Commonsense psychology explains
human behavior in terms of mental states such as beliefs and desires.  Telemachus
traveled to Sparta because he wanted to find Odysseus and believed he could do
so by talking with Menelaus, who lived there, and who was rumored to have been
the last person to see Odysseus and his men. Two things seem implicit in such
commonsense psychology: that the attributed mental states are real, and that
the kind of explanation being invoked is causal. Thus

[1] Telemachus traveled to Sparta
because he wanted find his father

is on par with

[2] the dam burst because of the
torrential rains

both insofar as Telemachus’s desire is as real as the
torrential rains, and insofar as the ‘because’ in each offers to inform the explainee
about some aspect of the respective causal histories of the explanandum events.

It is no secret that the twentieth
century was replete with attempts undermine this construal of commonsense
psychology.  In mid-century psychologists such as B.F. Skinner argued that
mental states are unreal, their ontological status being on par with witches or
demons, and philosophers such as A. I. Melden argued that logical connections
between the explanans and explanandum in commonsense psychology rendered mental
states impotent from a causal-explanatory point of view.  In later decades even
cognitive scientists in good standing had their doubts. Stephen Stich argued
that the mentalistic vocabulary of "folk psychology" should be
replaced with a vocabulary of syntactic states which would emerge in the course
of a maturing cognitive science (From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science,
MIT Press, 1985). And even Jerry Fodor–one of the most articulate and vigorous
defenders of the causal construal of commonsense psychology–worried that "Twin
Earth" concerns rendered beliefs and desires ill-suited for
causal-explanatory purposes, offering in their place a new inventory of  "narrow
content" states (Psychosemantics, MIT Press, 1989).

By the beginning of the current
decade such concerns seemed passé.  Noam Chomsky had long since demonstrated
that a robust ontology of mental states is essential to the explanation of
verbal behavior (‘Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior‘, reprinted
in Ned Block (ed.), Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I,
Harvard U.P., 1980), and Donald Davidson had put to rest worries arising from
logical connections between explanans and explananda (‘Actions, Reasons, and
Causes’, reprinted in his Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford U.P.,
1980).  As the 1990s progressed Stich and Fodor began to soft-pedal their
concerns about commonsense psychology and–in Fodor’s case most clearly–eventually
stopped endorsing their positive positions altogether.  All seemed safe for
understanding of our conspecifics in terms with which Homer would be
comfortable.

With the publication of Scott Sehon’s
Teleological Realism, however, we are poised to revisit this
argumentative territory. This is not to say that we will repeat the arguments
of the past half century. Sehon regards himself as a defender of commonsense
psychology, endorsing an ontology of beliefs and desires as robust as any. 
But, for Sehon, commonsense psychology is not exactly what it appears to be. 
Beliefs and desires, while real and intimately involved in commonsense
psychological explanations, are not causes of behavior.  Instead they
are states which aid the explainer in the attribution of goals to
agents, and it is these goals that are forefront in the explanatory endeavor.

Such is the essence of Sehon’s
positive program, but along the way he undertakes much more than this.  His
survey and critique of the literature deals deftly with a host of central
issues including: inter-theoretic  reduction, supervenience, causal
explanation, mental-state attribution, and even Humean motivation in relation
to moral responsibility. Thanks to the clarity and organization of his
presentation he accomplishes all this in fewer than 250 pages, endnotes and
appendices included.

But does he convince?  Yes and no.
Most plausible and refreshing is his stance on the relationship between
supervenience and reduction as applied to the mind-body problem.  Mental
properties supervene on physical properties only if there are no changes in
mental facts without changes in physical facts. Most today–Sehon included–accept
this supervenience thesis, at least in its "global" form that allows
the physical changes to take place anywhere, including the region external to
the body of the individual undergoing a change of mind. But some demand as well
that the fact of global supervenience itself be accounted for by reducing
mental properties to physical properties via "bridge laws" linking
the former to the latter. If for every mental property there is some (or other)
physical property that lawfully entails it, then (assuming these laws remain
unchanged) any change in the distribution of mental-property instances will be
accompanied by a change in the distribution of physical-property instances. 
Reduction by the discovery of bridge laws would thus account for supervenience
in a very comforting way. The problem is that, notwithstanding several decades of
effort (well documented in Sehon’s book), the requisite bridge laws have not
been forthcoming.  In the face of this some persist in looking for a suitable
reduction, but Sehon reacts in a novel way:

[i]n the absence of reduction,
supervenience without composition indeed seems miraculous; but, because we are
composed of physical particles, supervenience is no longer mysterious.  In
fact, it seems obvious to me that the supervenience of the mental on the
physical can be explained by the fact that we are composed of physical
particles (p. 131).

We have no properly documented
examples of mentation in the absence of a physical substrate, and the physical
properties that realize our mental states will no doubt be horrendously
complex.  Given these two observations it is hard to see why we should demand a
reduction, or expect one to be forthcoming. All this I applaud, and I hope for
a literature which takes its cue from Sehon’s brave stance. It is perhaps worth
adding that even if bridge laws were discovered it is not clear that those who
demand an account of supervenience should take comfort. To say that it is a law
that one property is instanced whenever another property is instanced is not to
explain the correlation; it is, rather, merely to signal an acceptance of the
correlation. Each and every law contains its own little mystery, no greater or
less in magnitude than the alleged mystery of supervenience itself.

What about Sehon’s positive
program?  Here I find myself less convinced.  There is ample anecdotal and
experimental evidence indicting that at a very young age humans not only
understand simple causal explanations of a wide range of phenomena, but offer
them as well.  Indeed, as a species we are dangerously zealous in this regard, the
post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy being a foible of human reasoning that
starts young and, unless consciously avoided, continues throughout life.  It
would be surprising if such a deep-seated human characteristic were not applied
in the course of understanding our conspecifics.  And [1] certainly looks
similar in form to [2].  Thus the onus is on Sehon to explain both why we
should not take commonsense psychology at face value, and what his offered
alternative construal of our day-to-day practice is. I will focus on Sehon’s
undertaking of the second of these tasks.

Explanations are what are offered
in answer to certain types of ‘why’ questions.  More specifically, explanations
have the aim of informing the explainee with regard to some aspect of
the world about which he or she is ignorant. In instances of causal
explanation it is some aspect of the causal history of the explanandum event
about which the explainee is ignorant.  In order to inform successfully, the
explainer must size up the epistemic status of the explainee, compare this with
what the explainer knows about the causal history of the explanandum event, and
then utter a sentence–paradigmatically a ‘because’ sentence–that relieves the
explainee’s ignorance.  Thus a successful causal explanation must be both true
(the explainer must mention an event or state that really was part of the
causal history of the explanandum event) and appropriate (the event mentioned
must be one the explainee is not already aware of, is one of a sort in which he
or she would be interested, etc.).  Explanations thus have both
truth-conditional and pragmatic components.  In instances of psychological
causal explanation, it is a belief or a desire of the agent about which the explainee
is ignorant, and it is the task of the explainer to figure out the relevant gap
in the explainee’s epistemic status, and plug it. In the case of [1], the explainee
is ignorant of some aspect of Telemachus’s psychological constitution prior to
the journey to Sparta.  The explainee wants to know which of many possible
desires was in fact possessed by Telemachus and causally operative in his
psychology.  Was it a desire for a good feast?  Was he nostalgic for the
company of Menelaus?  No, it was a desire to find his father.  To mention this
in [1] is to say something that is both true and appropriate given the
epistemic status of the (imagined, typical) explainee, and in this way it
successfully informs. [1] expresses a good explanation.

What about teleological
explanation?  For Sehon it is the agent’s goals about which the explainee
needs to be informed. [1] can be recast as

[1′] Telemachus traveled to Sparta
in order to find his father

suggesting that the state of affairs in which Telemachus
finds his father is the goal towards which his behavior was directed.  The explainee
is ignorant of this goal, and in being presented with [1′] has his or her
ignorance relieved, and thus comes to understand why Telemachus undertook the
journey.

However, for Sehon psychological
explanation is typically not a situation in which a knowing explainer informs
an ignorant explainee regarding the operative goal.  Instead, all parties to
the instance of explanation are ignorant, and must therefore apply interpretive
measures in order to determine which goal was operative. More generally, in the
course of deriving a teleological explanation of the form

[3] the agent _d in order to ψ

explainer-explainees apply two interpretive principles:

[I₁] find a ψ such
that _ing is optimally appropriate for ψing,
given a viable theory of the agent’s intentional states and circumstances

and

[I₂] find a ψ such
that ψing is the most valuable state of affairs towards which _ing could be directed, given a viable theory
of the agent’s intentional states and circumstances (pp. 146-147).

In applying [I₁] to Telemachus,
the explainer-explainee uses his or her knowledge of Telemachus’s beliefs (he
believed, for example, that Menelaus was the last person to have seen
Odysseus), desires (he desires to find his father), and circumstances (the
situation at the palace is dire, and only the strength that would come with
Odysseus’s return will bring affairs to proper order) to determine the goal
towards which the journey was directed. There may be other candidate goals
related to finding his father–an opportunity for time away from the tired
palace routines, an occasion for a feast absent the suitors, a chance to drive
an opulent chariot–but these are ruled out by an application of [I₂],
which requires that the goal with the greatest value to the agent be designated
as the operative one in the course of explanation.  All these interpretive
factors together enable the explainer-explainee to triangulate uniquely on the
operative goal, thus relieving his or her ignorance, and fostering
understanding. 

There are at least two problems
with this approach.  First, I wonder about the ontological status of goals and
goal-directedness.  With regard to the former, Sehon gives us a great deal of
information about how an explainer-explainee finds out what goals an
agent had–a process which involves [I₁], [I₂], knowledge
of the agent’s desires, and a host of assumptions about the agent’s rationality–but
he is coy about the nature of goals themselves.  At places he says goals are
future states of affairs, but the ontological status of a future state of
affairs is itself a mystery.  Perhaps Sehon believes there is no more to having
a goal than what gets ascribed by the ideal explainer-explainee to an ideal
agent in an ideal application of the interpretive apparatus.  But, by my lights
at any rate, this would mix poorly with the idea that he is offering a realist
form of explanation, as advertised in the title.

Sehon is much more explicit about
the ontological status of goal-directness, stating he doubts that "there
is any reductive analysis of goal direction, just as there is
arguably no reductive analysis of what it means to say that one event caused
another" (p. 137). I am sympathetic with the suggestion that causation
will have to remain an unanalyzed primitive, but to declare a stand-off on this
basis is methodologically suspect. Causation is an indispensable component of
our understanding of our world (as Sehon would readily acknowledge), and we
tolerate its unanalyzability because we have no choice.  But newly offered
metaphysical notions receive no such preferential treatment, especially ones
that arguably are in tension with our larger, causal, understanding of the
world.

A second problem with Sehon’s
positive program is the suspicion that teleological explanation is merely
causal explanation in disguise.  The ease with which we can switch between
sentences such as [1] and [1′] suggests this, as does the close connection
between desires and goals.  As Sehon acknowledges, desires are a rich source of
information about goals.  We know that Telemachus had the goal of finding his
father once we know that he had the desire to find his father.  But, given
this, it is arguable that all the explanatory work is done once we have learned
what the desire is, and the further switch from ‘Telemachus wanted to find his
father’ to ‘Telemachus had the goal of finding his father’ amounts to a mere
pleonasm, and thus is not a reliable guide to ontological postulation.

Sehon is well aware of this danger,
and provides a complex argument in an attempt to ward it off. Contained within
the general form of a teleological explanation offered at [3], he suggests, are
two counterfactuals which together constitute the truth-conditional core of
teleological explanation:

[4] ceteris paribus, if [the agent]
A had not had the goal of ψing, then A would not have _d

and

[5] ceteris paribus, if ψing
had required πing [instead of _ing,
or in addition to _ing], A would have πd
[instead of, or in addition to, _ing]
(p. 159).

Applying this to Telemachus yields:

[4′] ceteris paribus, if Telemachus
had not had the goal of finding his father, then he would not have traveled to
Sparta,

and

[5′] ceteris paribus, if finding
his father had required traveling to Troy instead of to Sparta, or in addition
to Sparta, Telemachus would have traveled to Troy instead of to Sparta, or in
addition to Sparta.

According to Sehon, both must be true (on a reasonable
construal of the truth conditions for counterfactuals) in order for [1′] to be
a correct explanation.

Causal explanation also has a
counterfactual truth-conditional core, but according to Sehon it involves only

[6] ceteris
paribus, if A had not had the desire to ψ, then A would not have _d

thus yielding

[6′] ceteris paribus, if Telemachus
had not had wanted to find his father, he would not have traveled to Sparta.

[4′] and [6′] are very similar, Sehon grants, but the two
ways of explaining remain distinct due to the absence of anything along the
lines of [5′] in the truth conditions for [1].

I am sympathetic with Sehon’s
analysis of [1] in terms of [6] and [6′].  If I ask you why Telemachus went to
Sparta and you utter [1] and yet [6′] is false, you have misinformed me as to
the cause of his journey.  Similarly, the analysis of [3] in terms of [4] seems
plausible. If, in answer to the same question, you utter [1′] even though [4′]
is false, something seems amiss. 

But I wonder whether there is in
fact anything along the lines of [5] built into [3].  According to Sehon, [5]
has– roughly–the force of saying that "A would have done whatever it
took to ψ" (p. 159).  This seems odd.  The general idea, recall, is
that in an instance of explanation the explainee is ignorant of some state or
event relevant to the explanandum event.  In the case of causal explanation the
explainee is ignorant of an event that was part of the causal history of the explanandum
event and, hence, the plausibility of [6].  In the case of teleological
explanation the explainee is ignorant of the goal towards which the explanandum
event was directed, and hence the plausibility of [4].  But mentioning a
particular goal in the course of explaining a particular behavioral event when
that goal is compatible with any sort of behavior seems uninformative. 
In the case of Telemachus we want to know why he went to Sparta.  It is
no help to be informed that he would have gone anywhere.  Thus I am not
convinced [5] is in fact part of an analysis of [3], and yet by Sehon’s own
admission it is [5] that is warding off the charge that teleological
explanations are causal explanations in disguise.

So, as I see it, there are problems
with Sehon’s positive program.  However, perhaps I am being unfair in ignoring Sehon’s
argument against the causal construal of commonsense explanation.  Sehon’s
overall rhetorical strategy is to highlight problems with the causal construal,
characterize his teleological replacement, and then claim that problems with
the former are more formidable than problems with the latter.  Perhaps the
problems I have indicated here are dwarfed by the problems Sehon finds with the
traditional causal construal of commonsense psychology.  I leave it to the
reader to evaluate this aspect of Sehon’s program and judge for him or herself
which is the less problematic approach.  At the very least, however, in its
style and willingness to challenge pervasive dogmas, Sehon’s book is precisely
what we need to help us further refine our understanding of explanation,
especially explanation as manifested in psychological contexts.

 

© 2006 Scott Walden

 

Scott Walden, Ph.D. is Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy, New York University. His academic work focuses on issues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of art, especially photography.
He is author of Places
Lost (Lynx, 2003).

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology