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folk psychology; agency; qualia; phenomenology

I am not sure of what is meant by 'folk psychology': is it our tendency to reify aspects of perception, belief into representations?  Could it be our common sense convictions about our agency (i.e., sizing up a situation in terms of our goals; deliberating about what to do, deciding upon, initiating and carrying out actions)?  If the former, then it's a kind of explanation that can can be challenged philosophically (and I tend to think that it cannot be tested empirically); if it's the latter, then it is not so much an explanation that could  be undermined by scientific investigation as it is the condition for the possibility of any philosophical or scientific reasoning.

Every explanation that one could hope to come up with re any process in nature, must (if it posits any sort of causality whatsoever), in order to be intelligible, derive any notion of a causality from our our awareness of our own agency.  

There's no push (or pull) without a pushy person.  That is, there's no way we can rightfully describe this or that process as involving force unless our awareness of our own engagement in the world is more basic than imagining things that aren't there.  Theory (in the sense of explanation) rests on a notion of causality that is not "just a theory."


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