1.2—
Mental State Ascriptions in Intentional Psychology and Folk Psychology

Attributions of intentional states such as beliefs and desires play an important role in our ordinary understanding of ourselves and other human beings. We describe much of our linguistic behavior in terms of the expression of our beliefs, desires, and other intentional states. We explain our own actions on the basis of the beliefs and intentions that guided them. We explain the actions of others on the basis of what we take to be their intentional states. Such explanations reflect a general framework for psychological explanation which is implicit in our ordinary understanding of human thought and action. A cardinal principle of this framework is that people's actions can often be explained by their intentional states. I shall use the term 'intentional psychology' to refer to any psychology that (a ) makes use of explanations involving ascriptions of intentional states, and (b ) is committed to a realistic interpretation of at least some such ascriptions.

This usage of the expression 'intentional psychology' should be distinguished from the common usage of the currently popular expression 'folk psychology'. The expression 'folk psychology' is used by many contemporary writers in cognitive science to refer to a culture's loosely knit body of commonsense beliefs about how people are likely to think and act in various situations. It is called "psychology" because it involves an implicit ontology of mental states and processes and a set of (largely implicit) assumptions about regularities of human thought and action which can be used to explain behavior. It is called "folk" psychology because it is not the result of rigorous scientific inquiry and does not involve any rigorous scientific research methodology. Folk psychology, thus understood, is a proper subset of what I am calling intentional psychology. It is a subset of intentional psychology because it employs intentional state ascriptions in its explanations. It is only a proper subset because one could have psychological explanations cast in the intentional idiom that were the result of rigorous inquiry and were not committed to the specific set of assumptions characteristic of any given culture's commonsense views about the mind. Many of Freud's theories, for example,

fall within the bounds of intentional psychology, since they involve appeals to beliefs and desires; yet they fall outside the bounds of folk psychology because Freud's theories are at least attempts at rigorous scientific explanation and not mere distillations of commonsense wisdom. Similarly, many contemporary theories in cognitive psychology employ explanations in the intentional idiom that fall outside the bounds of folk psychology, in this case because the states picked out by their ascriptions occur at an infraconscious level where mental states are not attributed by commonsense understandings of the mind.

In understanding the importance of CTM in contemporary psychology and philosophy of mind, it would be hard to overemphasize this distinction between the more inclusive notion of intentional psychology, which embraces any psychology that is committed to a realistic construal of intentional state ascriptions, and the narrower notion of folk psychology, which is by definition confined to prescientific commonsense understandings of the mental. For CTM's advocates wish to defend the integrity of intentional psychology, while admitting that there may be significant problems with the specific set of precritical assumptions that comprise a culture's folk psychology. On the one hand, Fodor and Pylyshyn argue that the intentionally laden explanations present in folk psychology are quite successful,^[1] that folk psychology is easily "the most successful predictive scheme available for human behavior" (Pylyshyn 1984: 2), and even that intentional explanation is indispensable in psychology.^[2] On the other hand, advocates of CTM are often more critical of the specific generalizations implicit in commonsense understandings of mind. Folk psychology may provide a good starting point for doing psychology, much as animal terms in ordinary language may provide a starting point for zoological taxonomy or billiard ball analogies may provide a starting point for mechanics; but more rigorous research is likely to prove commonsensical assumptions wrong in psychology, much as it has in biology and physics.^[3] Folk psychology is thus viewed by these writers as a protoscience out of which a scientific intentional psychology might emerge. One thing that would be needed for this transition to a scientific intentional psychology to take place is rigorous empirical research of the sort undertaken in the relatively new area called cognitive psychology.^[4] Such empirical research would be responsible, among other things, for correcting such assumptions of common sense as may prove to be mistaken. What is viewed as the most significant shortcoming of commonsense psychology, however, is not that it contains erroneous generalizations, but that its generalizations are not united by a single theo-

retical framework.^[5] CTM is an attempt to provide such a framework by supplying (a ) an account of the nature of intentional states, and (b ) an account of the nature of cognitive processes.