Philosophy of Psychology. Lisa Bortolotti
with so-called split brains (in whom the left and right hemispheres were disconnected by cutting the fibers between them). (Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998, xiii)
We agree with Ramachandran, especially with his idea that we can gain useful insights by observing some rare cases. This is why we will include the split-brain cases (which Ramachandran mentions in this passage) in our discussion of self-knowledge in Chapter 2, and Capgras syndrome (which is a rare condition that Ramachandran discusses in his book) in our exploration of delusion in Chapter 7. Ramachandran’s idea is also perfectly compatible with the importance of statistical analysis and replication when it comes to the phase in which we test the insights that we initially gain in observing rare cases. In fact, he only says that major discoveries in neurology were ‘initially’ based on single studies and demonstrations; his recommendation is ‘to begin with experiments on single cases and then to confirm the findings through studies of additional patients’ (Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998, xiii).
Research Participants
Psychological experiments need human participants. Typically, the participants of psychological studies are university students because these are the most easily accessible kind of people for psychology researchers. But this can be a problem. In psychology, we are not just interested in finding out how the mind of a university student works; rather we are interested in finding out how the mind works in general. Can we learn about how the mind works in general from psychological studies involving only university students?
Uncritical optimism on this issue has been questioned in recent years. It has been suggested (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzaya 2010a, 2010b) that most psychological studies published in major journals rely on the participants in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies, who are in fact highly unusual in many psychological aspects:
[P]eople from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies – and particularly American undergraduates – are some of the most psychologically unusual people on Earth. So the fact that the vast majority of studies use WEIRD participants presents a challenge to the understanding of human psychology and behaviour. […] Strange, then, that research articles routinely assume that their results are broadly representative, rarely adding even a cautionary footnote on how far their findings can be generalized. (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzaya 2010b, 29)
We will come back to this problem in Chapter 4 when discussing cross-cultural studies of moral judgments (e.g., Haidt, Koller, & Dias 1993; Shweder, Mahapatra, & Miller 1987).
Ecological Validity
Many psychological studies are undertaken in some artificial situations that are not representative of everyday settings, and the tasks proposed in the laboratory may not have the same relevant features as everyday tasks. This raises a methodological problem. In psychology, we are not just interested in understanding how people think and behave in artificial tasks and settings; rather we are interested in understanding how people think and behave in everyday tasks and settings. Can we learn about how people think and behave in everyday tasks and settings from the psychological studies involving only artificial tasks and settings?
Bloom warns us against the tendency to conclude that human agents are irrational on the basis of the experimental findings of irrational biases and errors in artificial tasks and settings. Perhaps biases and errors are exaggerated in artificial settings; they might not be very significant in real-life cases.
Statistically significant doesn’t mean actually significant. Just because something has an effect in a controlled situation doesn’t mean that it’s important in real life. Your impression of a résumé might be subtly affected by its being presented to you on a heavy clipboard, and this tells us something about how we draw inferences from physical experience when making social evaluations. Very interesting stuff. But this doesn’t imply that your real-world judgments of job candidates have much to do with what you’re holding when you make those judgments. What will actually matter much more are such boringly relevant considerations as the candidate’s experience and qualification. (Bloom 2017, 224–225)
This is something we should keep in mind, especially when we explore the limitations of human cognition; it is conceivable that the limitation that is found in a controlled experiment does not have much impact in real life.
Further Resources
Articles and Books
Tony Stone and Martin Davies’s article on cognitive neuropsychology and philosophy of mind (1993) includes a very interesting discussion of the aim and scope of philosophy and psychology. Alvin Goldman’s Philosophical Applications of Cognitive Science (2018) includes many examples of how philosophical discussions can be fruitfully informed by psychology and cognitive science.
As we noted, philosophy of psychology contains many topics and issues that we cannot cover in this book. See Philosophy of Psychology: A Contemporary Introduction (2004) and Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Science of the Mind (2020) by José Luis Bermúdez; An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology (2015) by Daniel Weiskopf and Fred Adams; Mindware: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Cognitive Science (2000) by Andy Clark; and The Philosophy of Cognitive Science (2015) by Mark Cain. We also recommend The Phenomenological Mind (2012) by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, and The Disordered Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Mental Illness (2013) by George Graham.
Online Resources
Paul Thagard’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on cognitive science (2019) is helpful as it summarizes some of the key areas of philosophy of psychology.
Tamar Gendler’s lecture Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature (2011), available at Open Yale Courses, discusses a wide range of issues in philosophy of psychology by combining ancient philosophical wisdom with cutting-edge psychological studies.
Questions
1 How can philosophy and psychology profitably interact in understanding how the human mind works?
2 Can you think of some particular examples in which philosophers and psychologists profitably interact with one another?
3 What can philosophers learn from psychological studies?
4 What can psychologists learn from philosophical arguments and discussions?
5 Is there a clear boundary between philosophical discussion of the mind and psychological discussion of it? Or is the boundary inevitably vague?
1 Rationality
1.1 Introduction
It is a long tradition in Western philosophy to characterize humans as rational animals and to argue that rationality is one of the features that distinguishes them from other animals. It is not just Aristotle who describes the human as the rational animal in his Metaphysics (1984). In Discourse on the Method (1985), Descartes also characterizes humans in terms of their distinctive reason or understanding; non-human animals do not have reason at all. This trend has continued: Donald Davidson says that rationality distinguishes ‘between the infant and the snail on one hand, and the normal adult person on the other’ (Davidson 1982, 318).
This view, however, can be (and has been) challenged. One challenge is to deny the sharp contrast between human cognition, which is rational, and non-human cognition, which is not. Humans are rational, but so are non-human animals. For example, Hume writes in his A Treatise of Human Nature