An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology

Citation

Weiskopf, D. A., & Adams, F. (2015). An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Chapter Summary

The book has nine chapters, each of roughly thirty pages, in the Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy series. In the preface the authors state their central position: psychology explains mental phenomena by describing the underlying processes, systems and mechanisms, and these psychological explanations are distinct from, and autonomous relative to, explanations in terms of neural mechanisms. Neuroscience and psychology are held to be complementary enterprises, and the book aims to give an account of the scope, methods, content and prospects of a distinctive science of the mind. It is written for students of philosophy, psychology and cognitively oriented neuroscience and presupposes no significant scientific background.

Chapter 1: What Psychology Is

The opening chapter begins with the everyday understanding of minds known as folk psychology, the practice of attributing beliefs, desires and intentions to explain and predict behavior, and uses it to introduce the question of what a scientific psychology is and how it differs from common sense.

Chapter 2: Autonomy and Reduction in Psychology

This chapter takes up the relation between mind and body. It outlines the divide between dualists and monists and the rise of physicalism, and then asks how psychological states should be understood in relation to physical, biological and neurophysiological ones. This is the chapter that addresses the preface's claim that psychological explanation is autonomous from neuroscience.

Chapter 3: Modularity and Cognitive Architecture

Here the mind is treated as a complex system with an internal design plan, in contrast to the Cartesian picture of an indivisible mind. The chapter introduces decomposition into components and the idea of modular architecture, using analogies with computing devices and biological organisms.

Chapter 4: Nativism, Development, and Change

The chapter turns to developmental psychology and asks how the mind gets from an initial state to a mature one. It draws a comparison with early preformationist ideas in biology to explain why appeals to hidden, innate structure need to be examined carefully.

Chapter 5: Beyond the Brain and Body

This chapter presents the "four E's" of recent cognitive science: embedded, embodied, enactive and extended cognition. They are treated as challenges to the traditional view of cognition as occurring inside the head, and the chapter uses them to raise the question of what makes something a cognitive system, the "mark of the cognitive".

Chapter 6: Perception and Action

The chapter starts by asking how the senses are defined and distinguished, then concentrates mainly on vision, the most closely studied sense. Enactivist views of perception are taken up in a later section of the chapter.

Chapter 7: Attention and Consciousness

Attention and consciousness are introduced as two hard-to-define aspects of mind. The chapter reviews contemporary ways of modeling attention and explores whether the link between attention and consciousness reflects a deep theoretical connection.

Chapter 8: The Social Mind

This chapter returns to folk psychology, now as an object of scientific study: the capacities for mindreading, predicting and explaining the behavior of others. It asks what kind of ability these are, what knowledge they draw on, and how they sit among other cognitive systems.

Chapter 9: Thought and Language

The final chapter asks which comes first, thought or language, starting from Descartes's view that speechless animals do not think and moving to an evolutionary view of thought and language as developments from earlier cognitive processes.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–2

• Folk psychology: the everyday practice of explaining behavior by beliefs, desires and intentions.
• Autonomy and reduction: whether psychological explanations stand on their own or reduce to neural ones.
• Physicalism and dualism: the broad positions on the mind-body relation.

Chapters 3–4

• Modularity: the mind as a system decomposable into components with an internal design plan.
• Nativism: the question of what the initial state of the mind contains.

Chapters 5–7

• The four E's: embedded, embodied, enactive and extended cognition.
• Mark of the cognitive: what distinguishes cognitive from noncognitive processes.
• Attention and consciousness: two linked but elusive phenomena.

Chapters 8–9

• Mindreading: the ability to attribute mental states to others, with its failure described as "mindblindness".
• Relation of thought and language: whether thinking depends on having a language.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear stated position. The preface sets out the autonomy thesis and its relation to neuroscience, so readers know the line of argument that runs through the chapters.
• Written for a mixed audience. The authors say they presuppose no significant background in the sciences discussed, aiming at undergraduates, graduates and researchers alike. The publisher says it is accessible to readers with little or no background in psychology or neuroscience.
• Case studies and current research. The publisher describes the use of clear and detailed case studies and up-to-date empirical research, giving an integrated overview of much of the architecture of the mind.
• Compact and well arranged. Nine chapters of similar length move from the status of psychology as a science, through architecture and development, to specific areas: perception, attention, social cognition and language.

Limitations

• An argued position, not a neutral survey. Because the authors build the book around a distinctive view, readers who want the full range of positions will need a companion text. The authors say there are far too many stances on the mind-body relation to survey.
• Selective coverage. The perception chapter confines itself mostly to vision. Areas such as emotion, memory or psychopathology do not appear among the chapter titles.
• Not an introduction to psychology. The book is about the concepts behind psychology and assumes readers already know what psychologists study.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is a book for after a broad survey of psychology. Gleitman, Fridlund and Reisberg's Psychology, Myers and DeWall's Psychology and the openly licensed Psychology 2e cover the content of the discipline, and Butler and McManus's Psychology: A Very Short Introduction gives a compact overview. Weiskopf and Adams then step back to ask what the explanations in those books amount to.

The closest companion is Brysbaert and Rastle's Historical and Conceptual Issues in Psychology, an upper-level textbook that combines the history of the discipline with philosophy of science and long-running conceptual debates. Brysbaert and Rastle give more weight to history; Weiskopf and Adams are more philosophical and concentrate on the architecture of the mind. Reading both gives a good picture of what kind of science psychology is.

How to Use This Book

The book suits second- or third-year students in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience who have finished an introductory course, and it is also usable by graduate students and general readers with a serious interest. No philosophical background is required.

A practical plan: read Chapters 1–3 first, since they set up the argument about explanation, reduction and architecture. Chapter 4 can follow for developmental questions. Chapters 5–9 are largely self-contained and can be taken in the order of interest: Chapter 5 for embodied and extended cognition, Chapters 6–7 for perception, attention and consciousness, Chapter 8 for social cognition, and Chapter 9 for language and thought. After each chapter, state the main claim in a sentence and note which psychological findings it relies on, then check those against a general psychology textbook.