TWO STRATEGIES

In this essay I want to examine two contrasted models of what we do when we try to get insight into other people's thoughts and behaviour by citing their beliefs, desires, fears, hopes, and so forth. On one model we are using what I shall call the functional strategy, and on the other what I label the replicative strategy. I shall argue that the view that we use the replicative strategy is much more plausible than the view that we use the functionalist strategy. But the two strategies issue in different styles of explanation and call upon different ranges of concepts. So at the end of the essay I shall make some brief remarks about these contrasts.

The core of the functionalist strategy is the assumption that explanation of action or mental state through mention of beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on is causal. The approach is resolutely third-personal. The Cartesian introspectionist error – the idea that from some direct confrontation with psychological items in our own case we learn their nature – is repudiated. We are said to view other people as we view stars, clouds or geological formations. People are just complex objects in our environment whose behaviour we wish to anticipate but whose causal innards we cannot perceive. We therefore proceed by observing the intricacies of their external behaviour and formulating some hypotheses about how the insides are structured. The hypotheses are typically of this form: ‘The innards are like this.