Folk psychology without theory or simulation

Folk Psychology is dead. Long live Folk Psychology!! This could be the motto of

many of the papers in this volume. I too endorse the need to reform the standard

assumptions about the function, scope and basis of our capacity to understand

others in terms of what might be called - accurately, if rather cumbersomely -

propositional-attitude belief-desire psychology. Yet, I stop short of proposing a

successor. I take it to be a datum that certain populations of psychologically normal,

adult humans do, as a matter of fact, make sense of intentional action by appeal

to reasons. In speaking of 'reasons' I mean precisely what philosophers have long

understood to be at the heart of discrete episodes of means-end practical reasoning -

processes that result in intentions to act.