Understanding human action: ‘Folk Psychology’

How one understands, or has previously understood, human behaviour is inseparably connected to the context and intellectual climate of a particular time in history. As the definition, and subsequently the interpretation and understanding, of human behaviour has changed, this section shall entail a critical discussion of some of these changes and how they have contributed to how human behaviour is understood in the participatory research approach. The different approaches to understanding human behaviour shall be discussed in a sequence of posts: firstly, the commonsense or ‘folk psychology’ approach to viewing human action shall be investigate; from there, the positivistic approach shall be discussed; and lastly, there will be a discussion on more socially orientated approach.

In order to discuss how human action can be viewed by any specific approach or paradigm, such as the positivistic or social approaches, we must first understand how the ‘common’ person views and understands human beings. One of the ways in which humans understand something is through ‘commonsense’, which could also be referred to as ‘commonsense psychology’ or ‘folk psychology’. The concept of folk psychology has played an important role in the fields of philosophy and science over the past 50 years. However, there are at least three commonly used and differing definitions of what exactly folk psychology is. To avoid any confusion and misunderstanding, the definition of folk psychology which this report shall be using is that folk psychology is “used to refer to a particular set of cognitive capacities which include—but are not exhausted by—the capacities to predict and explain behaviour”. Thus one could say, broadly, that folk psychology is simply the information that the common man has about the mind. Whilst the scope of the literature on folk psychology is vast, the contemporary discussion of folk psychology in philosophy and the sciences have focused largely on the portion of folk psychology that guides the prediction and explanation of human actions.

One of the primary reasons that folk psychology has been the subject of much thought and debate is that it plays such a central role in our everyday lives. We often use folk psychology to predict and explain things in our lives; for example, we engage in folk psychology for mundane chores, such as figuring out what your classmates believe about your work and what your partner will think when you arrive home late. In addition, some people think that folk psychology has such a pervasive role in our lives that, if it should turn out to be a serious mistake, it would be “the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of our species”. While that may seem melodramatic, it does give a sense of the importance of the concept. After gaining an understanding of what folk psychology is, the power of common sense to understand human action by identifying the beliefs and reasons behind the action seems somewhat limited; for this reason, we now proceed to the discussion on the positivistic and social approaches to understanding human action in order to develop a broader view of how human action can be understood.

In the next post, I will be discussing the positivistic or naturalistic approach, and how it is inadequate in the context of understanding human action.