Against a normative view of folk psychology

Against a normative view of folk psychology

Recently Elqayam and Evans (2011) have proposed that researchers studying human thinking should be moving away from normative accounts that specify how we “ought” to reason to a more descriptivist framework that describes how we reason. This is an approach that I very much support. The aim of the present article is to demonstrate how this can be applied to the study of mental state reasoning in...

‘Folk psychology’ is not folk psychology

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 th...

Folk Psychology

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 wil...

Is Folk Psychology Different ?

In this paper, I seek to refute arguments for the idea that folk psychological explanation, i.e. the explanation of actions, beliefs and desires in terms of one another, should be understood as being of a different character than ordinary scientific explanations, a view defended most prominently in analytical philosophy by Donald Davidson and John McDowell. My strategy involves arguing both aga...

Folk Psychology (fp)