Overview
@1974griceMethod’s creature construction approach to philosophical psychology is a conceptual method for building psychological theories using models of minimal rational agents. Creature construction imagines a sequence of increasingly complex creatures, then generates psychological theories that can be compared to our understanding of actual creatures:
The method which I should like to apply is to construct (in imagination, of course) according to certain principles of construction, a type of creature, or rather a sequence of types of creatures, to serve as a model (or models) for actual creatures. … The general idea is to develop sequentially the psychological theory for different brands of [my creatures I call pirots], and to compare what one thus generates with the psychological concepts we apply to suitably related actual creatures, and when inadequacies appear, to go back to the drawing-board to extend or emend the construction (which of course is unlikely to ever to be more than partial). (37)
The main purpose of Gricean creature construction is to conceptually justify why certain psychological terms—e.g., belief, desire—appear in a theory by showing what kind of creature must exist for that term to be meaningful.
Related notes:
- Philosophical psychology should define psychological concepts by their roles in psychological laws, after Grice (1974)
- Creature construction vs. resource-rational analysis
Highlights
- A generative procedure for a psychological theory should respect a continuum of creature complexity: “I am much impressed by the fact that arrays of psychological concepts, of differing degrees of richness, are applicable to creatures of differing degrees of complexity, with humans (so far) at the peak. So I would like a procedure which would do justice to this kind of continuity, and would not leave me just pursuing a number of separate psychological theories for different types of creatures.” (37)
- Creature construction shows that certain psychological traits emerge “inevitably”: “The strongest version of a creature construction argument demonstrates the inevitability of certain cognitive traits. That is, one might like to show that almost any suitable process of learning, evolution, or optimization would inevitably result in the psychological feature of interest.” (126)
- Relation to resource-rational analysis: “Some version of this hypothesis motivates (resource) rational analysis: if we correctly capture the task and sufficiently delineate the resource limitations characterizing the space of solutions, then optimality with respect to that space will be a promising guide to how the system works at some suitable level of abstraction. In other words, there is a kind of inevitability to the structure in question.”
References
- @1974griceMethod, “Method in philosophical psychology (from the banal to the bizarre)”
- @2000bratmanValuing, “Valuing and the will”