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- A. Goldman (1993). The Psychology of Folk Psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16:15-28.The central mission of cognitive science is to reveal the real nature of the mind, however familiar or foreign that nature may be to naive preconceptions. The existence of naive conceptions is also important, however. Prescientific thought and language contain concepts of the mental, and these concepts deserve attention from cognitive science. Just as scientific psychology studies folk physics (McCloskey 1983, Hayes 1985), viz., the common understanding (or misunderstanding) of physical phenomena, so it must study folk psychology, the common understanding of mental states. This subfield of scientific psychology is what I mean by the phrase 'the psychology of folk psychology'.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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Many philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that our everyday or "folk" understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called "folk psychology" (sometimes "commonsense" psychology). The terms in which folk psychology is couched are the familiar ones of "belief" and "desire", "hunger", "pain" and so forth. According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and others. However, the nature and status of folk (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: plato.stanford.edu seop.leeds.ac.uk illc.uva.nl science.uva.nl setis.library.usyd.edu.au | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: plato.stanford.edu seop.leeds.ac.uk illc.uva.nl science.uva.nl setis.library.usyd.edu.au | Scholar | More.. For the last 25 years discussions and debates about commonsense psychology (or “folk psychology,” as it is often called) have been center stage in the philosophy of mind. There have been heated disagreements both about what folk psychology is and about how it is related to the scientific understanding of the mind/brain that is emerging in psychology and the neurosciences. In this chapter we will begin by explaining why folk psychology plays such an important role in the philosophy of mind. (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: blutner.de amor.rz.hu-berlin.de amor.cms.hu-berlin.de dingo.sbs.arizona.edu rci.rutgers.edu umich.edu ncbi.nlm.nih.gov | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: blutner.de amor.rz.hu-berlin.de amor.cms.hu-berlin.de dingo.sbs.arizona.edu rci.rutgers.edu umich.edu ncbi.nlm.nih.gov | Scholar | More.. For the last 25 years discussions and debates about commonsense psychology (or “folk psychology,” as it is often called) have been center stage in the philosophy of mind. There have been heated disagreements both about what folk psychology is and about how it is related to the scientific understanding of the mind/brain that is emerging in psychology and the neurosciences. In this chapter we will begin by explaining why folk psychology plays such an important role in the philosophy of mind. (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: ruccs.rutgers.edu blackwell-synergy.com links.jstor.org | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: ruccs.rutgers.edu blackwell-synergy.com links.jstor.org | Scholar | More.. It is often assumed that cognitive science is built upon folk psychology, and that challenges to folk psychology are therefore challenges to cognitive science itself. We argue that, in practice, cognitive science and folk psychology treat entirely non-overlapping domains: cognitive science considers aspects of mental life which do not depend on general knowledge, whereas folk psychology considers aspects of mental life which do depend on general knowledge. We back up our argument on theoretical grounds, and also illustrate the separation between (...)
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| | Other links: springerlink.com | Scholar | More.. This article describes two uses of folk psychology in scientific psychology. Use 1 deals with the way in which folk theories and beliefs are imported into social psychological models on the basis that they exert causal influences on cognition or behavior (regardless of their validity or scientific usefulness). Use 2 describes the practice of mining elements from folk psychology for building an overarching psychological theory that goes beyond common sense (and assumes such elements are valid or scientifically useful). This distinction (...)
The debates about the form of folk psychology and the potential eliminability of folk psychology rest on a particular view about how humans understand other minds. That is, though folk psychology is described as --œour commonsense conception of psychological phenomena--� (Churchland 1981, p. 67), there have been implicit assumptions regarding the nature of that commonsense conception. It has been assumed that folk psychology involves two practices, the prediction and explanation of behavior. And it has been assumed that one cognitive mechanism (...)
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| | Other links: leaonline.com cogsci.rpi.edu | Scholar | More.. <b>1. Introduction</b> <b>2. One sense of "model"</b> <b>3. Folk psychology as a model</b> <b>4. Versions and construals</b> <b>5. Folk psychology in cognitive science and analytic philosophy</b>.
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| | Other links: people.fas.harvard.edu | Scholar | More.. This paper disputes the claim that our understanding of others is enabled by a commonsense or ‘folk’ psychology, whose ‘core’ involves the attribution of intentional states in order to predict and explain behaviour. I argue that interpersonal understanding is seldom, if ever, a matter of two people assigning intentional states to each other but emerges out of a context of interaction between them. Self and other form a coupled system rather than two wholly separate entities equipped with an internalised capacity (...)
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| Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize | My bibliography | Export citation | Other links: springerlink.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More..
| | Other links: springerlink.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. This book proposes a series of interconnected arguments against the view that interpersonal understanding involves the use of a 'folk' or 'commonsense' psychology. Ratcliffe suggests that folk psychology, construed as the attribution of internal mental states in order to predict and explain behaviour, is a theoretically motivated and misleading abstraction from social life. He draws on phenomenology, neuroscience and developmental psychology to offer an alternative account that emphasizes patterned interactions between people in shared social situations.
