From Economics to Biology

Walter Veit: Could you elaborate on the theory of mind? Most readers of Psychology Today will not be familiar with the term.

Alex Rosenberg: The theory of mind is also known as folk psychology or common sense psychology. It’s just the theory that our behavior, and especially human action, is the causal product of packages or parings be beliefs and desires — the latter give the ends, the form identify the means to attain them, and together they determine our choices, decisions, and actions. David Lewis rightly identified its generalizations as “platitudes.”

Walter Veit: When and why did you move from philosophy of biology to philosophy of cognitive science? Is there a connection to your earlier work in the philosophy of economics?

Alex Rosenberg: I moved to philosophy of biology from the philosophy of economics because biologists were actually interested in what philosophy of science might offer. Economists thought they were too smart to learn from other disciplines. Mostly, they still are, even after the financial crisis. I consider that cognitive science is part of biology, so I’m still doing philosophy of biology. My interest in molecular biology, and its relation to the rest of biology, made neuroscience a natural subject of interest as the molecular details of cognitive processes became more and more accessible.

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