What Is Folk Psychology?

Knowledge as a Mental State

“…On the philosophy side of the line, the answer is almost unanimously negative. Knowledge is conspicuously absent from the lists of mental states presented by many prominent contemporary philosophers of mind (Davies & Stone, 2001;Goldman, 2006;Gordon, 1986;Stich & Ravenscroft, 1994). It is not simply by oversight that philosophers have failed to include knowledge in their lists; there are systematic reasons for the omission, to be discussed in what follows.…”

Translation after Wittgenstein

“…This approach, suggested by that of Weinberger and Paz (1987) (as described in 4.3), has been followed in this thesis: I offered case studies (in 3.5 and 4. Just as there is talk of folk psychology, common-sense accounts of human behaviour that seem to make sense but that are misleading when analysed (Stich & Ravenscroft, 1994), so the Augustinian picture, according to Wittgenstein, is one that is widely and deeply but unconsciously held. It can be categorised as a folk linguistics that is profoundly dualist.…”

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science since 1980

“…O'Brien (1991) responded to the idea that connectionism might lead to eliminativism by arguing that transient activation patterns do fill the right kind of discrete functional role to match the folk conception of occurrent intentional states, while the causal holism of distributed connectionist networks offered stronger resources for a defence of intentional realism with regard to enduring beliefs. As debate about eliminative materialism and other aspects of the Churchlands' work continued through the 1990s (Stich and Ravenscroft 1992;Sterelny 1993;Gold and Stoljar 1999), however, new debates on 'theory of mind' also emerged.…”