Folk psychology as a causal language

Abstract

According to Oude Maatman (2020), our recent suggestion (Borsboom et al., 2019) that symptom networks are irreducible because they rely on folk psychological descriptions, threatens to undermine the main achievements of the network approach. In this article, we take up Oude Maatman’s challenge and develop an argument showing in what sense folk psychological concepts describe features of reality, and what it means to say that folk psychology is a causal language.

Folk psychology and network theory: Fact or gamble? A reply to Kalis and Borsboom

“…The core reason for this difference between our accounts is that I do not commit to realism about intentional content as an irreducible, mind-independently existing property, whilst Kalis and Borsboom (2020) do—which they confirm in their reaction. The relevance of this difference is best illustrated through an example.…”

“…Notably, this also applies to my own account (Oude Maatman, 2020). However, as stated before, I am primarily concerned with the empirical consequences that the realism of Borsboom and colleagues (2019; Kalis & Borsboom, 2020) leads to, which my account manages to avoid.…”

“…This makes Kalis and Borsboom's (2020) realism difficult to argue against. Kalis and Borsboom (2020), however, do not discuss the conditions both accounts set on this realism, which, in both cases, is closely related to the explanatory success of folk psychology. In the case of Haugeland (1993), a repeated failure of folk psychological predictions violates a rationality assumption necessary for identification of folk psychological phenomena.…”

“…In Ladyman and Ross’s (2007) view, predictive success itself is also not enough ; folk psychology needs to be more information–theoretically efficient in a “complete” science than all other possible lower level explanations. Kalis and Borsboom (2020), then, are in fact betting on the (continued) empirical success of this “causal language” to ground the biological irreducibility of causal connections such as “delusion → behavior change” (Borsboom et al, 2019). This inadvertently forces them to treat folk psychology as a scientific theory, especially if it is to compete with other scientific theories in Ladyman and Ross’s (2007) scientifically informed approach to metaphysics.…”

“…Any answers to this challenge can draw from a large philosophical literature, discussions that are far from settled. Kalis and Borsboom’s (2020) philosophical arguments therefore invite deeper scrutiny, and their position likely requires more support than they so far have given. Notably, this also applies to my own account (Oude Maatman, 2020).…”