Philosophy of Psychology. Lisa Bortolotti
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Dedication
For Keiko Miyazono and Kenichi Miyazono
For Ennia Scarduelli and Adalberto Bortolotti
Philosophy of Psychology
An Introduction
Kengo Miyazono and Lisa Bortolotti
polity
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Copyright © Kengo Miyazono and Lisa Bortolotti 2021
The right of Kengo Miyazono and Lisa Bortolotti to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1547-9
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1548-6 (pb)
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Acknowledgements
Our greatest debt is to Yukihiro Nobuhara: if he had not invited Lisa to present her work on delusions at the University of Tokyo in October 2010, then Kengo and Lisa wouldn’t have met and discovered common interests and potential areas of collaboration.
Next, we are grateful to the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science: Kengo was funded by one of their international fellowships to visit Lisa at the University of Birmingham. There, he completed his research on delusions and actively participated in Lisa’s projects. Being colleagues enabled Lisa and Kengo to talk about belief, delusion, and rationality together, and also become friends. Lisa’s European Research Council project, PERFECT, made it possible for the collaboration to continue, at a distance. Kengo made significant contributions to the project outputs, and in particular to the notion of epistemic innocence that was developed as part of that project.
We thank anonymous reviewers for helpful and insightful suggestions. We are also grateful to Uku Tooming for detailed comments on the final manuscript, and to Benjamin Costello for his excellent proofreading. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (16H06998, 18H00605).
This book project started in 2015, and it took us five years to complete the manuscript. We thank Pascal Porcheron, Ellen MacDonald-Kramer, and Stephanie Homer at Polity Press for their extraordinary patience and encouragement during this time.
Our project took time because we aimed to do something novel with it. Although there are good introductions to the philosophy of psychology or to the philosophy of the cognitive sciences, they tend to focus on what we call ‘foundational philosophy of psychology’, where the foundational issues in psychology (such as the nature of representation, or the language of thought hypothesis) are prioritized. In contrast, this book focuses on ‘implicational philosophy of psychology’, where the philosophical implications of psychological studies (such as the study of reasoning biases by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky [discussed in Chapter 1], or the study of altruistic behaviour by Daniel Batson [discussed in Chapter 5]) take centre-stage.
The present book is an attempt to put together the issues we find interesting and stimulating at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, and share them with our students in an accessible and engaging way. We have had excellent role models as lecturers of Philosophy of Psychology over the years, including John Campbell, Martin Davies, David Papineau, Kim Sterelny, Helen Steward, … to mention only a few.
We hope we have learnt something from them.
Introduction
An Overview
This book introduces and explains some central issues in the philosophy of psychology. It is important to note that it is not a neutral introduction to the topic. It is an opinionated introduction to the philosophy of psychology in which we defend a particular view of human cognition and agency. The view that we defend is that human cognition and agency are imperfect, in the sense that humans fail to meet some ideal standards of cognition and agency, such as the ideal of rationality, self-knowledge, and free and responsible agency.
Imagine that Lucy wants to pass her ballet exam tomorrow and she knows that she needs to rehearse the opening routine to make sure she remembers all the steps. Passing the exam is important to her, and she would be very disappointed if she failed. Yet she sits on the sofa to watch a movie instead of practising her routine. Given Lucy’s goal (passing the ballet exam tomorrow), her behaviour (watching a movie instead of practising) may be considered irrational since she does not take the appropriate steps to fulfil her goal. Chapter 1 discusses various notions of rationality and some ways in which human agents might fall short of the standards of rationality.
Now imagine that Giorgio describes himself