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20160614 Corrections A THERAPEUTIC ELIMINATION OF “BELIEF” AND “DESIRE” FROM CAUSAL ACCOUNTS OF ACTION Mark Curtis University of East Anglia School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies Department of Philosophy This thesis is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 2016 This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK copyright law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Acknowledgements and Dedication My gratitude, firstly, to my thesis supervisors Eugen Fischer and John Collins. Eugen, as my unstinting primary supervisor, gave short shrift to my occasionally woolly thinking, detached me from my own dogmas and challenged me to raise the standard of my scholarship. Any academic merit that this thesis displays I owe to his guidance. Thanks also to colleagues, faculty and staff at the University of East Anglia, for revealing conversations in both formal and informal settings. Among others I must mention Lewis Clarke, Jessica Dollman, Gareth Jones, Janis Loschmann, Andrei Nasta, Liz McKinnell, Mihai Ometita, Sylvia Panizza, Fiona Roxburgh, Maria Serban, Sidra Shahid, Simon Summers and Odai al Zoubi. I am incredibly grateful to my wife, Karen, without whose emotional and material support I could never have embarked on this project. This work is dedicated to the memory of my late father, John Curtis, who imbued in me the sense that life should be marked by continual learning, curiosity and enquiry. A Therapeutic Elimination… Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 3 0.1 Research Questions and Objectives .................................................................................................. 3 0.2 Classic Philosophical Folk Psychology ............................................................................................ 6 0.3 Philosophical Problems Generated by Folk Psychology ................................................................ 19 0.4 Philosophical Pictures, Dogma and the Therapeutic Approach ...................................................... 29 0.5 Synopsis of Parts and Chapters ....................................................................................................... 40 Part One: "Belief" and "Desire" in Psychology 1 Chapter One: Causal Explanation in Psychology ......................................................... 44 1.1 The Nature of Psychological Explanation ...................................................................................... 44 1.2 “As If” versus Genuine Explanations and Explanation versus Prediction ...................................... 51 1.3 Functional Analysis in Practice: Marr’s Vision .............................................................................. 52 1.4 Spreading Activation in Semantic Memory .................................................................................... 57 1.5 Developments of Associative Theories .......................................................................................... 64 1.6 The Scientific Status of Psychology ............................................................................................... 66 1.7 Chapter Summary ........................................................................................................................... 69 2 Chapter Two: Action Choice, Judgement and Decision-Making ................................. 71 2.1 Expected Utility Decision Theory: “Homo Economicus” ............................................................. 71 2.2 EUDT and Folk Psychology: The Parallels .................................................................................... 77 2.3 Dynamic Probability and the Rational Bayesian ............................................................................ 78 2.4 Bayesian Missteps, Framing and Biases ......................................................................................... 79 2.5 Fast and Frugal Heuristics: “Homo Heuristicus”? ......................................................................... 87 2.6 Automaticity and the New Unconscious ........................................................................................ 94 2.7 Dual-Process Models ...................................................................................................................... 99 2.8 Chapter Summary ......................................................................................................................... 102 3 Chapter Three: Interpersonal Understanding of Action; “Attribution Theory” ......... 105 3.1 Interpersonal Understanding and the Appeal of “Agency” .......................................................... 105 3.2 Attribution Theory ........................................................................................................................ 108 3.3 Historic Investigations into Situational Attributions .................................................................... 112 3.4 Fundamental Attribution Error or Correspondence Bias .............................................................. 117 3.5 Actor-Observer Differences .......................................................................................................... 123 3.6 Social Heuristics and Automaticity .............................................................................................. 127 3.7 Chapter Summary ......................................................................................................................... 134 Part Two: Everyday "Belief" and "Desire" 4 Chapter Four: Narratives of Action; Stories and our Picture of the Mind ................. 137 4.1 Why Narratives? Heider and Simmel revisited. ........................................................................... 138 4.2 The Ubiquity and Definition of Narratives ................................................................................... 140 4.3 Narrative Psychology .................................................................................................................... 145 4.4 Therapeutic Narrative Psychology ................................................................................................ 152 4.5 Narrative Truth versus Historical Truth ........................................................................................ 157 4.6 Narratives With or Without Mental State Terms? ........................................................................ 161 4.7 Narrative Folk Psychology ........................................................................................................... 166 4.8 Is There a “Narrative Heuristic”? ................................................................................................. 170 4.9 Chapter Summary ......................................................................................................................... 174 5 Chapter Five: Excuses, Testimony, Mens Rea and Causes ....................................... 176 5.1 Justifications and Making Excuses ............................................................................................... 177 5.2 The Epistemology of Testimony Applied to Excuses .................................................................. 181 5.3 Are Belief-Desire Excuses Intended or Evaluated as Testimony? ................................................ 187 5.4 Are Excuses Assessed as Causes? ................................................................................................ 189 5.5 Guilty Acts and Guilty Minds: Mens Rea and the Law ................................................................ 194 5.6 Case Study: R v Morgan et. al (1975) .......................................................................................... 200 5.7 Case Study 2: “Let him have it Chris!” ........................................................................................ 203 5.8 Chapter Summary ......................................................................................................................... 209 Mark Curtis, UEA June, 2016 1 A Therapeutic Elimination… 6 Chapter Six: Hedges and Non-Causal Mental State Terms ........................................ 211 6.1 The Phenomenon of Hedging and Hedges ................................................................................... 211 6.2 The Roles that Hedges Perform .................................................................................................... 216 6.3 “I believe that” as a Hedging-Phrase. ........................................................................................... 218 6.4 The Pragmatic Interpretation of Hedges ....................................................................................... 220 6.5 Implicatures of “I believe that…” Hedges .................................................................................... 225 6.6 “I believe that…” Hedges and Assertion ...................................................................................... 229 6.7 Chapter Summary ......................................................................................................................... 235 7 Chapter Seven: Conclusions and Implications ........................................................... 237 7.1 Objectives Reviewed ...................................................................................................................
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