Whose psychological concepts?

Transcription

1 1 Whose psychological concepts? Jan Smedslund The Structure of Psychological Common Sense Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. ISBN $24.95 Review by Bertram F. Malle Socrates charge against the sophists was that they spoke about important phenomena using terms without clear meaning. In The structure of psychological common sense, Jan Smedslund brings forth a similar charge against contemporary psychology: that in speaking about psychological phenomena psychologists tend to use language unreflectively (p. ix), and this unanalyzed language is an obstacle to scientific progress (p. ix). For many years, Smedslund has been fighting aggressively for more attention to the definition and choice of concepts in psychology. In his recent book, however, he conveys the impression of an aging, lone warrior who has laid down his weapons and resigned himself to repeating his message, whether others will listen or not. The reader who has never heard of Smedslund will therefore be bewildered by this book. The author decided to avoid any metatheoretical discussion arguments for and against his goal and method because he

2 2 has found them to be relatively unprofitable (p. xii). At the end of the book, Smedslund offers a useful reference list for those who want to follow the path of debates between Smedslund and his critics. Without reading up on this past literature, however, the reader is left only with a fourpage introduction for guidance. There Smedslund explains tersely what his goal and method are: to describe the invariant structure of psychological concepts and assumptions embedded in ordinary language, by defining and relating them to each other. The main 100 pages of the book then offer what Smedlsund calls platitudes of folk psychology (p. xii) on the topics of 1. Persons, 2. Acting, 3. Wanting and Believing, 4. Feeling, 5. Interpersonal Processes, 6. Intrapersonal Processes, and 7. Personal Change. This text comes formulated in hundreds of definitions, axioms, theorems, and corollaries, interspersed with semantic proofs and clarifying notes. The amount of work that went into building this structure is enormous. The results, however, are often debatable. For example, Axiom states: P tries to maximize expected utility ; Theorem claims: P is sad, if, and only if, P believes that something P wants has become irrevocably lost ; and Corollary asserts: If P s trust in O decreases, then P s expectancy of being harmed by O increases. The reader s first response may be to examine each axiom, theorem, and corollary and ask whether it is (semantically or empirically) true. In the past, many critics have taken this approach and disagreed with Smedslund about, say, a specific definition. However, such disagreements are impossible to resolve unless one answers a fundamental question first: Whose concepts is Smedslund defining and relating to each other? Ordinary people s concepts or psychologists concepts?

3 3 On the one hand, Smedslund appears to be interested in explicating the implicit conceptual system of psychology embedded in ordinary language (p. ix) that is, the assumptions and distinctions underlying our ways of thinking and talking about psychological phenomena (p. ix). Clearly, he refers here to ordinary people s concepts as they are used in everyday speaking and thinking. Similarly, the title of Smedslund s book suggests that what is at stake is a description of common-sense psychology. On the other hand, Smedslund insists that definitions of ordinary language terms are relatively useless (p. x) because they do not capture the richness, vagueness, and variability of meaning in ordinary language (p. xi). As a result, Smedslund declares that he has turned to the introduction of technical/scientific terms [that] do not belong to ordinary language (p. ix). So what is this book about? The descriptive endeavor of capturing the complex framework of folk-psychological concepts? Or the normative endeavor of proposing a novel system of scientific terms that psychologists should use when conducting empirical research? These two endeavors are not logically incompatible, but as readers we are forced to decide which endeavor we take Smedslund to be pursuing. For the nature of the endeavor dictates the method we use to determine whether the offered definitions are adequate and the theorems true. Suppose Smedslund is reconstructing people s folk-conceptual framework. Then we would need empirical evidence that people use the concepts of, say, intentionality or awareness, in the way Smedslund defines them. However, Smedslund offers no such empirical evidence, and in the cases where empirical evidence is available, Smedslund s definitions prove inadequate.

4 4 Consider, for example, Definition Intentional = df directed by a preference for achieving a goal. (p. 5). For one, this definition does not capture basic features of people s folk concept of intentionality, such as skill or the distinction between intention (a mental state) and intentionality (a manner of performing an action). Take a novice in darts who may be lucky enough to hit the bull s eye. Her action is clearly directed by a goal, but if she does not have the skill to hit the bull s eye, people are unwilling to say she hit it intentionally; she intended to hit it, but she did not hit it intentionally (Malle & Knobe, 1997). Furthermore, in distinguishing intentional from unintentional behaviors, Smedslund uses the vague criterion that the person is continuously sensitive to the outcome of these activities (p. 5), not the criterion expressed in his definition of intentionality, that the person is directed by a preference for achieving a goal. Contradictions ensue. For example, when someone coughs during a concert and manages to stop when he is met with reproachful stares from the audience, Smedslund argues that his coughing is sensitive to outcome (p. 5) and thus intentional according to the sensitivity criterion. However, Smedslund overlooks that the coughing is not intentional according to the goal-directedness criterion, for the person had no goal to achieve with his coughing. But perhaps Smedslund is not pursuing a descriptive endeavor. He may, instead, be aiming at normative definitions of psychological concepts with which scientists should, from now on, theorize about psychological phenomena. In this case, we would need arguments for the usefulness and predictive power of the proposed definitions (and arguments against alternative definitions). Unfortunately, such arguments are lacking in Smedslund s book as well. The ambiguity of Smedslund s undertaking and the failure of either one of the two endeavors will reinforce the belief held among many psychologists that investigations of folk-

5 5 psychological concepts are useless. But they are not. Smedslund, like many of his critics, merely fails to keep separate two very different roles of folk-psychological concepts (Fletcher, 1995): First, they guide people s social perception and social interaction and are thus true determinants of behavior, worthy of psychological study in their own right. Second, folkpsychological concepts are the starting point of just about every psychological theory, and recognition of this pre-scientific background would help sharpen and refine many such theories. Smedslund has usually formulated his critique of contemporary scientific psychology with respect to this second role of folk-psychological concepts: that social scientists pay scarcely any attention to their theoretical concepts, especially their folk-psychological origins. But the alternative to such oblivion must be a practice of awareness and well-supported choice of definitions by each individual researcher, not a monopolized dictionary of scientific terms, based on a single scholar s intuitions. Of the two possible readings of the book descriptive and normative I consider the more fruitful one to assume that Smedslund s endeavor was descriptive after all; that he focused on the first role of folk-psychological concepts (to guide people s social behavior); and that he provided preliminary reconstructions of these folk concepts. Settling on any of these reconstructions, mind you, would require hard empirical work to show that people use the concepts in the reconstructed ways and that this use systematically influences social behavior. Even so, if one takes what the book offers as first approximations, then there are gems to be discovered. Many scholars will of course overlook these gems, lacking the patience to read through pages and pages of definitions, axioms, and theorems (many of which are highly debatable). There is one alternative strategy.

6 6 The strategy I suggest for maximal appreciation of this book is to keep a copy of its table of contents nearby and, whenever one s research hits upon any of the tabulated themes, to read through the relevant passages of the book. One may not agree with Smedslund s specific analyses, but they help regain what psychology has lost when it separated from philosophy awareness of its words and concepts. Once we regain this awareness, we can take the step that Smedslund has failed to take: collect empirical evidence or conceptual arguments for proposed definitions of concepts. In so doing, however, we need to remind ourselves whose concepts we are defining: scientists concepts, used and revised within the scientific community for the purpose of studying human behavior, or people s concepts, used and revised within our culture as part of human behavior. References Fletcher, G. J. O. (1995). Two uses of folk psychology: Implications for psychological science. Philosophical Psychology, 8, Malle, B. F., & Knobe, J. (1997). The folk concept of intentionality. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 33,