Acting for Reasons: in defence of common-sense psychology

This is a book about why we do what we do. It’s also about how we arrive at an understanding of another person’s actions or succeed in predicting what someone else will do. A traditional view in philosophy, known as ‘common-sense’ or ‘folk’ psychology, holds that representational mental states—paradigmatically, propositional attitudes like beliefs and desires—lie at the heart of intentional action and social cognition. According to this view, intentional or deliberate actions are responses to mental states which capture a person’s reasons for action: I open the cookie jar because I’d like a cookie and believe there is one in there. has been thrown into serious doubt, with a school of thought emerging which holds that common-sense psychology’s appeal to reasons and reasoning is overly demanding and overly intellectualizing, painting an idealized picture of decision making which is rarely (if ever) borne out by the evidence. A highly influential factor in the rejection (or at least, demoting) of the common-sense model has been a wave of experimental findings coming from Psychology, Economics, and related disciplines which appear to refute the common-sense model of intentional action as typically reasons-responsive. Although people may sometimes act as a result of their reasons, this experimental evidence seems to show that much more commonly people act out of habit and intuition, failing to pay proper attention to the evidence they have. This book is an attempt to reject that line of argument and to defend the common-sense perspective.