Individualism and Psychology

Abstract

Recent years have seen in psychology — and overlapping parts of linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the social sciences — the development of some semblance of agreement about an approach to the empirical study of human activity and ability. The approach is broadly mentalistic in that it involves the attribution of states, processes and events that are intentional, in the sense of ‘representational’. Many of these events and states are unconscious and inaccessible to mere reflection. Computer jargon is prominent in labeling them. But they bear comparison to thoughts, wants, memories, perceptions, plans, mental sets and the like — ordinarily so-called. Like ordinary propositional attitudes, some are described by means of that-clauses and may be evaluated as true or false. All are involved in a system by means of which a person knows, represents, and utilizes information about his or her surroundings.

A version this paper was given at the Sloan Conference at MIT in May 1984. I have benefited from the commentaries by Ned Block, Fred Dretske, and Stephen Stich. I have also made use of discussion with Jerry Fodor, David Israel, Bernie Kobes, and Neil Stillings; and I am grateful to the editors for several suffestions.