This thesis examines the relationship between folk psychology and scientific psychology, and argues that the conceptual taxonomy provided by the former is unsuitable for fine-grained cognitive scientific research. I avoid traditional eliminativism by reserving a role for folk psychology as a socio-normative discourse, where folk psychological concepts primarily refer to behaviour rather than to mental states, and also exert a regulative influence on behaviour. In the first half of this thesis I develop a positive account of folk psychology as a broad discourse that includes mental state attributions, behavioural predictions, narrative competency, and regulative mechanisms. In the second half I argue that the conceptual taxonomy provided by this discourse has led to theoretical confusions in both philosophy and cognitive science, and I propose a systematic methodology for developing a novel ‘cognitive ontology’ that is better suited for contemporary scientific research. What is folk psychology? In chapter 1 I survey the history of the term folk psychology and demonstrate that the term only really came into general usage following the work of Fodor and Churchland in the 1970s and 80s. I also argue that it is a mistake, stemming from this era, to identify folk psychology exclusively with propositional attitude psychology, which is just one particular way in which the folk might understand one another. If folk psychology is not just propositional attitude psychology, what else might it be? In chapter 2 I consider what I call the ‘universality assumption’, i.e. the assumption that folk psychological intuitions are shared across all cultures and languages. If this assumption were justified then it might provide partial support for the claim that folk psychology presents an accurate account of human cognition. However, there is significant evidence of variation in folk psychological intuitions, suggesting that folk psychology might be at least partially biased by cultural and linguistic influences. If folk psychology is not the same in every culture, how come it is so successful at predicting behaviour? In chapter 3 I look at various ways in which folk psychological discourse can play a regulative or normative role by exerting an influence on our behaviour. This role helps to explain how folk psychology can be predictively successful even if it fails to accurately describe the fine-grained details of human cognition, as via regulative mechanisms it is able to become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. How well does folk psychology match up with our scientific understanding of cognition? In chapter 4 I present evidence of cases where folk psychological concepts have served to mislead or confuse theoretical debates in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I consider several case studies, including the false belief task in social cognition, the taxonomisation of sensory modalities, the extended cognition debate, and the recently emerging ‘Bayesian brain’ hypothesis. If folk psychological concepts do not refer to entities in our scientific theories, then what do they refer to? In chapter 5 I examine the status of folk psychological kinds as natural kinds, and argue that even under a very liberal account folk psychological kinds probably do not constitute viable scientific kinds. However, due to the regulative mechanisms described in chapter 3, they do constitute what Hacking has described as ‘human’ or ‘interactive’ kinds, which exhibit complex looping effects. What kinds of concepts should cognitive science use, if not folk psychological concepts? Finally, in chapter 6 I look at recent developments in ‘cognitive ontology’ revision and argue that we should adopt a systematic methodology for constructing novel concepts that better reflect our current best understanding of cognitive systems. In closing I consider the relationship between these novel concepts and the ontology presented by folk psychological discourse.

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In this thesis, I present a view according to which folk psychology is not only used for predictive and explanatory purposes but also as a normative tool. I take it that this view, which I delineate in chapter 1, can help us account for different aspects of human agency and with solving a variety of puzzles that are associated with developing such an account. My goal is to examine what it means to act as an agent in a human society and the way in which the nature of our agency is also shaped by the normative constraints inherent in the common understanding of agency that we share with other agents. As I intend to demonstrate, we can make significant headway in explaining the nature of our capacity to express ourselves authoritatively in our actions in a self-knowing and self-controlled manner if we place this capacity in the context of our social interactions, which depend on a constant exchange of reasons in support of our actions. My main objective is to develop a promising account of human agency within a folk-psychological setting by mainly focusing on perspectives from the philosophy of action and mind, while still respecting more empirically oriented viewpoints from areas such as cognitive science and neuroscience. Chapter 2 mainly deals with the nature of self-knowledge and with our capacity to express this knowledge in our actions. I argue that our self-knowledge is constituted by the normative judgments we make and that we use these judgments to regulate our behaviour in accordance to our folk-psychological understanding of agency. We are motivated to act as such because of our motive to understand ourselves, which has developed through our training as self-knowing agents in a folk-psychological framework. Chapter 3 explores the idea that we develop a self-concept which enables us to act in a self-regulating manner. I distinguish self-organization from selfregulation and argue that we are self-regulating in our exercises of agency because we have developed a self-concept that we can express in our actions. What makes us distinct from other self-regulating systems, however, is that we can also recognize and respond to the fact that being such systems brings us under certain normative constraints and that we have to interact with others who are similarly constrained. Chapter 4 is mainly concerned with placing empirical evidence which illustrate the limits of our conscious awareness and control in the context of our account of agency as a complex, emergent social phenomenon. Finally, chapter 5 deals with the way in which agentive breakdowns such as self-deceptive inauthenticity fit with this account.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-12T22:57:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 arquivo2870_1.pdf: 3952047 bytes, checksum: a301b1acc37679d6a508136e3cc30a02 (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / O presente trabalho é uma investigação sobre o campo da arte contemporânea no Brasil com o suporte teórico da Psicologia Discursiva. A Psicologia Discursiva é uma área da Psicologia que investiga como as categorias psicológicas são invocadas e manejadas no discurso cotidiano. Seus postulados propõem um deslocamento nos tópicos e explicações psicológicos tradicionais, evitando a teorização abstrata em favor de análises baseadas na pragmática das ações sociais. A folk psychology (psicologia popular) é um rótulo na Psicologia que diz respeito ao conjunto de crenças cotidianas acerca do ser humano, em contraste à descrição oferecida pela Psicologia científca ou profssional. Assim, a folk psychology pode ser colocada como tópico de escrutínio da Psicologia Discursiva. Dentro dessa mais ampla defnição de folk psychology, trago o conceito de concepção de sujeito como foco deste trabalho. Concepção de sujeito é a maneira como o sujeito é descrito noção entendida como folk psychology, mas com ênfase não na origem do conhecimento (por não ser científca), mas sim no sujeito que ela concebe maneira que é tratada, na presente pesquisa, como disponível no discurso. A pesquisa se debruça, enfm, sobre o campo da arte contemporânea, buscando enxergar concepções de sujeito no discurso de artistas plásticos, a partir da análise de conversas gravadas em áudio: como o sujeito acontece no discurso do artista que fala sobre sua obra? Foram realizadas e analisadas cinco conversas com artistas residentes no Recife, onde foi possível observar movimentos no discurso que apontam para diferentes concepções de sujeito. A análise ainda permitiu enxergar que tais concepções, ao serem invocadas no discurso sobre a obra de arte, participam de diferentes atos discursivos: defender a obra, explicitar seus méritos, justifcá-la em suas características formais fgurando, no discurso, um cenário em que as concepções informam o artista no ato de criação e ainda aparecem na explicação de por que fazer arte

Works of fiction do things to us, and we do things because of works of fiction. When reading Hamlet, I mentally represent certain propositions about its characters and events, I want the story and its characters to go a certain way, and I emotionally respond to its goings-on. I might deem Hamlet a coward, I might wish that Hamlet stabbed Claudius when he had the chance, and I might feel sorrow at Ophelia’s senseless suicide. These fiction-directed mental states seem to resemble the propositional attitudes of belief, desire, and emotion, respectively — the everyday attitudes that represent and orient us toward the world. These mental states constitute our engagement with fiction, and the way in which they hang together is central to understanding our engagement with fiction. In that aim, this thesis hopes to provide an analysis of our belief-like attitudes about works of fiction. I argue that a folk psychological theory of fictional engagement should call upon belief, not imagination, to serve as the primary cognitive attitude with which we engage fictions.

How do we recognize that someone is thinking that the train is running late, desiring another cookie, or intending to make coffee? What is the cognitive process by which we come to attribute to another individual the belief, for instance, that Barack Obama is President? For the past few decades, philosophers working on Folk Psychology--i.e., those involved in the study of how people typically form judgments about others’ mental states--have focused largely on questions involving everyday attributions of mentality in terms of intentional states, like beliefs and desires. What I dub ‘the New Folk Psychology’ expands on this tradition to include everyday attributions of phenomenal consciousness (i.e., feelings and experiences). How, that is, do we come to recognize something as being capable of and having phenomenal states, like feeling happy or experience pleasure? The project is organized around three core topics. The first component attempts to identify the process underlying everyday attributions of consciousness. This task is carried out with an eye towards addressing issues in the current folk psychology of consciousness debate, such as whether ordinary psychology incorporates something like the philosopher’s distinction between intentionality and phenomenology. My work (Arico 2010, Arico, et al. 2011) advocates a model of mind-attribution called the Agency Model. According to this model, whenever we represent an entity as having certain properties (for example, facial features), we automatically categorize that thing as an AGENT. This AGENT-categorization then activates a cascade of behavioral dispositions, including the disposition to attribute both intentionality and phenomenology. The second component concerns ways that the process underlying everyday attributions of consciousness might be related to psychological process involved in moral perception. My work to date has focused largely on the question of how it is that we come to see an entity as a moral being, as something that deserves moral consideration and/or is subject to moral evaluation. I argue that existing accounts of such moral perception are based on problematic experimental data (Arico, forthcoming). I then propose an amended Agency Model (Arico, under review), according to which seeing an entity as a moral being--like attributing it consciousness--is a consequence of categorizing that thing as an AGENT. I then utilize this cognitive picture in an attempt to explain the enduring normative ethical debate over which kind of mental capacity most fundamentally grounds moral standing.

abstract: This Thesis contends that if the designer of a non-biological machine (android) can establish that the machine exhibits certain specified behaviors or characteristics, then there is no principled reason to deny that the machine can be considered a legal person. The thesis also states that given a related but not necessarily identical set of characteristics, there is no principled reason to deny that the non-biological machine can make a claim to a level of moral personhood. It is the purpose of my analysis to delineate some of the specified behaviors required for each of these conditions so as to provide guidance and understanding to designers seeking to establish criteria for creation of such machines. Implicit in the stated thesis are assumptions concerning what is meant by a non-biological machine. I use analytic functionalism as a mechanism to establish a framework within which to operate. In order to develop this framework it is necessary to provide an analysis of what currently constitutes the attributes of a legal person, and to likewise examine what are the roots of the claim to moral personhood. This analysis consists of a treatment of the concept of legal personhood starting with the Greek and Roman views and tracing the line of development through the modern era. This examination then explores at a more abstract level what it means to be a person. Next, I examine law's role as a normative system, placing it within the context of the previous discussions. Then, criteria such as autonomy and intentionality are discussed in detail and are related to the over all analysis of the thesis. Following this, moral personhood is examined using the animal rights movement of the last thirty years as an argument by analogy to the question posed by the thesis. Finally, all of the above concepts are combined in a way that will provide a basis for analyzing and testing future assertions that a non-biological entity has a plausible claim for legal or moral personhood. If such an entity exhibits the type of intentionality and autonomy which humans view as the foundation of practical reason, in combination with other indicia of sentience described by "folk psychology", analytic functionalism suggests that there is no principled reason to deny the android's claim to rights. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Biology 2011

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本篇論文的主要目的是要藉由批判Paul Churchland版本的唯物消除論當中的論證之相關蘊含以及前提，來分析其立場的缺失與不足之處。而為了要達到這個目的，我便將本論文的構成主軸分成兩個部分：第一個部分是由第一章以及第二章所構成，其主要談論過去Churchland (1981)所宣稱的消除論立場以及其論證架構，在這裡除了整理過去眾多哲學家對於他的論證的一些批判與反駁的觀點之外，我也提出自己對於過去消除論之三個主要困境的主張。第二個部分則是由第三章以及第四章所構成，其主要是針對Churchland (2007)現在的唯物消除論之新進觀點來展開論述。當中除了分析他消除論立場的一致性之外，同時也去分析並討論他所提供之支持消除論的新論證，我將之稱作為「動物認知論證」(animal cognition argument) 。我將指出，由於Churchland在該論證當中隱含了一個重要的預設，因而使得該新論證的途徑未必可以合理地推得出其原有的消除論立場。