![]() ![]() Similarly, I argue that we can understand the persistence of false self-conceptions only if we evaluate them in terms of the costs and benefits of what they get human beings to do, instead of how well they describe the workings of human cognition. Instead, software is evaluated in terms of the costs and benefits of what it gets the computer that runs it to do. Software is not evaluated in terms of the degree to which it truly describes the workings of the computer that runs it. Rather than evaluating self-directed beliefs for truth, I argue that we should evaluate them in the way we evaluate computer software. In this paper, I propose a solution to this apparent puzzle. However, there is voluminous empirical evidence, gathered over many decades, that many highly persistent self-conceptions are false. ![]() For this reason, mechanisms operating at phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and cultural scales weed out such false beliefs. Human beings with false beliefs about how to secure food, social partners, and physical security do not succeed at these tasks as well as human beings with true beliefs about them. Typically, action-relevant, false beliefs do not persist. This chapter surveys the history of thinking about mental duality, looking at precursors and related theories in philosophy and psychology, and giving a detailed account of the origins of modern dual-process and dual-system theories themselves. More recently, some theorists have proposed ambitious dual-system theories of mental architecture, according to which human central cognition is composed of two multi-purpose reasoning systems, usually called System 1 and System 2, the former having fast-process characteristics and the latter slow-process ones. Since the 1970s, researchers on various aspects of human psychology have developed dual-process theories, according to which there are two distinct processing mechanisms for a given task - one fast, effortless, automatic, nonconscious, inflexible, heavily contextualized, and undemanding of working memory, and the other slow, effortful, controlled, conscious, flexible, decontextualized, and demanding of working memory. In recent years an exciting body of work has emerged from various quarters devoted to exploring the idea that there is a fundamental duality in the human mind. Nevertheless, I deny that co-cognition equates to simulation proper or that it plays anything more than a supporting role in understanding reasons for action. For example, I claim it rests in part on a capacity for co-cognition, inter alia, since that ability is necessary for understanding another’s thoughts. In the concluding postscript, I acknowledge that we need more than the folk psychological framework to understand how we understand reasons, but I deny that this something more takes the form of a theory about propositional attitudes or simulative procedures for manipulating them. This should expose the impotence of the standard reasons for believing that folk psychology must be a kind of theory. I then go on to demonstrate how the NPH can account for (i) the structural features of folk psychology and (ii) its staged acquisition without buying into the idea that it is a theory, or that it is acquired by means of constructing one. To add appropriate force to this observation, I first say something about why we should reject the widely held assumption that the primary business of folk psychology is to provide third-personal predictions and explanations. My purpose in this paper is merely to spell out just how the Narrative Practice Hypothesis, if true, undercuts any need to appeal to either theory or simulation when it comes to explaining the basis of folk psychological understanding: these heuristics do not come into play other than in cases of in which the framework is used to speculate about why another may have acted.
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