Blackwell Reference Online

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These are two, many think competing, views of the nature of our commonsense, proposi-tional attitude explanations of action. For example, when we say that our neighbour cut down his mulberry tree because he believed that it was ruining his patio and didn't want it ruined, we are offering a typically commonsense explanation of his action in terms of his beliefs and desires. But, even though wholly familiar, it is not clear what kind of explanation is at issue. On one view, the attribution of beliefs and desires is taken as the application to actions of a theory which, in its informal way, functions very much like theoretical explanation in science. This is known as the ‘theory theory’ of everyday psychological explanation. In contrast, it has been argued that our propositional attributions are not theoretical claims so much as reports of a kind of simulation . On such a ‘simulation theory’ of the matter, we decide what our neighbour will do (and thereby why he did it) by imagining ourselves in his position and deciding what we would do. For fuller accounts of these two views and further examples, see belief (2) and folk psychology . ... log in or subscribe to read full text