The Philosophy of Psychology

Preface page ix
Acknowledgements xii
1 Introduction: some background 1
1 Developments in philosophy of mind 1
2 Developments in psychology 12
3 Conclusion 23
2 Folk-psychological commitments 24
1 Realisms and anti-realisms 24
2 Two varieties of anti-realism 26
3 The case for realism about folk psychology 31
4 Realism and eliminativism 40
5 Using folk psychology 46
6 Conclusion 48
3 Modularity and nativism 49
1 Some background on empiricism and nativism 50
2 The case for nativism 52
3 Developmental rigidity and modularity 56
4 Fodorian modularity 62
5 Input systems versus central systems 66
6 Conclusion 75
4 Mind-reading 77
1 The alternatives: theory-theory versus simulation 77
2 Problems for simulationism 83
3 A hybrid view 89
4 Developmental studies 91
5 Accounting for autistic impairments 99
6 Conclusion 103
vii
5 Reasoning and irrationality 105
1 Introduction: the fragmentation of rationality 105
2 Some psychological evidence 108
3 Philosophical arguments in defence of rationality 111
4 Psychological explanations of performance 119
5 Practical rationality 125
6 Conclusion 130
6 Content for psychology 131
1 Introduction: wide versus narrow 133
2 Arguments for wide content 138
3 The coherence of narrow content 138
4 Explanation and causation 143
5 Folk-psychological content 155
6 Conclusion 160
7 Content naturalised 161
1 Introduction 161
2 Informational semantics 163
3 Teleo-semantics 167
4 Functional-role semantics 176
5 Naturalisation versus reduction 184
6 Conclusion 190
8 Forms of representation 191
1 Preliminaries: thinking in images 191
2 Mentalese versus connectionism 194
3 The place of natural language in thought 208
4 Conclusion 225
9 Consciousness: the final frontier? 227
1 Preliminaries: distinctions and data 227
2 Mysterianism 234
3 Cognitivist theories 247
4 Conclusion 271
References 272
Index of names 290
Index of subjects 295