Argument
Folk psychology
Overview
Folk psychology, commonsense psychology, or naïve psychology, is the ordinary, intuitive, or non-expert understanding, explanation, and rationalisation of people's behaviours and mental states. In philosophy of mind and cognitive science, it can also refer to the academic study of this concept. Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain, pleasure, excitement, and anxiety use common linguistic terms as opposed to technical or scientific jargon. Folk psychology allows for an insight into social interactions and communication, thus stretching the importance of connection and how it is experienced.
Traditionally, the study of folk psychology has focused on how everyday people—those without formal training in the various academic fields of science—go about attributing mental states. This domain has primarily been centered on intentional states reflective of an individual's beliefs and desires; each described in terms of everyday language and concepts such as "beliefs", "desires", "fear", and "hope".
Belief and desire have been the main idea of folk psychology as both suggest the mental states we partake in. Belief comes from the mindset of how we take the world to be while desire comes from how we want the world to be. From both of these mindsets, our intensity of predicting others mental states can have different results.
Folk psychology is seen by many psychologists from two perspectives: the intentional stance or the regulative view. The regulative view of folk psychology insists that a person's behavior is more geared to acting towards the societal norms whereas the intentional stance makes a person behave based on the circumstances of how they are supposed to behave.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Folk psychology is discussed.
But all these religions rest on earlier foundations; they are elaborations of religious motives arising within particular folk communities. Thus, then, in the analysis of the higher mental processes, folk psychology is an indispensable supplement to the psychology of individual consciousness. Indeed, in the case of some questions the latter already finds itself obliged to fall back on the principles of folk…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
editorial apparatus; names the idea; states what it is; the book is about it; opens on it
The first set of facts to be adduced against the common sense view of desire are those studied by psycho-analysis. In all human beings, but most markedly in those suffering from hysteria and certain forms of insanity, we find what are called "unconscious" desires, which are commonly regarded as showing self-deception. Most psycho-analysts pay little attention to the analysis of desire, being interested in…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
states what it is
Both of these distinctions—that between a speculative and an empirical, and that between a scientific and a popular treatment—affect the subsequent history of the study. Psychology is sometimes understood to mean the results of casual observation of our own minds by what is termed introspection, and by the interpretation of what we may observe in others. Such observations are in the first place carried on under the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
states what it is
In the same way that psychoanalysis makes use of dream-interpretation, it also profits by the study of the numerous little slips and mistakes which people make—symptomatic actions, as they are called. I investigated this subject in a series of papers which were published for the first time in book-form in 1904 under the title of _The Psychopathology of Everyday Life_.[12] In this widely circulated work I have…
Sigmund Freud, The problem of lay-analyses
states what it is
Here more metaphysic is called for: The Absolute Reason is now supposed to work under limiting conditions of finitude, of a sensitive and temporal organism. The antecedents of reflective thought are not, therefore, determinations of thought pure and undefiled, but of what thought can do when it stoops to assume the yoke of change and of feeling. I pass by the metaphysical problem left unsolved by this flight into…
John Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory
states what it is
Philosophers who discussed Folk psychology
Related ideas
- Mental state
- Linguistics
- Classification
- Scientific method
- Volition
- Jargon
- Cognitive science
- Philosophy of mind
- Concept
Place in the tradition
Part of Eliminative materialism.