Folk Psychology Re-Assessed

1.1. FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, THEORY OF MIND AND SIMULATION The tasks we face in our day to day social lives are quite heterogeneous but many of them make a common demand upon us. They require us to understand and interact with other people and, in most social encounters, we exhibit a special sensitivity to our fellow human beings that is quite different from the way we respond to inanimate objects and most other species of organism. Social life is dependent, to a considerable degree, on our ability to understand what is distinctive about human behaviour and to successfully apply that understanding in all manner of situations. What is central to our ability to interpret one another? A great deal of work in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, anthropology, developmental psychology and a host of other disciplines assumes that, at root, interpersonal interpretation is accomplished through the employment of a 'commonsense' or 'folk' psychology, meaning an 'everyday', rather than 'scientific', appreciation of mindedness. Although there is considerable debate over which cognitive processes support our folk psychological abilities and how those abilities develop during childhood, there is a remarkable degree of consensus concerning what folk psychology consists of. Almost all discussions of the topic begin by stating or presupposing that it is the ability to attribute intentional states, principally beliefs and desires, to other people and perhaps also to oneself, in order to predict and explain behaviour.

The contributors are a group of highly respected authors, working in the disciplines of philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, phenomenology, narrative theory and developmental psychology A range of criticisms of orthodox conceptions of folk psychology, theory of mind and simulation are brought together for the first time, together comprising a serious challenge to an established and hugely influential paradigm in philosophy of mind, cognitive science and various other fields Richly interdisciplinary, drawing on phenomenology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, philosophy of mind and narrative theory

Auteur

Matthew Ratcliffe is Reader in Philosophy at Durham University in England. Most of his recent work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of psychology and philosophy of psychiatry. He is author of Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (Palgrave, 2007) and Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Contenu
Emotion, Perception, and Interaction.- Expression and Empathy.- We Share, Therefore We Think.- Logical and Phenomenological Arguments Against Simulation Theory.- Persons, Pronouns, and Perspectives.- Reasons, Norms, Narratives and Institutions.- There are Reasons and Reasons.- Folk Psychology Without Theory or Simulation.- The Regulative Dimension of Folk Psychology.- Folk Psychology: Science and Morals.- Folk Psychology and Freedom of the Will.- The Fragmentation of Folk Psychology.- Critter Psychology: On the Possibility of Nonhuman Animal Folk Psychology.- Folk Psychology Does not Exist.- From Folk Psychology to Commonsense.