You Can Fool Some of The People All of The Time, Everything Else Being Equal; Hedged Laws and Psychological Explanations

Abstract

First blush, anyhow, the notion of a psychological law appears to be at the intersection of a number of projects that are currently active in philosophy and in science. For example: i. Commonsense psychological explanation. The idea that commonsense intentional psychology should be construed as a prototheory of the etiology of behavior comports with the idea that commonsense intentional explanation/prediction is (at least implicitly) at least from time to time a species of explanation/ prediction by law subsumption. And, as a matter of fact, a law-subsumption view of commonsense intentional explanation often seems independently plausible. Here's a fragment of the commonsense psychology of expertise: Repetition facilitates rote recall, and rehearsal improves peiformance. It's hard to doubt that we appeal to this generalization to explain and predict the successes of behavioral strategies (How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice.), and it's hard to doubt that we are often right to do so. It's not the whole story about Horowitz that he spent a lot of time playing scales; but surely it's part of the story. The relation between practice and expertise isn't conceivably accidental. And it iSii't conceivably conceptual either. You can imagine a world where repeating a list doesn't help with learning it; or where it only helps on Tuesdays; or where it's only repeating the list backwards that helps. But if the connection between practice and performance is reliable and contingent, why shouldn't explanations and predictions that invoke this connection count as law subsumptions? Similarly, though perhaps more tendentiously, with explanations that appeal to a nomological counterpart of modus ponens to connect John's believing that (P and P -X Q) to his believing that Q. ii. Cognitive science. In commonsense psychological explanation, appeals to intentional laws are often only more or less explicit; but in cognitive science, they're up front. There has, in fact, been some confusion about this in the literature about cognitive science; some philosophers have thought they saw a conflict