Kindless Philosophy

 Folk science and the Manifest Image “What then do we see when we look at this bustling public world? Among the most complicated and interesting of the phenomena are the doings of our fellow human beings. If we try to predict and describe them using the same methods and concepts we have developed to describe landslides, germination, and magnetism, we can make a few important inroads, but the bulk of their observable macro- activity-their "behavior"-is hopelessly unpredictable from these perspectives. People are even less predictable than the weather, if we rely on the scientific techniques of meteorologists and even biologists. But there is another perspective, familiar to us since childhood and used effortlessly by us all every day, that seems wonderfully able to make sense of this complexity. It is often called folk psychology. It is the perspective that invokes the family of "mentalistic" concepts, such as belief, desire, knowledge, fear, pain, expectation, inten...

 Setting Off on the Right Foot “Talking about the mind, for many people, is rather like talking about sex: slightly embarrassing, undignified, maybe even disreputable. "Of course it exists," some might say, "but do we have to talk about it?" Yes, we do. Many people would rather talk about the brain (which, after all, is the mind) and would like to think that all the wonderful things we need to say about people could be said without lapsing into vulgar, undisciplined mentalistic talk, but it is now quite clear that many things need saying that cannot be said in the restricted languages of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, or behavioristic psychology. It is not just the arts and humanities that need to talk about the mind; the various puritanical attempts to complete the biological and social sciences without ever talking about it have by now amply revealed their futility. In fact there is something approaching a new consensus among cognitive scientists and the more libe...