An expressivist approach to folk psychological ascriptions

ABSTRACT

In recent years, some authors have shown a renewed interest in interpretivist theories of folk psychological ascription [Hutto 2013. “Fictionalism About Folk Psychology.” The Monist 96 (4): 582–604.; Mölder 2010. Mind Ascribed: An Elaboration and Defence of Interpretivism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Sanchez-Curry 2020. “Interpretivism and Norms.” Philosophical Studies 177 (4): 905–930.; Mölder 2021. “Interpretivism Without Judgement-Dependence.” Philosophia 49 (2): 611–615.; Slors 2015. "Interpretivism and the Meaning of Mental State Ascriptions." Studia Philosophica Estonica, 10 (2): 18–27.]. Part of the virtue of interpretivism lies in its ability to provide an answer to elminativist arguments without falling into the assumptions and problems of intentional realism. However, some recent developments in semantic expressivism applied to normative expressions could help to build an alternative theory to interpretivism that would enjoy the same virtues. The aim of this paper is to present and defend an expressivist approach to the status of folk psychological ascriptions. According to this view, mental states ascriptions are evaluative and non-descriptive statement that express or reflect certain normative standards or values of the attributor. After presenting the view and contrasting it with interpretivist positions, with which expressivism shares important motivations and claims, I present two arguments to favor the expressivist analysis. In line with the first argument, expressivism can account for fundamental aspects of disagreements regarding mental attributions while the second highlights the capacity of the view to explain the widespread justificatory and exculpatory uses of mental states ascriptions.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpretivism
• expressivism
• normativity
• disagreement
• mindshaping

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for helpful comments from Marc Slors, Annemarie Kalis and all the audience of the Workshop ‘Situated perspectives on agency and normativity’ at Utrecht University. I would like to thank the entire Granada Gang, especially Manuel de Pinedo and Neftalí Villanueva for everything there is of them in my position.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 see Toppinen (2015) for an attempt to answer this problem and Posłajko (2021) for a reply.

2 These authors may not identify as expressivists. However, given their denial that adscriptions describe internal states, and the pragmatic functions of belief concepts they hold, it is difficult to see how their theses are qualitatively different from minimal expressivism. Furthermore, their views are perfectly compatible with the positive thesis that I will discuss below.

3 For a sake of simplification, I talk here of supportive attitude. However, we often ascribe mental states to make explicit our negative attitude to a particular proposition, for example, to highlight the bad intentions of the attitude holder. The valence of the evaluation, however, is not important here.

4 Someone might question whether mental state ascriptions are normative. However, since this is assumed by both expressivist and interpretivist positions, I will not argue in favor of this thesis in this article.

5 For a developed version of this argument in the case of moral relativism, see Pérez-Navarro (2022).

6 For more examples of persistent disagreements on belief ascriptions see Pérez-Navarro et al. (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the project ‘The Social Roots of Mental health’ PID2021-126826NA-I00 funded by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación [MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033]/ and ‘ERDF A way of making Europe’, the Grant IJC2019-040199-I funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and the 2021 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators funded by the BBVA Foundation (the Foundation takes no responsibility for the opinions, statements, and contents of this project, which are entirely the responsibility of its authors).

Notes on contributors

Víctor Fernández Castro

Víctor Fernández Castro is a current Juan de la Cierva post-doctoral research fellow at Department of Philosophy I and Filo-Lab at Universidad de Granada. He was previously appointed at LAAS-CNRS (Université de Toulouse, CNRS) and the Institut Jean Nicod, (DEC, ENS, PSL Research University). He has also been research visitant at George Washington University and the University of Edinburgh. His main areas of interest are the theoretical philosophy of mind and psychology and their applications to areas such as social robotics, mental disorders, or social philosophy.