文档介绍：Autonomous Psychology and the
32 Belief -Desire Thesis
Stephen P. Stich
A venerable view , still very much alive, holds that human action is to
be explained at least in part in terms of beliefs and desires. Those who
advocate the view expect that the psychological theory which explains
human behavior will invoke the concepts of belief and desire in a
substantive way . I will call this expectation the belief-desirethesis . Though
there would surely be a quibble or a caveat here and there, the thesis
would be endorsed by an exceptionally heterogeneous collection of
psychologists and philosophers ranging from Freud and Hume , to
Thomas Szasz and Richard Brandt . Indeed, a number of philosophers
have contended that the thesis, or something like it , is embedded in
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our ordinary , workaday concept of action. If they are right , and I think
they are, then in so far as we use the concept of action we are all
committed to the belief- desire thesis. My purpose in this paper is to
explore the tension between the belief- desire thesis and a widely held
assumption about the nature of explanatory psychological theories, an
assumption that serves as a fundamental regulative principle for much
of contemporary psychological theorizing . This assumption , which for
want of a better term I will call the principle of psychologicalautonomy ,
will be the focus of the first of the sections below. In the second section
I will elaborate a bit on how the belief- desire thesis is to be interpreted ,
and try to extract from it a principle that will serve as a premise in the
argument to follow . In the third section I will set out an argument to
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the effect that large numbers of belief desire explanations of action,
indeed perhaps the bulk of such explanations, are patible with
the principle of autonomy . Finally, in the last section, I will fend off a
possible objection to my argument . In the process, I will try to make
clear ju