Overview
Philosophical psychology, as outlined in @1974griceMethod, is a systematic approach to defining and understanding psychological concepts like belief, desire, judging, and valuing. Grice identifies four problems that “any adequate philosophical psychology must address”: circularity when defining psychological concepts; ambivalence about whether psychological laws are non-contingent (analytically true) or contingent; how to handle our apparently privileged access to our own beliefs and desires; and how to justify which laws to use for explicating psychological concepts.
Grice’s proposed approach is to treat psychological concepts as theoretical primitives in a psychological theory, defined by their roles in psychological laws. The purpose of a psychological theory is to provide systematic explanations for behavior that differ from explanations offered by “presupposed” theories, such as physiological theory.
Related notes: Creature construction approach to philosophical psychology, after Grice (1974)
Highlights
- Psychological concepts are primitives in a psychological theory of behavior: “To set this problem aside for a moment, the approach which I am interested in exploring is that of thinking of certain psychological concepts as theoretical concepts. They are psychological concepts just because they are the primitive concepts which belong to a certain kind of psychological theory without also belonging to any presupposed theory (such as physiological theory); and a psychological theory is a theory whose function is to provide, in a systematic way, explanations of behaviour which differ from any explanations of behaviour which may be provided by (or may someday be provided by) any presupposed theory (such as physiological theory).” (26)
- Psychological concepts are defined by their role in a psychological theory: “To explicate such psychological concepts is to characterize their role in the theory to which they primarily belong—to specify (to this or that degree of detail) the laws or quasi-laws in which they figure, and the manner in which such laws are linked.”
References
- @1974griceMethod, “Method in philosophical psychology (from the banal to the bizarre)”