ABSTRACT
The concept of folk psychology has played a central role in the philosophy of psychology in recent decades. The term “folk psychology” is deliberately used to mark a contrast with what we might call “scientic psychology.” Whilst the latter is a body of theory developed and articulated by researchers within a scientic specialization, the former is said to be common to nearly all human beings. Given the centrality of folk psychology in contemporary philosophical thought about the mind, it is surprising that there is little consensus on either its nature or its status. Many philosophers and cognitive scientists insist that folk psychology is a theory of mind, but this claim is by no means universally accepted. Moreover, there are marked disagreements even amongst those philosophers who understand folk psychology to be a theory. In the second and third sections, I explore two ways in which folk psychology has been taken to be a theory. Following Stich and Nichols (2003) I call these the platitude approach and the mindreading approach.1 Then, in the fourth section, I briey discuss eliminativism – the doctrine that the mental states over which folk psychology quanties simply don’t exist. The nal two sections of this chapter are devoted to theorists who deny that folk psychology is a theory. In the fth section, I briey sketch the claim that folk psychology is best understood in terms of mental simulation, and in the sixth section, I discuss the claim that folk psychology is a stance or attitude that we take to a range of systems.
