Professor Emma Borg

Event details

Twitches, Fidgets, Habits, Skills: Exploring the scope of common-sense psychology

A standard view in philosophy holds that human action is typically intentional, i.e. reasons-responsive, driven by what a subject believes, desires, and intends. This picture of human action seems crucial to many things we care about (e.g. underpinning reactive moral attitudes). However, recently questions have been asked about the scope of what Fodor 1987 called ‘good old common sense belief/desire psychology’: is the assumption that human behaviour is typically reasons-responsive right? According to various scope-based challenges, although the reasons-based approach holds for deliberate, consciously considered actions, most of what humans do is not like this. In particular, fidgets, habits, and skills have all been argued to fall beyond the reach of the common-sense framework. Yet if this is right, then the reasons-based model turns out to be less interesting or impressive than we might once have thought, since it accounts for only a tiny sliver of human action, ignoring vast swathes of ordinary human behaviour. My aim in this talk is to defend common-sense psychology from various incarnations of the scope challenge. I’ll argue that, at heart, the challenge rests on a background picture of two different, encapsulated systems for thought and action, a picture we have reason to resist.