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8. THE CASE FOR INNATE
KNOWLEDGE
In this chapter I shall consider the most
likely candidate for substantive innate knowledge, namely our beliefs about our
own psychology.
Innateness and Reliability
Recall from chapter 5, that in order for
there to be innate knowledge, we must possess some innate beliefs which are not
only true, but caused by a reliable process. While classical rationalists held
that the process in question was Divine intervention (our innate beliefs having
been implanted in us by a veracious God), this idea is no longer taken
seriously in scientific cultures. In order for a claim to innate knowledge to
be given even cursory consideration today, the proposed belief-causing process
must be a natural one. Indeed, the only suggestion which is consistent
with current scientific knowledge is that innate beliefs might be determined
through evolutionary selection. For science tells us that this is the manner in
which all other innate characteristics have been arrived at, whether in
ourselves or other organisms.
What
reason is there for thinking that natural selection would be a reliable
process, supposing that it resulted in some innate beliefs? Notice first, that
true belief has immense survival-value for any organism, such as ourselves,
much of whose behaviour is caused by the interaction of beliefs and desires.
For in general an organism's projects will only succeed if based upon beliefs
which are true. This is not to say, of course, that action undertaken on
a true belief is guaranteed to succeed. I may set off walking through the
desert, correctly believing that there is water to be found in that direction,
but perish of thirst before I reach it. But often (though not always) the
failure will result from the falsity of some other belief. Thus in this
example, it may be my false belief that the water is close enough for me to
reach by walking which is responsible for my death. (On the other hand, I may
simply have lacked any alternative course of action, so that I would have
perished whatever I did.)
It
is also true that action undertaken on false belief is not guaranteed to fail.
One way in which the action may nevertheless succeed, is where the belief,
while false, is sufficiently close to the truth. For example, although my
belief about the direction of the oasis may be strictly incorrect, it may still
lead me to within sighting distance of the water I need. However, if an action
based upon a wholly false belief succeeds, it will only succeed by accident.
For example, although walking in the wrong direction to find the oasis I am
aiming for, I may be lucky enough to stumble across another, and hence survive
anyway. In which case wholly false beliefs will not have survival-value in the
long run. But in evolutionary selection it is the long run that matters. What
seems undeniable is that organisms (of the sort which act on beliefs) will only
survive, in general and in the long run, if they base their actions on beliefs
which are true, or at least close to the truth. So if any innate beliefs have arisen
through natural selection, we should expect them to be at least approximately
true.
An
objection to this line of argument, however, is that natural selection can
explain features of organisms which do not have survival-value, provided
that they are by-products of things which do have it. Then if this were
true of innate belief, there would be no particular reason to expect the
beliefs in question to be true ones. (Indeed, even if those beliefs did happen
to be true they would not count as reliably acquired, and hence would not be
known. For their truth would then turn out to be accidental relative to the
processes involved in their acquisition.) Yet this objection cannot be
sustained, at least in the absence of any concrete proposal. For it is
extremely difficult to understand how innate beliefs might be a by-product of
some other innate characteristic of human beings, without themselves having a
value in survival contingent upon their truth.
Another
point to notice is that natural selection has conferred on us
belief-acquisition processes which are generally reliable. Beliefs arising from
perception and memory are, on the whole, true. (Those sceptical of this will be
answered in chapters 11 and 12.) So even if evolution does not issue directly
in any beliefs, it has resulted in innate mechanisms for acquiring beliefs
which are fairly reliable. Therefore it is, to that extent, a reliable process
in its turn. Moreover part, at least, of the inaccuracy of our perceptual
mechanisms can be accounted for in terms of a competing constraint, which would
not operate (or not to the same extent) in the case of innate beliefs. This is
speed. Perceptual mechanisms need to be fast as well as reliable. So there may
be survival-value for an organism in some sacrifice of reliability, if this is
more than off-set by a corresponding gain in speed. For example, it will be
better to have a perceptual mechanism that informs me extremely quickly that
there is a predator running towards me, even if - as a result of the speed with
which it operates - the mechanism often informs me that there is a predator
approaching when there is not. Better sometimes to flee unnecessarily than
never to have time to flee at all! But in connection with innate beliefs, as
opposed to perceptual mechanisms, there is presumably no demand for speed
(except perhaps speed in accessing and calculating with those beliefs). So
evolutionary selection of innate beliefs would, if anything, be even more
reliable than perception.
It
is possible to imagine cases where an innate false belief would be an
aid to survival. For example, an innate belief in the magical properties of a
particular plant, which in fact contains a powerful medicine, might prove very
useful to those who live in the region where that plant flourishes. But such
cases are rendered unlikely when one remembers that in order to have been
selected through evolution, a belief would have to prove useful over a
time-span which is extremely long in comparison to human history, and in a wide
variety of differing circumstances. I therefore conclude that if evolution has
resulted in any innate beliefs, then those beliefs will very likely constitute
innate knowledge.
Recall
that in chapter 6 we discovered some candidates for innate knowledge, in the
course of our discussion of innate mental structure. Thus, while we disagreed
with Chomsky's claim that the innate structure of the language-faculty should
be counted as genuine knowledge, we noted that our conscious beliefs about
whether a particular sentence is or is not well-formed will count as innately
known. For such beliefs are true, and are caused by a reliable process,
provided that they result in a systematic way from the underlying structure of
the language-faculty. But if this is the total extent of our innate knowledge,
it will be of very marginal significance. For it is not these beliefs
themselves which explain our capacity to formulate and to recognise grammatical
sentences. They rather arise out of what does explain that capacity, namely the
innate structure of the language-faculty, together with the subject's
parameter-setting experience of their native language. Indeed, it is arguable
that the very idea of a sentence being well-formed or ill-formed only arises in
cultures where for political reasons attempts are made to standardise different
dialects. For example, I am told that linguists working in the field often have
considerable difficulty in explaining to the members of the language-community
they are studying, just what it is they are after when they seek the speakers'
judgements as to whether or not a given native sentence is well-formed.
In
chapter 6 we also allowed that other faculties, such as vision, are innately
structured, embodying information about the world. If this is so, then it seems
that perceptual beliefs will (somewhat strangely) count as innate, being
triggered by experience rather than learned from it. But perhaps a better way
to put the point is this. The innate structure of the visual faculty may give
us innate (locally triggered) knowledge that there are, in general, physical
objects distributed in three-dimensional space around us. But then our
particular perceptual beliefs - for example, that there is a cylindrical object
resting on a flat surface in front of me now - are based upon experience. For
it is only our general ability to perceive in three-dimensions which is
unlearned. On that basis we then learn where particular objects are by
seeing. So our detailed perceptual knowledge of the world around us should not
be counted as innate.
If
we are to show that we have innate substantive knowledge of detailed truths
about the world, we need to consider some other candidates. One example may be
provided by our knowledge of our own psychology.
Folk-Psychology
We have an immense network of common-sense
beliefs about the mind. These beliefs concern the relationships of mental
states to one another, to the environment and states of the body, and to
behaviour. This collection of beliefs is generally referred to by philosophers
today as 'folk-psychology'. It includes such beliefs as these: that pains tend
to be caused by injury, and tend to prevent you from concentrating upon other
tasks; that perceptions are generally caused by the appropriate state of the
environment (e.g. the experience of a tiger being caused by the presence of a
tiger), and are often laid down in memory; that if you want something, and
believe that performing an action or sequence of actions will enable you to get
it, then you will normally (other things being equal) do that thing; that
decisions are often the result of prior deliberation, and generally lead you to
perform the action decided upon; that when people assert something, they
generally believe it, and that when they say they are going to do something, they
generally do it; and so on.
It
is important to stress that folk-psychology should only be understood to cover
the set of common-sense generalisations about the human mind which hold good
independently of context or culture. For it is perfectly obvious that our particular
beliefs about someone's psychology - concerning their individual desires,
intentions and beliefs - will not be innate, but will rather be learned from
observation of their behaviour. Similarly, when we arrive for the first time in
a foreign country we may not be able to take much for granted about their
customs, or about what they believe or value. So we shall not be able to rely
upon such culture-relative generalisations as that a hand-shake will be treated
as a sign of greeting. But what we can take for granted is that the
general way in which their minds work will be similar to ours - for example,
that they will generally believe what they see. And it is this general
knowledge which we shall largely rely on in interpreting their behaviour, and
in beginning to construct detailed pictures of their psychology.
There
are a number of points to notice about folk-psychology. The first is that it is
extremely complex, consisting of perhaps many thousands of distinct
generalisations. This complexity can easily pass unnoticed, since we are so at
home within folk-psychology that we are barely aware of its existence. But the
complexity emerges as soon as we try to articulate everything that common-sense
tells us about the mind. (To see this, just try completing the list of
generalisations started in the paragraph before last!) We might be tempted to
say that folk-psychology is no less complicated than the human mind itself. But
this would be an exaggeration. For a great deal of the operation of our minds
is, no doubt, nonconscious; whereas folk-psychology is mostly concerned with
our conscious mental life. But even this is complicated enough.
The
second point to notice about folk-psychology is that, while it may be loosely
structured and imprecise, it is also remarkably successful.1 Because
of it, the actions of other people as well as ourselves are often predictable,
and almost always intelligible. (We can make sense of one another, in a way
that we are able to understand hardly anything else in the natural world.)
Indeed, it is only because of folk-psychology that social life is possible at
all. We constantly rely upon it in interpreting the utterances of other people;
in recovering from their utterances, circumstances, and behaviour a description
of their beliefs and intentions; in predicting what may be expected of people
with those beliefs and intentions in a given situation; and in predicting the
effects on other people of our own utterances and actions. To see how
successful we are in all this, reflect upon the complexity and diversity of
modern societies, and yet on the extent to which we nevertheless manage to
coordinate our behaviour.
Just
as it is easy to overlook the complexity of folk-psychology, so it is easy to
underestimate its success. For our occasional muddles and misunderstandings
tend to have far greater salience for us. This is because many of the cases
which matter to us most are those where understanding is hardest to come by.
Thus one person's religious, moral or political beliefs may seem completely
mysterious to another. Indeed, by generalising from and romanticising such
cases, some people are inclined to picture human beings as wholly opaque to one
another, beyond mutual knowledge or comprehension. What they overlook are the
myriad cases of mundane success. Even those with widely differing religious
beliefs can cooperate successfully in practical projects, such as building a
wall together, or coordinating a meeting in a strange city. And many of their
every-day actions will be mutually intelligible.
The
third point to notice about folk-psychology, besides its complexity and
remarkable success, is that it is also deep. As a first approximation,
you might say that this depth consists in the fact that folk-psychology
explains and predicts human behaviour through the interaction of unobservables
- beliefs, desires, feelings and thoughts. In this respect, at least, it might
be compared to highly-developed sciences such as physics and chemistry, which
similarly explain the observable behaviour of physical substances in terms of
the unobservable interactions of their parts. However, this way of putting the
point presupposes a distinction between theory and observation which is highly
contentious. Many philosophers would want to insist, on the contrary, that we
can literally see someone's pain or desire, against the background of
our beliefs about their circumstances and other mental states. Similarly, many
philosophers of science would want to say that a physicist in the course of an
experiment may - in the light of their background theoretical beliefs - be said
to see electrons being discharged from the substance under study. These
philosophers would maintain that, since what we see is always to some extent a
function of what we believe, there is no motive for denying that entities such
as pains and electrons are observable.
A
better way to characterise the depth of folk-psychology is to stress its
implicit realism. It commits us to the real existence of mental states
and events, and real causal interactions between them. Indeed, it embodies a
complex theory about the inner structure of the mind. For example, consider a
folk-psychological explanation of someone's decision in terms of the train of
reasoning which led up to it. This postulates a causal sequence of real events,
which were unobservable in fact, even if not in principle.
One
question left outstanding, is to what extent the generalisations of
folk-psychology are consciously believed. It might be suggested that they
should rather be assimilated to the sort of nonconscious mental structures
which underlie our grasp of grammatical rules. Now it may be that there are
such structures here too, but it is surely undeniable that generalisations of
the sort mentioned earlier will be consciously endorsed. This need not mean
that they often (or in fact ever) surface in consciousness. For being
truistic (too obvious to mention), they mostly pass unthought of. But they are
certainly available to consciousness, since speakers will immediately
assent to them if asked.
This
is not to say, however, that we cannot make mistakes when we try to articulate
the principles we are taking for granted. For example, at one point Fodor says
that people will (other things being equal) do whatever they believe to be necessary
to fulfil their desires.2 But this is false if taken quite
generally. What really matters is that the act be sufficient, or be part
of a sequence of actions which is believed to be sufficient. Thus even if I
would like to become a famous concert pianist, and believe that it is necessary
that I should first learn to play the piano, it does not follow that I will
make the attempt. For I might also believe that even if I learned the piano I
should never be good enough to be famous.
Is Folk-Psychology Learned?
Folk-psychology is apparently universal to
all human communities. So far as I am aware, there are no societies which fail
to have notions corresponding to those of pain and anger, and which do not
employ the practical-reasoning-model for explaining actions in terms of the
interaction of beliefs and desires. This is, if true, a striking fact. There is
hardly any other comparable body of belief which is equally universal. Indeed,
the only real candidate is folk-physics, which includes such truisms as that it
takes more energy to lift a heavy object than a light one. A case can be made
for saying that this, too, is innate. But I shall not pursue the matter here.
Stephen
Stich has raised doubts about the universality of folk-psychology,3
citing the work of the anthropologist Rodney Needham.4 But in
reality the anthropological evidence presented by Needham supports the
universality of folk-psychology. What seems to count against it, is only a
faulty (Wittgensteinian) analysis of folk-psychological notions.5 On
such an account, these notions are conceptually tied to specific types of
behavioural criteria, and are necessarily embedded in particular linguistic and
cultural practices. In which case, since in many societies these practices are
absent, the notion of belief, for example, may be held to be without
application. But in fact, as we have seen, folk-psychology postulates a network
of causally related real internal states and events, where such states will
only issue in a given type of behaviour if other things are equal - that is, if
the surrounding states in the network remain the same. From this perspective,
it is only to be expected that people in different cultures, while enjoying the
same types of mental states (beliefs, desires, and so on), might engage
in very different behaviours, depending upon the particular beliefs and values
which are current amongst their members.
However,
the universality of folk-psychology is not in itself sufficient to show that
folk-psychological beliefs are innate. For supposing that those beliefs are
largely true, then it is clear that no human society would last very long
without them. Since a shared common-sense psychology is the basis on which all
social cooperation and communication rests, groups of humans who did not
possess it would be hard put to survive, let alone flourish. But for all that,
it may be that the beliefs in question are empirically acquired. It may be that
they were gradually discovered by emergingly successful social groups in the
past, and are now passed on between generations by teaching. Or it may be that
they are rediscovered by each individual in the course of normal psychological
development.
In
fact, however, (as in the cases of grammatical rules and of concepts) very
little, if any, explicit teaching of folk-psychology takes place. Adults simply
use psychological notions in the presence of children, leaving the
latter to acquire by themselves the generalisations within which those notions
are embedded. Indeed, Plato's Problem arises here in particularly stark form.
For the body of knowledge which the child has to acquire is not only large, but
structured in a very complex way. Since almost every mental state can interact
with any other, folk-psychology must consist of literally thousands of
generalisations. Yet recent evidence suggests that children have an adequate
mastery of a great deal of it, at least, by the end of their fourth year.6
(Indeed, since much of the evidence relates to the child's verbal
ability, the actual time of acquisition may be earlier still. For it is often
the case that understanding precedes the ability to articulate.)
Moreover,
while the data available to the child may not actually be corrupt, it is
certainly fragmentary and incomplete. Since much of folk-psychology is truistic
(to adults), it will hardly ever be explicitly cited in explanations. No adult
ever says things like 'Daddy has gone to the shops because he wants food to eat
tonight, believes that there is nothing suitable in the house, believes that
the shops are the best place to get food, believes that now is a suitable time
to go to the shops' and so on. One simply says 'Daddy has gone shopping to get
supper'. Not even the endless 'Why?' questions of a two-year-old will lead one
to articulate a generalisation like 'When people want something, and believe
that they can do something to get it, they tend (other things being equal) to
do that thing'. So how are we supposed to imagine that the child can gather,
purely by inference from its own observations, the full repertoire of
psychological generalisations? Moreover, much of what is needed to formulate
these generalisations is in any case hidden from the child. For being inner, it
is not available to pre-theoretical observation.
It
might be suggested that the child can learn folk-psychological generalisations
from its own case, by introspection. But this is highly implausible, for at
least two reasons. The first is that even if we suppose that all mental states
are transparently available to consciousness, as Cartesian models of the mind
maintain, the relevant causal connections are not. So we would have to suppose
that the young child has the ability to construct (albeit nonconsciously) an
explanatory theory of remarkable sophistication and complexity. It would also
be very surprising that all children should happen to hit upon the same
theory. But the second reason why introspection cannot be the source of the
child's knowledge of folk-psychology is simple and devastating. It is that many
mental states are not in any case immediately available to introspection. While
it is true that many mental states characteristically give rise to a belief in
their own existence, that they do so is itself one of the generalisations of
folk-psychology that the child needs to learn. For example, introspection
cannot show you that you went to the shops because you wanted to buy food and
believed that it was a suitable time to go, if your belief in the suitability
of the time did not surface in a conscious thought prior to your action. You
may now, looking back, say that of course you had such a belief underlying what
you did; but then it cannot be introspection which tells you that such
retrospective explanation is reliable.
I
conclude that Plato's Problem concerning the child's acquisition of
psychological generalisations cannot be solved, unless we suppose that much of
folk-psychology is already innate, triggered locally by the child's experience
of itself and others, rather than learned.
Supposing
that folk-psychology is largely true (or at least close enough to the truth to
be successful), we can construct an additional argument for supposing it to be
innate. For its innateness would confer considerable advantages in survival.
Recall that it is our shared belief in folk-psychology which makes cooperation
and communication possible. So if folk-psychology had to be learned, it would
have to be learned first. No cooperation could take place between parents and
children, and no other information could be acquired by children from their
parents, until the relevant generalisations had been learned, and learned
correctly. This would waste time and cognitive resources, at a stage in
development when every additional fact which a child can learn from adults can
save its life. ('Don't play with snakes; if you see a tiger, then run; don't
try to climb into the cooking pot;' and so on.) On the other hand, if the
relevant generalisations are innate, only needing to be triggered into
existence by the child's early experience, then the child can immediately
embark on the important task of learning the accumulated wisdom of its society.
So the innateness of folk-psychology is just what one might have expected
evolutionary selection to deliver. Creatures, such as ourselves, whose survival
depends crucially upon mutual knowledge of one another's psychology, will
survive best if that knowledge is innate.
Indeed,
recent evidence suggests that it was the evolution of a distinctively social
intelligence which gave the primary impetus to the evolution of human
intelligence in general.7 Studies of the behaviour of our closest
animal cousins in the wild - chimpanzees - show convincingly that they, too,
have at least a primitive model of their fellows' psychology. The suggestion
then made, is that once this model is innately given, new modes of social
interaction (cooperation as well as competition) become possible. The
advantages in survival of such interaction would be so decisive, that one would
expect the model to become rapidly more sophisticated, proliferating in the end
into full-blown human intelligence. This story is certainly plausible enough to
further support the suggestion that human folk-psychology is innate.
Is Folk-Psychology True?
Recall that in order to qualify as knowledge,
a belief must at least be true. So if folk-psychology is to be not only
innate, but innately known, it must constitute a correct theory of the mind. So
far we have been assuming that it is indeed true, but many have denied this.8
They have maintained that there is no more reason to believe folk-psychology to
be true, than there is to believe in the truth of folk-medicine or
folk-religion. But in that case it is hard to see why folk-psychology should be
so staggeringly successful. Of course it is not complete, since there
are many puzzling facts about our psychology which it cannot explain (for
example, various forms of mental illness). But its degree of success within its
domain (namely, normal conscious mental life) can be measured by the success of
the species as a whole. For it is folk-psychology, as we have said, which
underlies both our ability to cooperate and to communicate information, which
in turn are the very foundations of human society and human progress.
It
might be said in reply that human communities have flourished and prospered
despite their members having had many false beliefs - for example, beliefs in
magic and witchcraft. But the difference between such beliefs and those of
folk-psychology is that the latter are implicated in almost every aspect of our
practical lives. Beliefs in magic, in contrast, while perhaps being highly
valued by those who possess them, are relatively peripheral. It is not
surprising that societies should flourish despite their members having false
beliefs. What would be surprising is that those beliefs should be ones
on which the whole fabric of cooperation and communication depends.
Additionally,
if we regard some of the arguments given earlier as successful in establishing
nativism, then the innateness of folk-psychology provides us with good reason
for believing it to be true. For why should the beliefs in question be innate unless
they are true? It might be replied that many innate features of organisms
involve misrepresentations of the environment. For example, ducklings seem to
have an innate belief that the first moving thing they see is their mother.
Since this will lead them mistakenly to attach themselves to a human being, if
a human is the first moving thing they see, it might be argued that there is no
general reason for thinking that innate beliefs will be true. But one
difference between the two cases lies in the relative stability of the duckling
environment. (Another is that the mechanism in the duckling is probably not
properly characterised as a belief. Are we really prepared to apply the
practical-reasoning-model here?) Since the mother duck is almost always the
first thing which a duckling will see, it is easy to understand why the
mechanism of imprinting should have been selected in evolution.
Human
folk-psychology, in contrast, has to serve in a very wide and unpredictable
range of circumstances. Much of the success of human beings as a species lies
in their ability to adapt to almost any environment, as well as in their
ability to accumulate knowledge about the world around them and hence adapt it,
in turn, to human needs. So the innate basis of these abilities (namely our
mutual beliefs about human psychology) has to be workable whatever the
circumstances, and whatever other beliefs and practices are current in the
community. It is hard to see how anything could serve this purpose except
the truth.
I
conclude that we have good reason to think that folk-psychology is both
innately believed and true. Then since it appears that the evolutionary
selection of beliefs and belief-acquisition mechanisms (at least in creatures
as complex and adaptable as ourselves) is a reliable process, folk-psychology
will count as innately known. So we do have substantial innate knowledge of an
aspect of the world, namely the psychology of members of our own species.
Folk-Psychological Concepts
What of the constituent concepts of our
common-sense beliefs about the mind? Are they, too, innate? Or are they rather
acquired from experience prior to the triggering of our innate beliefs? (Recall
from chapter 4, that our possession of innate knowledge need not entail that we
also possess innate concepts.) One account of mental concepts which might allow
them to be derived from experience would be the Cartesian model. This holds that
all mental states are transparently available to consciousness, our concepts of
them being simple recognitional capacities. Then perhaps introspection of our
own mental states might be sufficient for us to acquire our conceptions of
them, even if it is not sufficient for us to learn of the causal relations
between them, as we noted above.
The
Cartesian conception of mental concepts is now almost universally rejected, for
at least two reasons. The first is that it makes it very difficult to explain
how we can have knowledge of the mental states of other people. If our
conception of each type of mental state is given purely by its inner subjective
quality, which we can of necessity know only from our own case, then it is
problematic, to say the least, how we can know that other people have similar
subjective feelings in similar circumstances.9
The
second objection to the Cartesian account, is that there are many types of
mental state for which it does not even begin to look plausible. Consciousness
of my own beliefs and desires, in particular, surely cannot be a matter of
immediate recognition. For in virtue of what would they be recognised?
These states do not have distinctive feels to them, in the way that pains and
other sensations arguably do. Indeed, since there are potentially infinitely
many distinct beliefs and desires, of which I have concepts before I
come to have them, there is a real problem here as to how I might be supposed
to have acquired these conceptions from introspection.
There
is no unanimity as to what account of our mental concepts should replace the
Cartesian one. But functionalism is now the most popular.10 This
holds that mental states are individuated by their normal causal role,
or function. Indeed, the functionalist view is that mental concepts gain their
sense from their position within the generalisations of folk-psychology.
Knowing what a belief is, for example, is a matter of knowing how it tends to
interact with other mental states such as desires and decisions.
There
are problems with functionalism which need not detain us here.11
Suffice it to say that if functionalism is true, then mental concepts, in being
acquired along with folk-psychological beliefs, will be innate if the latter
are. Indeed, it looks as if the same will be true on any viable alternative to
Cartesianism. For as Chomsky points out, our mental concepts appear to be
connected to one another in very many complex and subtle ways.12
This then means that it will be hard to explain how those concepts are acquired
so fast, on such slender exposure, unless they may be supposed to be innate.
There
is one issue which we do need to pursue further, since it bears on the likely
truth of folk-psychology. This is the question whether, in gaining their sense
from being embedded within folk-psychological beliefs, mental concepts are
employed as natural-kind terms. (A natural-kind term is one which is
used with the intention of 'dividing nature at the joints', in Plato's phrase -
that is, of picking out a class of things which would be recognised as such in
a completed science.) To take this view, is to think of folk-psychology as a
primitive form of scientific theory of the mind, as its very name suggests.
Then if, as is possible, a completed scientific psychology would not employ
such notions as 'belief', 'desire' or 'pain', it will turn out that these terms
fail to refer (just as 'phlogiston' fails to refer), and that the whole of
folk-psychology should be rejected as false.
However,
whether or not a body of belief constitutes a scientific theory is at least
partly a matter of the intentions with which it is held. In particular, we have
to be prepared to abandon the theory if a better one emerges. But we do not
have this attitude towards our common-sense psychology. If a future scientific
psychology finds that it can operate best without such notions as 'pain' or
'belief', we will not accept that there are no such things as pains and
beliefs, any more than we accept that tables are not really solid objects in
the light of the discoveries of modern physics. Rather, we will continue to
operate with our folk-psychological notions and generalisations alongside
scientific psychology. While I have argued that folk-psychology is a largely
true theory of the mind, it does not follow that it is a scientific theory of
the mind. (Compare folk-physics, which includes such truths as 'The chair broke
because David was too heavy for it'. We retain this as true, despite the fact
that 'chair' does not designate a natural kind.)
My conclusion is that we do indeed possess a body of reliably caused true beliefs which are innate, namely our beliefs about our own psychology.