COMMON-SENSE, COGNITIVE-PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHOLOGY - BELIEFS, MATERIALISM AND EXTERNALISM

Concepts of propositional attitudes such as intentions, beliefs, desires, are common sense psychological concepts. According to some philosophers and psychologists, they are part of a folk or naive psychological theory. However, such concepts are also used in the scientific psychological study of deductive and inductive reasoning, cognitive dissonance and in ''theories of mind''. Beliefs and propositional attitudes have contents of intentional properties. And they are supposed to be causes of intentional actions or behavior. The philosophical problem dealt with in this paper arises from the tension between two views : on the one hand, it is plausible to assume that causation is a local process. On the other hand, most contemporary philosophers of mind accept an externalist view of content (or intentional properties) of beliefs such that intentional properties are not local properties of an individual's brain. The basic dilemma one faces is thus the following: either revise the assumption that intentional properties of beliefs are relevant to the causal explanation of intentional actions or behavior ; or revise the assumption that local properties of an individual's brain are relevant to the causal explanation of an individual's intentional actions.