Abstract

This thesis attempts to defend folk psychology--those commitments and principles of mental state attribution we commonly rely on to explain intelligent behavior--against recent charges that commonsense psychology must be revised or eliminated because it is not properly scientific. I argue that commonsense psychology is scientifically respectable in its current, unrevised form. First I criticize Dennett's instrumentalist, the Churchlands' eliminativist, and Fodor's revisionist, treatments of folk psychology. Their attacks, I argue, derive either from mistaken pictures of folk psychology or from misconceptions about what constitutes scientific respectability. By presenting a variety of results in experimental psychology whose scientific repute is not in question, I then show how the primitive intentional states appealed to in psycholinguistics are relationally individuated and as such, are functionally continuous with the intentional states of folk psychology. I close with an argument that folk psychological explanation is a species of functional explanation, and that, since functional explanations are routinely offered in the natural and social sciences, in the first instance the scientific integrity of folk psychology can be undermined only by charges directed against folk psychology specifically, rather than by more general criticisms of functional explanation