Black@YALE.ARPA (07/05/83)
From: "John B. Black" <Black@YALE.ARPA>
The recent assertion on this list that "Mind Sciences" (unlike
physics) do not have a "common, roughly correct, theory to start with"
is just dead wrong. In fact, the study of "naive psychology" (i.e.,
people's folk theories of how other people behave) constitutes a
sizable subfield within formal psychology. You don't have to be a
professional psychologist to recognize this, just listen to the
conversations around you and you will find a large proportion of them
are composed of people offering explanations and predictions of other
people's behavior. The source of these explanations and predictions
are, of course, people's folk or naive theories of human behavior (and
these theories ae "roughly correct"). Thus AI and the other "mind
sciences" do seem to be like physics in this regard.