Not only do I feel more confident about some things than others, I think its possible to experience changes in one's degree of belief in a given proposition - going down as evidence of its falsehood is presented, for instance, and going back up as one thinks of a rebuttal to that counterevidence.
I think that the conflicts cross-cut each other, and that the same mental state can have properties that are, in Frankish's scheme, characteristics of radically different natural kinds.Īccording to Frankish, for instance, conscious belief is binary - you either believe something or you don't - whereas basic belief comes in degrees and is always nonconscious: "our degrees of confidence are not matters of immediate conscious awareness" (p.23). Although the conflicts Frankish discusses are genuine, it is hard to share his confidence that they can be resolved by dividing the properties of beliefs into those possessed by basic beliefs and those of the superbeliefs. Frankish believes that tensions in folk psychology reflect an underlying distinction in our mental nature, and that folk psychology can be divided without remainder, as it were, into two unified theories with different, and correct, ontological commitments. But I am skeptical that all the tensions can be resolved in his preferred way, by two neat conceptual clusters. The result is a very strong commitment not just to the idea that folk psychology quantifies over real entities, but that folk psychology, properly understood, is correct in almost every particular about the nature of those entities, and that the nature of belief is a conceptual, rather than an empirical, matter.įrankish draws attention to many genuine tensions in folk psychology. (This term is not defined, but it seems to mean syllogistic or otherwise subject to logical, rather than probabilistic, appraisal.) The supermind is realized in the basic mind, in the sense that generalizations about states of the supermind are made true by generalizations about underlying basic states.
As a reasoning system, it is "classical". The supermind, on the other hand, is conscious, and its beliefs can be actively formed and controlled, expressed in a natural language, and are held or not without qualification. As a reasoning system, it is well described by Bayesian decision theory. (The book would be easier to follow if it consistently used just one of these pairs of neologisms.) The basic mind is non-conscious and contains passively formed beliefs that come in degrees, cannot be actively controlled, and do not involve language. The overall picture distinguishes what Frankish calls either the strand 1 mind or the basic mind from the strand 2 mind, or supermind. It will be hard to follow if one is not already familiar with the literature, but it does illustrate very well the connections between various positions on folk psychology, rationality, and the concept of belief.
He takes us on an interesting and stimulating survey of the conceptual issues, but the discussion rushes through a number of debates that should be taken at less speed and spelled out more clearly. Having argued for this point in outline, Frankish defends it by arguing that several outstanding disputes in the philosophy of mind can be resolved by recasting the issues in his terms. Frankish claims that folk psychology has two theoretical cores, which provide the frameworks needed to understand the two different types of minds - basic minds and superminds - that humans possess. Keith Frankish thinks the arguments about the nature of folk psychology remain unresolved because both sides are correct about different aspects of the mind.
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