Term used in recent philosophy of mind for the view that beliefs, desires and so on exist and operate much as common sense assumes they do; that is, the operations of the mind can be adequately explained in terms of such notions, or (more strongly) that they cannot be adequately explained without them.
Strictly the term refers to such explanations themselves rather than to claims about their adequacy, but it is given point by recent claims that beliefs, desires and so on not only play no essential part in explaining mental phenomena, but do not even exist; that is, no phenomenon, and no set of features of our mental life, corresponds to our use of words like ‘belief and ‘desire’.
Strictly, therefore, such use is, on this view, incoherent, though harmless for ordinary purposes. ‘Folk psychology’ is an analogue in philosophy of mind of naive realism in epistemology.
Table of Contents
- 1 Videos
- 2 Related Products
- 2.1 From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief
- 2.2 Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate
- 2.3 Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences (A Bradford Book)
- 2.4 Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science)
- 2.5 Elements of Folk Psychology: Outlines of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind (Classic Reprint)
- 2.6 The Future of Folk Psychology: Intentionality and Cognitive Science
- 2.7 African American Folk Healing
- 2.8 Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee's Theory of How the World Works (Psychology)
- 2.9 The Many-Minded Man: The "Odyssey," Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic (Myth and Poetics II)
- 2.10 Folk Illusions: Children, Folklore, and Sciences of Perception
Last update 2020-06-17. Price and product availability may change.