Can intuitive psychology survive the growth of neuroscience?

Abstract

This paper considers the impact which developments in neuroscience seem likely to have on our inherited, intuitive psychology ‐ the system of beliefs called ‘folk psychology’ by enthusiasts for its elimination. The paper argues that while closer relations between a developing genuinely scientific cognitive psychology and a burgeoning neurological understanding are to be welcomed, physiology will not reduce psychology, and the concepts belonging to intuitive psychology will be transformed and enriched, but not discredited or discarded, when psychology, in its cognitive form, emerges as a science with genuine explanatory power. The analogy between belief and desire, on one hand, and witches and phlogiston, on the other, is rejected. So is the parallel between folk psychology and folk physics. We face the choice, on Churchland's principles, between the rejection of historical, literary, and moral culture, and accepting a dualism in human thought which despairs of a comprehensively naturalistic vision of ourselves.

Notes

Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind‐Brain. Bradford Books. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 1986, xiv + 546 pp., $27.50.