Abstract

The central claim of the dissertation is that one uses one's own personality as a model in making sense of the actions of others. Prereflective common sense endorses this view, but it has not been popular among philosophers, primarily because it is not clear how "putting yourself in someone else's shoes" can count as an explanation. ;The first part is primarily expository and destructive. I outline and criticize two versions of the widely accepted philosophical account of commonsense psychology. The first version takes it to be a collection of inductive generalizations about human behavior in typical circumstances. This view probably has few proponents, but I consider it because its limitations provide much of the motivation for the more popular alternative, according to which commonsense psychology involves a calculus of belief and desire. I describe in some detail how this more sophisticated view must work if it is to account for commonsense explanation. I then argue that it cannot work in that way, because it fails to provide a principled account of explanations of the wide variety of actions that are not directed at independently specifiable outcomes. ;My presentation of my positive view begins with a discussion of ordinary belief attributions and their role in explanation. I argue that the ability to follow another's beliefs involves nothing that is not already involved in mastery of a natural language. I then display my view of the structure of explanations of actions with an extended example of explanations of laughter. Having displayed my view, I apply it to a variety of explanations appealing to character, emotions, and changes of character. ;I then show that "putting yourself in someone else's shoes" can provide genuine explanations despite its lack of reliance on generalizations that can be made explicit. I point to legitimate explanatory uses of modeling outside of commonsense psychology and argue that using oneself as a model is equally legitimate. I also show that the explanatory usefulness of the model does not depend on incorrigibility about one's own motives. ;The dissertation closes with a discussion of the nature of mental states and self-knowledge. Although my account is individualistic in its dependence on each person's ability to use his or her personality to model others, I conclude that that ability itself depends on membership in a shared cultural and linguistic community