Rahvapsühholoogia ajalised piirid / Temporal Limits of Folk Psychology

Abstract

Teesid: Kas meie igapäevane raamistik vaimunähtuste tähistamiseks ehk rahvapsühholoogia rakendub ajaliste piiranguteta? Või ei rakendu rahvapsühholoogia mikroskaalal (millisekunditest kuni sadade millisekunditeni). Käesolev artikkel vaeb seda küsimust ja uurib, et mis järeldub sellest vaimsete nähtuste olemuse kohta, kui rahvapsühholoogia mikroskaalal ei rakendu. Vaatluse alla tuleb eeldus, mille kohaselt vaimseid seisundeid individueeritakse rahvapsühholoogia kaudu. Toon välja mitmesuguseid võimalusi käsitada rahvapsühholoogia, mikroskaala ja mentaalse omavahelist seost.

It has been claimed that familiar psychological categories do not apply at a very short time scale. The conceptual framework that collects our everyday psychological notions is called ‘folk psychology’. This paper explores the following question: is there a limited time scale in which folk psychology is applicable, and if that is the case, then what does this tell us about the nature of mental phenomena? In particular, the question concerns the applicability of folk psychology at the microscale (ranging from milliseconds up to hundreds of milliseconds). I outline several options concerning the relationship between folk psychology, the microscale and the mental.

Why does this matter? First, this is important since if folk psychology applies only within certain temporal limits, this is an obstacle to developing models of micro-scale time consciousness in folk-psychological terms. Second, ‘folk psychology’ can be understood as just another name for a set of mental terms. This is not an innocent assumption. If this assumption holds, then the folk conception tacitly settles which properties are mental. We can call this assumption the ‘Principle of Folk Individuation’ (FIP): mental states are individuated only through folk psychology.

If folk psychology is limited to a macroscale, and the FIP holds, then processes happening outside this scale at the millisecond range are not mental. This presumes that the mental is recognition-dependent: a property is mental only if it has a specification in mental (folk) terms; if it lacks it, there is no reason to classify it as mental. On the other hand, if folk psychology is limited to the macroscale, but there are good reasons to think that the mind is not, then this tells against the Folk Individuation Principle.

Some reasons for considering certain events at the microscale as mental, albeit not part of folk psychology, could be found in research in psychology, where scientists have ascertained certain modality-dependent thresholds for distinguishing stimuli. The lowest threshold is for auditory stimuli (only a two-ms interval between stimuli suffices to detect them as separate). The ordering of stimuli requires intervals between stimuli of at least 20 ms. Are these discriminations mental? Prima facie, they must be, for these are conscious events. Therefore, they provide a counterexample to the FIP. This would lead to the position that the microscale processes are mental.

At this point, someone who would like to keep the FIP might argue that considerations based on temporal thresholds do not show that the microscale events are mental but not folk-psychological. First, one could hold that these short-lived conscious experiences are neural states and that the brain has better temporal resolution than the mind/folk psychology. However, this reply might cause difficulties in giving a full picture of how neural consciousness relates to mental events. If microscale conscious events are merely neural, one is faced with the task of explaining at what point a conscious event becomes properly mental. The second option is to point out that ‘conscious experience’ is a folk-psychological term, too. Hence, considerations from temporal thresholds do not tell against the FIP. However, one may ask if the term ‘experience’ applies without problems to these discriminatory states. For instance, how can we tell that these states are perceptual experiences, not recent memories?

There is another option. There is no need to construe folk psychology narrowly as a theory of beliefs, desires, memories and thoughts. In principle, folk psychology can be extended and developed: it could also include reference to events that take place at the microscale. We would need a new vocabulary to characterise those states, but this new vocabulary could still be part of an extended folk psychology—folk psychology 2.0. In this way, we could keep the FIP by updating it to state that mental states are individuated only through folk psychology 2.0 (which includes folk psychology and more). Then, one could say that although folk psychology, as traditionally conceived, applies only at the macroscale, folk psychology 2.0 also spans the microscale.