Читать книгу Philosophy of Psychology - Lisa Bortolotti - Страница 15

We find it useful to divide philosophy of psychology into two sub-areas: ‘foundational philosophy of psychology’ and ‘implicational philosophy of psychology’.

Foundational philosophy of psychology is concerned with core concepts in psychology (e.g., ‘representation’, ‘computation’, or ‘concept’) and general hypotheses in psychology that can make sense of a series of relevant studies as interconnected, including: the massive modularity hypothesis, which roughly says that our mind is composed of ‘modular’ systems that are dedicated to some specific tasks (Fodor 1983); the language of thought hypothesis, which roughly says that our cognition is based upon processing language-like representations (Fodor 1975); and the adaptive unconsciousness hypothesis, which roughly says that a part of our mind has evolved via natural selection and we do not and cannot have direct access to it (Wilson 2002). Questions in foundational philosophy of psychology include: ‘What are representations?’, ‘How does computation work?’, ‘Is the massive modularity hypothesis plausible?’, ‘Is the language of thought hypothesis needed to explain cognition?’, and so on.

In contrast, implicational philosophy of psychology focuses on the results of particular psychological studies (rather than their theoretical foundations) and investigates their implications for issues that are philosophically relevant. For example, Chapter 1 will focus on a series of influential studies on reasoning biases (Kahneman, Slovic, & Tversky 1982; Tversky & Kahneman 1974) exploring the implications of such studies for questions concerning human rationality. It will ask, for example, whether these studies show that humans are irrational after all. Chapter 7 will discuss studies on the limitations of memory (Loftus 2003; Schacter & Addis 2007), which show that human agents can easily misremember even important details of past events and thus might have important implications for eye-witness testimony in forensic settings. One might subsequently ask whether these studies show that eye-witness testimony is fundamentally unreliable.

Although we think that the distinction between foundations and implications is useful, we do not assume that it is clear-cut. The difference between them is probably a matter of degree: for example, some issues are more foundational and less implicational than others. There will be some borderline cases. For example, the dual-process theory (the theory according to which there are two distinct types of cognitive processes: Type-1 processes that are fast, unconscious, and automatic, and Type-2 processes that are slow, conscious, and controlled), which is discussed in Chapter 3, might be a borderline case.

Both dimensions of philosophy of psychology are equally important, but this book is more focused on implicational philosophy of psychology than foundational philosophy of psychology. There are two reasons for this. First, implicational issues have recently stimulated very lively discussions in philosophy of psychology research (which used to be dominated by foundational issues). We wanted this book to reflect this recent trend. Second, existing philosophy of psychology textbooks mainly focus on foundational issues, leaving the implications largely unexplored. This book is motivated by our frustration with the lack of accessible resources for discussing implicational issues. Hereafter, ‘philosophy of psychology’ means implicational philosophy of psychology.

This book will focus on implicational issues rather than foundational issues; however, strictly speaking, its focus is even narrower. There are so many interesting implicational issues and one book is not able to cover them all. As hinted previously, we will prioritize topics related to the ‘imperfection’ of human cognition and agency. Our central topics will include reasoning, judgment, belief, emotion, behaviour, and agency. For this reason, unfortunately, we will largely ignore the issues concerning consciousness, perception, attention, and so on. (See Further Resources for some material on the issues that we do not discuss in this book.)