Folk Psychology and Law: the Case of Eliminativism

Abstract

The aim of this paper is very modest. First, we want to assess how differentstrategies of naturalization might deal with the need of using folk psychologyin legal domain. Second, we want to check whether folk psychology is indeedindispensable in the legal domain. Third, we want to describe possible problemswith one strategy of naturalization, i.e. radical naturalization with classicalelimination. Our conclusion will be that despite various attempts, every projectof naturalization of law will have to resolve the tension between law and folkpsychology and such resolution would not be achieved by simple reduction orelimination of folk psychology. A variety of non-standard solutions might be inplace to resolve this tension. We will only outline those strategies here.

From Neuroscience to Law: Bridging the Gap

“…Here, we only point to this tension, and merely note that as long as we hold our folk psychological practices nonnegotiable, and take our moral and legal reasoning to be resting on such practices, which seems plausible (cf. e.g., Lelling, 1993;Morse, 2003Morse, , 2004aMorse, , 2006Morse, , 2007Morse, , 2008Morse, , 2011aMorse, ,b, 2013Morse, , 2015Sifferd, 2006Sifferd, , 2018Jakubiec and Janik, 2017;Hirstein et al, 2018;Moore, 2020), we must rely on some, albeit covert and unarticulated, criteria on how to demarcate between biological and psychological causal hypotheses. The monistic metaphysics of physicalism should therefore, in this context at least, be reconciled with methodological dualism.…”