Intuitions in the Sandbox
A graduate student recently reminded me of an essay I'd written in 1998 with Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at U.C. Berkeley. He appears to be just about the only person who liked it. But maybe I'm wrong about that -- maybe he was merely being polite!
The essay begins with a dialogue pertinent to the relationship between empirical psychology and philosophical intuition, which is an increasingly hot topic these days. The dialogue is, I think, amusing, provocative, and self-standing (it was entirely written by Alison), and for some reason I feel like inflicting it on readers of this blog.
To understand the dialogue it's necessary to know that developmental psychologists now think that children progress from, at age 3, not realizing that beliefs can be false to knowing, by age 4, that beliefs can be false. (Surprising as this conclusion may be, it is now orthodoxy in developmental psychology and is supported by hundreds of studies.)
Here's the dialogue, conceived of as between two three-year-olds in a sandbox, Phil and Psyche.
Psyche: You know, Phil, something’s been bothering me. You know how beliefs are always true? Well, an odd thing happened the other day. My big brother saw my mom put a piece of chocolate in the cupboard and then left to play Nintendo, and while he was away my mom took the chocolate out of the cupboard and put it in the drawer. When my brother came back, he went straight to the cupboard and said loudly, several times, that he was sure the chocolate was in there. But of course, it was really in the drawer. So I have this idea: Could it be that he had a belief that was just like ordinary beliefs, except false?
Phil: My dear Psyche, as I have so often pointed out to you before, your confusion is due to a category mistake. You are treating the truth of beliefs as if it were an empirical matter. Actually, it is simply a conceptual fact about beliefs that they are always true. Indeed, we might say that it is criterial for a belief to be a belief that it be true. Look, consult your intuitions, consult the intuitions of anyone else in the sandbox. All of us agree, immediately, intuitively, without inference or theory, that all beliefs are true. Ask yourself what a belief is. What else could it be but a true representation of events?
Psyche: But couldn’t we all be wrong? Couldn’t there be an alternative way of conceiving of belief that none of us happen to subscribe to now?
Phil: Another category mistake. When I say that beliefs are necessarily true, this isn’t a mere contingent psychological fact about the concepts of all us three-year-olds. It’s an eternal, platonic, philosophical fact about the nature of belief and truth.
Psyche: Well, what about my brother?
Phil: He is probably participating in an alternative form of life. I always thought he was kind of weird.
Psyche: But you see, it isn’t just him. It even seems to be me. Since the chocolate incident, wherever I look, I see evidence that beliefs may be false. Why just yesterday, a woman came into the daycare center with a candy box and I said “Candy!” and then she opened the box and there were pencils inside. I know intuitively that I must have thought there were pencils in the box all along, and of course that’s what I told her when she asked me. But then why did I say “Candy!”? Am I turning into a madwoman?
Phil: (gravely) I fear you may have a worse affliction. I fear you are turning into a cognitive psychologist. As I was saying just the other day, “It would be dangerous to deny from a philosophical armchair that cognitive psychology is an intellectually respectable discipline, provided, of course, it stays within proper bounds.” [Apparently a copy of John McDowell's 1994 book, Mind and World found its way onto the picturebook shelf.] This is what happens when those bounds are breached.
Psyche: But surely there must be some explanation?
Phil: Philosophy does not provide explanations, only diagnoses. (Intones) Of that we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent....
The remainder of the essay was conceived of simply as the exposition of the main idea of this dialogue: that philosophers who think that their intuitions reveal necessary metaphysical truths about the world are as confused as Phil. Our intuitions derive from empirical sources (or else, no better, were written into us innately by natural selection), and we should hold them up to revision as new empirical evidence comes in. I don't think Quine or Carnap would have disagreed....
You can find the entire essay here.