychology. These views would, of course, undercut the claim that the success of commonsense psychology in allowing us to predict one another's behavior in day-to-day affairs provides direct evidence for the possibility of a nomological intentional psychology. But it need not rule out providing such evidence more indirectly: if we are successful at interpreting others, it might be in part because we have a kind of model in our heads of how people are likely to think and act given certain beliefs and desires, and this at least suggests the possibility of a nomological account of how different beliefs and desires in combination will produce other cognitive states and, ultimately, behaviors. In short, even if "folk psychology" is a dubious philosophical reconstruction, this does no fundamental damage to the project of nomological intentional psychology.