As can be anticipated, most peoples conception of what a forensic psychologist (or psychiatrist) does is fairly generalised; the vast majority envision that a forensic psychologist is simply a ‘profiler’, working in some capacity within law enforcement advising police and other detectives of their UNSUB’s (unknown subject) criminal profile. This is probably the most glamorous role within the field, and something i would personally hope to do in the future! But realistically there are a large number of jobs that be conducted by a forensic psychologist, least of which is the aforementioned one. Lets talk about some of these now…

To start with, forensic simply means ‘pertaining to a court of law’ or ‘of the law’, so a forensic psychologist or psychiatrist is simply a psychologist/psychiatrist that specialises in the criminal justice system. The more common roles that a forensic psychologist will undertake include:

1. They provide expert psychological evidence in trials, sometimes verbal but more often through the means of written reports (psychological testing of a defendant etc is often undertaken to analyse competency or in cases where child protection is an issue).
2. They consult with legal/law and other related professionals on various things ranging from impact of court proceedings on witnesses and testimony, liaise with police investigations, help with crime prevention, child protection and victim’s needs among others.
3. They develop and conduct research, and provide clinical services to persons within the criminal justice system. This includes things such as treatment of people with substance abuse disorders, therapy for crime victims, assessing and treating offenders – usually during incarceration and after release on parole as well as things such as counselling children who have been affected by the divorce of their parents.

In time we will be adding various articles on to this section of the website covering every aspect of forensic psychology, statistical analysis and other key areas of study you need to be au fait with.

We now have added the ‘Psychology’ menu option, which to start with will link to the various pages dealing with abnormal psychology, and over the coming weeks we will begin to add a vast number of articles relating to this field – this is, as of now, our number one priority/pursuit. Without sounding like a person on a mission (or maybe a cult leader?), there are, without a doubt, too many lives being lost, destroyed, damaged, or anything in between, for intelligent individuals to be standing by watching and waiting. We (and by this i mean everybody) need to open our eyes and begin to conquer the demons that destroy – ourselves, our friends, our family, everyone. Too many lives have already been lost.

To write at the personal level for a minute – i hope by adding articles on the various psychological disorders, and by personally relating to some of them, others may open up, or even offer to help. It is the least any of us can do.

Please bookmark this site, not necessarily for yourself, but for the person that some day may rely on the information you can provide. Questions, comments, personal experiences can all be left below, or emailed privately to me here. Please do not hesitate to contact me for any reason – my Blackberry phone is always on and i endeavor to reply to people as quickly as possible.

The criticism we shall focus on in this paper stems from Paul Churchland and Stephen Stich. Although both adopt different ways of proving their arguments, the conclusion is the same.

Churchland believes that folk psychology suffers severe explanatory failures, that it has been stagnant and made no empirical progress in over twenty centuries, and that folk psychology lacks the ability to be reduced to that of neuroscience and is therefore false.

Stich, on the other hand, stipulates that the overall causal organization of the cognitive system probably doesn’t conform to the causal organization that folk psychology ascribes to it and there probably are no such events as beliefs, desires, and the like.

It seems though, that for folk psychology to come under attack from these arguments, that it must first be deemed a theory. Neither Churchland nor Stich seem willing to take this point onboard and seem to ignore the fact that folk psychology may not be open to reducibility or to being proven false through empirical evidence. For folk psychology to be considered a theory it needs to employ empirical generalizations, which it does not, it is simply “a network of social practices that includes ascribing such mental states to ourselves and others, and proffering explanations of human behaviour that advert to these states.”

That aside, let us examine some of the arguments against folk psychology a bit more closely, and for the moment assume that folk psychology is a theory that is open to falsification.

The first two arguments that Churchland puts forward are the ones with less force, and are strengthened by the third. Churchland raises the first argument, that folk psychology suffers severe explanatory failures, citing things such as creativity, memory and learning as examples of folk psychologies failings. Horgan and Woodward suggest firstly, that folk psychology at no time attempts to solve these problems, and secondly, although folk psychology itself does not appear to address these issues, concepts derived from the core elements of folk psychology do. Cognitive psychologists address visual perception, memory and learning using the folk psychological terms of belief and desire.

Churchland also places the demand that for any psychological theory to be successful, it needs to be able to explain or account for a set of pre-established phenomena and must do so in a unified way. A prime example of this being false, as stated by Horgan and Woodward, is that of early optical theories. These theories were forced to try and explain facts that have since been attributed to the physiology of sight. Horgan and Woodward rightly state “There is no good reason, a priori, to expect that a theory like folk psychology, designed primarily to explain common human actions in terms of beliefs, desires, and the like, should also account for phenomena having to do with visual perception, sleep, or complicated muscular coordination.”

Churchland, on top of this, suggests that any theory formulated from folk psychology should be discarded as false. Horgan and Woodward defend this by citing examples such as attribution theory or cognitive dissonance theory, as these are built primarily from folk psychological concepts. Churchland fails to provide any argument based on empirical evidence and as such his argument is discarded.

The second argument put forward by Churchland states that folk psychology has been stagnant and made no empirical progress in over 2000 years, but this is false also. Over the centuries folk psychology has modified its approach in all sorts of areas, and has definitely not been stagnant, it has advanced in empirically progressive ways over the years. For example, human behavior used to be attributed to things such as enduring character traits, but is now more likely attributed to situational factors. Another example of its failure to be stagnant is that of appealing to unconscious beliefs and desires, which have been widely accepted since Freud.

Still another reason to suggest that folk psychology has actually been progressive is to look at theories built on folk psychological terms such as belief and desire. We again turn to cognitive psychology, which has led to novel predictions and surprises, all of which were proven by experimentation. It could be argued that although cognitive psychology is largely based on folk psychology, that doesn’t mean that folk psychology has empirically progressed. However the claims being made by Churchland and Stich are that folk psychology is radically false; but folk psychology cannot be radically false if theories based on its terms are proven, through experiment, to be even slightly true.

On another point, it may be true, that folk psychology is not even open to falsification from lack of empirical progressiveness, as folk psychology is not a theory. Folk psychology is not interested in generating new causal generalizations; it is concerned with making particular causal judgments about particular instances of human behavior. Horgan and Woodward state “It is not appropriate, we submit, to assess these activities using a standard explicitly designed to assess theories that aim at formulating novel causal generalizations.”

This point emerges much more clearly if you examine an example, causal judgments that are non-psychological have barely changed, if at all, over thousands of years. If we throw a rock into the air we know it will fall to the ground. It would be rather foolish to conclude that simply because this observation is not part of an empirically progressive theory that it must be false.

Now for Churchland’s third and final argument for the falsity of folk psychology, that folk psychology lacks the ability to be reduced to neuroscience. This is his fundamental argument, and his other two are used to enforce its strength, however Horgan and Woodward raise some interesting arguments of their own to combat it. Even if folk psychology lacks the ability to be reduced to lower-level theories, and these lower-level theories themselves are able to account for the nature and behaviour of humans, it does not follow that folk psychology need to radically false. Folk psychology was quite obviously, due to its age, never formulated with an eye to reduction to today’s scientific methods and theories. “Churchland’s eliminative materialism is not the only viable naturalistic alternative to reductive materialism.” say Horgan and Woodward. There is at least one other alternative in that of Donald Davidson’s non-reductive, non-eliminative materialism. Strangely Churchland does not mention this version of identity theory anywhere, and one can infer many things from this. Some may take the approach that Churchland never considered this version of identity theory to be a threat to his arguments, and as such did not waste time examining it, but had he thought this was the case, one would think that the stronger approach would be to talk about it and prove it to be false. He at no time attempts to do this and as such his argument loses its force, as obviously, as stated by Horgan and Woodward, Churchland is simply mistaken; folk psychology does not have to be reducible to neuroscience so that it can be compatible with it.

Lets now look at Stich’s arguments against folk psychology, his arguments state, that the overall causal organization of the cognitive system probably doesn’t conform to the causal organization that folk psychology ascribes to it and there probably are no such events as beliefs, desires, and the like. He interprets this as; folk psychology is radically false because the psychological events that control verbal behaviour are essentially orthogonal (independent) to those that control non-verbal behaviour, and that in general, our verbal and non-verbal behaviour is controlled by two separate cognitive mechanisms. From this he establishes that there is no such thing as beliefs, and hence folk psychology must be false.

This seems all well and good, as he cites a study by Storms and Nisbett to support his arguments, but this does not address unconscious beliefs and desires. Folk psychology only asserts that beliefs and desires lead to verbal expression under appropriate elicitation conditions, it at no time asserts anything of the kind for unconscious beliefs and desires. This removes any power that Stich had in using the Storms and Nisbett study to support his argument as all the evidence can be explained within the natural and plausible realm of folk psychology as we can posit unconscious folk psychological causes.

Stich also appears to do considerable damage to his own arguments by using folk psychological terms such as belief and desire without explaining whether he actually wants them to mean what folk psychology stipulates they mean, this is hardly a good thing for somebody who is trying to argue that folk psychology is false, let alone attempting to convince us that therefore, there are no such things as beliefs or desires.

More so, Storms and Nisbett, as well as Timothy Wilson (a leading advocate of dual cognitive control) who’s position Stich makes much use of, all explicitly say that non-verbal behavioural criteria can exist, even when the subjects behaviour appears to contradict such ideas.

Let us look at a simple example of why dual cognitive control cannot be true. There are many areas where complex processing is taking place and we appear to have integrated verbal and non-verbal cognitive mechanisms. The example Horgan and Woodward use is that of a university lecturer, writing on a whiteboard whilst explaining something complex. It is difficult to believe that if we have dual cognitive control how something like this would work.

Finally Stich raises the modularity principle as an argument for the falsity of folk psychology, in that, beliefs, desires and the like must be identical to naturally isolable parts of the cognitive system. Folk psychology doesn’t meet the modularity principles requirements and hence beliefs do not exist. But it seems that the modularity principle may not be a plausible idea as an intertheoretic compatibility condition as we shall explain now.

Stich suggests that folk psychology violates this principle in a radical way in that meaning or content only emerges from “great webs of structure” hence folk psychology is false due to its inability to mesh with lower level theories. But it seems that Stich’s argument does more than what he wants it to; not only is folk psychology in violation of the modularity principle but cognitive science is also, for it appears that cognitive science would fail to mesh successfully with the lower level theory of neuroscience, and neuroscience with the lower level theory of physicschemistry etc. This points out the enormous implausibility of the modularity principle as an intertheoretic compatibility condition. It does seem plausible however that each folk psychological belief may be made up of various cognitive science events, this doesn’t prove in any way that beliefs do not exist, it simply enlightens us to the complexity of the event.

The bottom line is that it appears both Churchland’s and Stich’s arguments against folk psychology fall apart under attack from Horgan and Woodward. The severe explanatory failures of folk psychology and the apparent stagnation have been brushed aside with very little effort citing the fact that folk psychology does not attempt to explain the things that Churchland claims it should and that although folk psychology appears to be stagnant theories based on folk psychological terms and concepts are still in use today and continue to be proven true through experimentation.

It has also been established that folk psychology does not need to be reducible to neuroscience in order to maintain its truth or compatibility as there are other theories available which Churchland fails to even mention. Stich’s claims, while more radical and complicated, are also voided by Woodward and Horgan with simple examples. The idea of dual cognitive control has all its power removed by examining how a person can do complex calculations in their head while writing them down, and finally the modularity principle is proven to be false as it would prove false most of our theories including quite likely cognitive science, as well as neuroscience. Hence we must conclude that folk psychology is here to stay until such time as some plausible arguments against it are raised or it is proven that it really is a theory. Until such time as this happens, statements such as “He is just mistaken to assume that folk psychology must be reducible to neuroscience in order to be compatible with it.” shall continue to reign true.