The Non-Reificatory Approach to Belief Richard Floyd The Non-Reificatory Approach to Belief Richard Floyd The Non-Reificatory Approach to Belief Richard Floyd University of Lancaster Lancaster, Lancashire UK ISBN 978-3-319-59872-7 ISBN 978-3-319-59873-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59873-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944142 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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Cover illustration: Mopic/Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To Alex, Rachel, and my parents Acknowledgements Many thanks to John O’Neill for a crucial intervention at an early stage. To Rachel Cooper for keeping me in the game on numerous occasions and who, along with Helen Steward, provided valuable feedback on an early draft. To Neil Manson and Brian Garvey for reading all the mate- rial in this book at various stages and providing much needed guidance, comments, and suggestions (extra thanks go to Brian for convincing me that this was worth doing). And finally, to all the people who have lis- tened to or read the material that ended up in this book, for their feed- back and encouragement. My research was partially funded by a bursary from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Lancaster University. vii Contents 1 Approaching the Mind 1 2 Wittgenstein, Ryle, and the Language of Commonsense Psychology 27 3 Belief and Explanation 57 4 Theory-Theory, Simulation, and Self-ascription 87 5 The Positive Account of Belief 121 6 Where Did It All Go Wrong? 163 7 Conclusion 205 Index 209 ix 1 Approaching the Mind 1 Introduction In our everyday lives, most of us only see the outsides of people. We can see (usually) the stimulus and response, but we cannot see what happens in between that decides which response will follow which stimulus, or which behaviour will be the result of which situation. Nevertheless we are readily able to offer commonsense explanations as to why so-and-so did such-and-such, and it usually involves reference, in some way or other, to so-and-so’s beliefs and desires. The stand- ard view1 in philosophy of mind is that when we talk about beliefs, desires, hopes and fears, we are in fact giving a description of this hid- den, internal element of our interaction with the world, that when we say someone believes something we are saying that somewhere beneath their skin there is a belief. But as soon as we adopt this view then we are presented with a potential problem, for it seems that common- sense psychology could end up in competition with biology and neu- roscience. The former posits one set of inner particulars to explain our behaviour, and the latter shows us, quite clearly, another. So while the layperson will say “Bob jumped off the cliff because he thought there © The Author(s) 2017 1 R. Floyd, The Non-Reificatory Approach to Belief, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-59873-4_1 2 R. Floyd was an alien spaceship waiting, hidden, at the bottom to take him to salvation,” the neuroscientist will say “Bob jumped off the cliff because such-and-such a neuron (or set of neurons) fired in his brain in such- and-such a pattern.” We cannot reasonably deny what the neuroscien- tist tells us; if we try he will put Bob’s head in a machine and show us. So we are left with two options: we must either show that the things which commonsense psychology posits are in some way identical with (or constituted/realized by, or reducible to) the things the neuroscien- tist displays (which is notoriously tricky), or we must conclude that commonsense psychology is wrong, and beliefs are a myth (which seems absurd). We are, however, only presented with this problem if we assume that commonsense psychology posits inner particulars in order to explain/ predict our actions, i.e. if we adopt a reificatory approach to common- sense psychological concepts. There is an alternative option, which is to claim that commonsense psychology does not in fact posit things. Words like “belief” and “desire” do not refer to spatiotemporal particu- lars within us which cause our overt behaviour, and thus the account of which they form a part does not compete with that of the scientist. If this is the case then we need not worry about what beliefs are made of, or whether they really exist; such questions cannot reasonably be asked. We simply need to concentrate on providing a clear account of what these words mean. This non-reificatory approach has had a variety of proponents over the years; Wittgenstein is a clear influence, with both logical positivists and ordinary language philosophers among the non- reificatory theorists. With the rise of functionalism and cognitive science in the latter part of the twentieth century, the non-reificatory approach is certainly a minority position, but I will argue that the minority have got it right. This main thesis is this: the non-reificatory approach to belief is the correct one. In support of this, I intend to establish that: (1) Th e reificatory approach to belief is problematic in various ways (see below); most importantly—and despite appearances—it does not fit well with the everyday use of the concept. This is what I try to establish in this chapter and the next, as well as parts of Chap. 5. 1 Approaching the Mind 3 (2) Th e reasons (see Sect. 5 below) for adopting a reificatory approach are not really that strong. The reasons in question are possible responses to 1) which suggest that the technical problems of reifi- catory theory are worth dealing with because we need beliefs to be inner particulars of some sort to make sense of certain aspects of commonsense psychology. In what remains of this chapter I will describe the reificatory approach, and what I believe to be wrong with it. I will then present the alterna- tive, giving a very brief survey of the more prominent voices advocating the non-reificatory approach. 2 The Reificatory Approach to the Mind 2.1 What Is Reification? The loosest definition of reification is that it means people treat some- thing as a thing which in fact is not a thing after all. But we have to be careful here, the word “thing” is very vague; the portion of space seven inches to the right of my head into which a small teapot would fit per- fectly if it were held there is a thing in a sense, but not in a particularly useful sense, and certainly not useful for the task at hand. We need a clearer definition of what sort of mistake is being made. In the present discussion, I mean by ‘reification’ the treatment of something as if it were a particular which can be individuated by its position in space and time. One is drawn to Ryle’s example of “the aver- age taxpayer.”2 The average taxpayer does have properties; we can ask, quite reasonably, “What does the average taxpayer earn?” or “How big a house does the average taxpayer have?” But we cannot ask “Where is the average taxpayer right now?” If we think that we can locate the aver- age taxpayer in space and time we have made a mistake; we have reified him. Another important example is that of a centre of gravity. There has been a fair amount of debate over whether or not centres of gravity are real or not,3 but the focus here is on what I mean by reification. When we say that a car has a centre of gravity, we are talking about the point