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When, in our everyday life, we try to understand ourselves and others, we do so, against the background of our psychological knowledge and with a vocabulary that originates from our personal experiences and the world in which we grew up. We understand our own and other people's actions and behavioral patterns in terms of a combination of, wishes, needs, intentions, hopes, fears, beliefs, concepts of reality, etc. That our neighbor's wife suddenly quit her job, left her family, and moved to Spain to open a café — all of this may be understandable in light of the fact that she got married and already had children at the age of twenty, so that we may think that she, now when the kids are grown up and can take care of themselves, finally gave in to a pent-up need to fulfill herself. And that she came back after three months…? Well, we might think, maybe she was lonely in the new country, and maybe her unhap-piness also included an inherited sense of duty that ultimately got the upper hand.
This type of everyday psychological explanation is primarily characterized by the attempt to understand another person, so to speak, from within. To explain someone's conduct in terms of underlying motifs, thoughts, feelings and beliefs, implies making those actions comprehensible from that person's own point of view. In our attempt to explain, we use our own point of view as an “imaginative resource” (Nagel, 1994, p. 27); we use our own experience, imagination and emotional flexibility to understand a psychological context that is not our own, but within which the other person's conduct may gain some form of intelligibility.
Psychology in this primordial sense is not an academic discipline, and the most interesting psychological questions cannot possibly be answered by means of the experimental methods and procedures that are predominant within the academic psychology of our age. For example, a behavioral or neurobiological explanation of why someone is notoriously unfaithful can never