Lecture 013

Reading

FIC and Its Strategy

FIC descriptions:

• based on fold-psychology

• interpretive

• collectivist (apply to a collection of things share similar property, holist)

Folk psychology: not necessarily pejorative, accumulation of models from daily life.

Property of FIC descriptions:

• common in media, pop media

• ambiguous when talking about a group

• not obvious, generating conclusion needs special knowledge

• can be insightful

syllogism:

statistical syllogism: syllogism with probability

• group believes should be read as statistical syllogism to get the true meaning of the sentence (FIC sentence is often phrased in a way that leads to overgeneralization)

Question: can we ascribe "believes", "desire" (internal state) to a group (entity) ?

Group Believes: does it exists?

• dictatorship: can coordinate movements to achieve goal (desire -> action)

• collectively controlled group: working individually for group's good

Question: what's wrong about interpretivism?

interpretivism: the task is to uncover hidden believes

• they does not reside on empirical evidence (how can you tell if internal believe is true)

  • Geertz: since all observation needs an interpretation, and we can't evaluate the accuracy of an interpretation, we do interpret
  • Author: there are methods to evaluate an interpretation
    • "the environmental strategy": deduct current mental state from the environment
    • "the behavioral strategy": deduct past mental state from behavior

• claims are ambiguous

minimalist theories of mind: a way to ascribe mental state to people

• focus on behavior output

• assume minds are rational

inference to the best explanation (abductive reasoning): a strategy for identifying the right explanation for some set of phenomena by picking the most likely or plausible one from among a range of possible explanations

• its like 1. I collect a dataset of actions

• 1. although for each action, there can be many believes (internal state) associated with it
• 1. but if my sample are large enough, then I can reduce the possible believes down to one

• why do you assume these actions come from the same belives

• The author reject this minimalist theories of mind by saying that there exists many possible believes for one action, but I think the author's reasoning is not able to deny the methodology

Yes, there are "methods to evaluate an interpretation"
But your method doesn't say which one is the best if all
my interpretations come form these strategies

Question: are there better way to ascribe internal state than above 2 methods?

Yes. "composite construction": using existing theory (not just black box input and output) built from earlier research

• example: neuology

Questions

1. interpretive social science "need[s] special access to people's hidden beliefs and desires" that is different than the kind of access that folk psychology provides. Correct?

I think interpretive social psychologists can ascribe (or, using the phrase of the question, "access") people's hidden beliefs and desires more accurately than a folk psychologist because of a difference in their research methodology. Folk psychology, defined in the paper, uses theories and models generated from daily life activities to deduct the internal states (hidden beliefs and desires) of people (page 1). The author also states that both folk psychologists and well-trained interpretivists use "a combination of environmental and behavioral strategies" to ascribe internal states (page 7). However, since I think interpretive social scientists tend to have more access to "composite-construction" (page 11) than folk psychologists, and that applying the "composite construction strategy" can greatly reduce the number of possible mental states associated with an action in the problem of "inference to the best explanation", interpretive social scientists can more accurately ascribe one's internal state than a folk psychologist due to their methodological difference in research.

1. inference to the best explanation is not a particularly good strategy, compelling?

Not compelling. He should not argue in this way.

The author reject this minimalist theories of mind by saying that there exists many possible believes for one action, but I think the author's reasoning is not able to deny the methodology.

1. which specific "under-determination"

2. 1. I don't know
3. 1. because we assume there is only one true belief

4. article by political scientist Lenka Bustikova Bustikova's argument is entirely based on what Bustikova thinks a group of voter believes. This is Bustikova's assumption, or at least Bustikova did not justify this with empirical evidence.