The Mind of the Nation: The Debate about Völkerpsychologie, 1851-1900

Völkerpsychologie or ‘folk psychology’ has a bad reputation amongst historians. It is either viewed as a pseudo-science not worth studying in detail, or considered a ‘failure’ since, in contrast to sociology, psychology, and anthropology, it never established itself as an independent discipline at university level. This article argues that Völkerpsychologie as developed by Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal was an important current in nineteenth-century German thought. While it was riddled with conceptual and methodological problems and received harsh criticism from academic reviewers, it contributed to the establishing of the social sciences since key concepts of folk psychology were appropriated by scholars such as Georg Simmel and Franz Boas. The article summarizes the main features of Lazarus and Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie, discusses its reception in Germany and abroad, and shows how arguments originally developed for folk psychology were used by Lazarus to reject antisemitism in the 1870s and 1880s. It concludes that Lazarus and Steinthal’s Völkerpsychologie epitomized the mentality of nineteenth-century liberals with its belief in science, progress, and the nation, which was reinforced by their experience of Jewish emancipation

ECONOMIC AGENCY THROUGH MODULARITY THEORY

Economic agency as a matter of rational decision-making and as a problem of bounded rationality has never gone too far from its earlier formalization in the 1950s. Not that the advancement on this topic is so slow, but the same problem concerning higher level cognition as another general program of cognitive science is not as easy as behavioral studies. This paper will show a parallelism between economic agency and folkpsychological perspective, and in turn will give a short description on how folk psychology is unseparable from modularity theory. In short, then there must be a way to cope with cognition as the black box of economics if we can identify the appropriate level of description of cognitive structure, i.e.: modularity theory.bounded rationality, folk psychology, modularity theory

Putting the Folk Back in Folk Psychology: The Social, Cultural, and Moral Character of Folk Psychology

This project provides a critical analysis of how philosophers have traditionally characterized and understood folk psychology, what I call the traditional construal of folk psychology. On the basis of a growing and diverse body of empirical evidence regarding how folk psychology is deployed in situ by the folk, I argue that we must reject this traditional construal and embrace a new understanding of folk psychology. Two crucial and related assumptions regarding the function of folk psychology have been taken for granted in the contemporary debate regarding the mechanisms that underlie our folk psychological competence. More specifically, philosophers have assumed that the primary function of folk psychology is to explain and predict behaviour and that folk psychology is a quasi-scientific enterprise, whereby these goals are shared with science. However, an empirical investigation into how the folk use folk psychology reveals a different story. Instead, we find that we often fail to accurately explain and predict behaviour and that our folk psychological discourse functions so as to satisfy a number of social, cultural, moral goals or purposes. In this way, there are a number of normative functions to our folk psychological practices. These observations, I argue, are inconsistent with the traditional construal of folk psychology and therefore warrant that we take a skeptical position with respect to the traditional construal and re-examine the assumptions that underlie it. However, I argue that attempts to reconcile the traditional construal with the empirical evidence are unlikely to be successful and that the right way forward is to reject the tradition and embrace a new understanding of folk psychology. The traditional construal, I argue, is too narrow in scope to adequately address this empirical evidence and we must embrace a more comprehensive and empirically informed understanding of folk psychology that can embrace the normative interests that shape and drive this practice. While much work will remain, this new landscape will be a significant departure from the traditional construal and we will leave this project having put the folk back into folk psychology

Folk Psychology Revisited: The Methodological Problem and the Autonomy of Psychology

'Folk psychology' is a term that refers to the way that ordinary people think and talk about minds. But over roughly the last four decades the term has come to be used in rather different ways by philosophers and psychologists engaged in technical projects in analytic philosophy of mind and empirical psychology, many of which are only indirectly related to the question of how ordinary people actually think about minds. The result is a sometimes puzzling body of academic literature, cobbled together loosely under that single heading, that contains a number of terminological inconsistencies, the clarification of which seems to reveal conceptual problems. This paper is an attempt to approach folk psychology more directly, to clarify the phenomenon of interest, and to examine the methods used to investigate it. Having identified some conceptual problems in the literature, I argue that those problems have occluded a particular methodological confound involved in the study of folk psychology, one associated with psychological language, that may well be intractable. Rather than attempt to solve that methodological problem, then, I suggest that we use the opportunity to rethink the relationship between folk psychology and its scientific counterpart. A careful look at the study of folk psychology may prove surprisingly helpful for clarifying the nature of psychological science and addressing the contentious question of its status as a potentially autonomous special science

Perceptions Regarding the Care and Education of Children from Birth to Age Three among Students of Early Childhood Education: Changes between Pre-training and Post-training

Many theoreticians focus on understanding the belief system regarding the mind of the learner – The Mind Theory. Olson & Brunner (1996) referred to this belief system as "folk psychology". They named the processes required to promote learners' knowledge and understanding "folk pedagogy". In their opinion, folk pedagogy reflects the learners' folk psychology. In other words, 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.The present study set up to characterize the folk psychology (contains expressions and summaries of various settings as a way of informally shaping quite general meanings or organizing experience) and the folk pedagogy, which deals with where, when and why people teach or educate one another in various ways for the sake of making out of things (Olson & Bruner, 1996) in early childhood education students with respect to education and care during the first three years of life and examine whether these views change during the course of their formal education.The sample comprised of 379 students of education majoring in early childhood education at three colleges in Israel. Data was gathered by a structured questionnaire examining five domains: the impact of year of life on child development, domains affecting child development, care and educational settings, care and educational methods and the role of caregivers. The findings reveal that the perceived influence of family care centers and daycare centers influence on child development decreases between the beginning and the end of their studies. The perceived effectiveness of coping through awareness increased, while strict coping methods were perceived as less effective after the training

Wishful thinking and the unconscious: A reply to Gouws

This paper argues against the view that the Freudian unconscious can be understood as an extension of ordinary belief-desire psychology. The paper argues that Freud’s picture of the mind challenges the paradigm of folk psychology, as it is understood by much contemporary philosophy of psychology and cognitive science. The dynamic unconscious postulated by psychoanalysis operates according to rules and principles that are distinct in kind from those rules that organise rational and conscious thought. Psychoanalysis offers us a radical reconception of our ordinary way of thinking about our own minds

From folk psychology to cognitive ontology

This thesis examines the relationship between folk psychology and scientific psychology, and argues that the conceptual taxonomy provided by the former is unsuitable for fine-grained cognitive scientific research. I avoid traditional eliminativism by reserving a role for folk psychology as a socio-normative discourse, where folk psychological concepts primarily refer to behaviour rather than to mental states, and also exert a regulative influence on behaviour. In the first half of this thesis I develop a positive account of folk psychology as a broad discourse that includes mental state attributions, behavioural predictions, narrative competency, and regulative mechanisms. In the second half I argue that the conceptual taxonomy provided by this discourse has led to theoretical confusions in both philosophy and cognitive science, and I propose a systematic methodology for developing a novel ‘cognitive ontology’ that is better suited for contemporary scientific research. What is folk psychology? In chapter 1 I survey the history of the term folk psychology and demonstrate that the term only really came into general usage following the work of Fodor and Churchland in the 1970s and 80s. I also argue that it is a mistake, stemming from this era, to identify folk psychology exclusively with propositional attitude psychology, which is just one particular way in which the folk might understand one another. If folk psychology is not just propositional attitude psychology, what else might it be? In chapter 2 I consider what I call the ‘universality assumption’, i.e. the assumption that folk psychological intuitions are shared across all cultures and languages. If this assumption were justified then it might provide partial support for the claim that folk psychology presents an accurate account of human cognition. However, there is significant evidence of variation in folk psychological intuitions, suggesting that folk psychology might be at least partially biased by cultural and linguistic influences. If folk psychology is not the same in every culture, how come it is so successful at predicting behaviour? In chapter 3 I look at various ways in which folk psychological discourse can play a regulative or normative role by exerting an influence on our behaviour. This role helps to explain how folk psychology can be predictively successful even if it fails to accurately describe the fine-grained details of human cognition, as via regulative mechanisms it is able to become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. How well does folk psychology match up with our scientific understanding of cognition? In chapter 4 I present evidence of cases where folk psychological concepts have served to mislead or confuse theoretical debates in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I consider several case studies, including the false belief task in social cognition, the taxonomisation of sensory modalities, the extended cognition debate, and the recently emerging ‘Bayesian brain’ hypothesis. If folk psychological concepts do not refer to entities in our scientific theories, then what do they refer to? In chapter 5 I examine the status of folk psychological kinds as natural kinds, and argue that even under a very liberal account folk psychological kinds probably do not constitute viable scientific kinds. However, due to the regulative mechanisms described in chapter 3, they do constitute what Hacking has described as ‘human’ or ‘interactive’ kinds, which exhibit complex looping effects. What kinds of concepts should cognitive science use, if not folk psychological concepts? Finally, in chapter 6 I look at recent developments in ‘cognitive ontology’ revision and argue that we should adopt a systematic methodology for constructing novel concepts that better reflect our current best understanding of cognitive systems. In closing I consider the relationship between these novel concepts and the ontology presented by folk psychological discourse

The politics of human nature

Human nature is a concept that transgresses the boundary between science and society and between fact and value. It is as much a political concept as it is a scientific one. This chapter will cover the politics of human nature by using evidence from history, anthropology and social psychology. The aim is to show that an important political function of the vernacular concept of human nature is social demarcation (inclusion/exclusion): it is involved in regulating who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them.’ It is a folk concept that is used for dehumanization, for denying (a) membership in humankind or (b) full humanness to certain people in order to include or exclude them from various forms of politically relevant aspects of human life, such as rights, power, etc

Neuroscience, Free Will, and Criminal Responsibility

This chapter argues that the folk-psychological model of the person and responsibility is not challenged by determinism in general or by neurodeterminism in particular. Until science conclusively demonstrates that human beings cannot be guided by reasons and that mental states play no role in explaining behavior, the folk-psychological model of responsibility is justified. This chapter discusses the motivations to turn to science to solve the hard normative problems the law addresses, as well as the law\u27s psychology and its concepts of the person and responsibility. Then it considers the general relation of neuroscience to law, which I characterize as the issue of translation. The limits of neurolaw are canvassed and the chapter argues that neurolaw poses no radical challenge to the concepts of the person and responsibility. The chapter is cautiously optimistic about the contribution that neuroscience may make to law in the near and intermediate term. The penultimate section examines some of the claims concerning responsibility made in other chapters in this volume followed by a brief conclusion

Consciousness in scientific and folk psychology

The intentional properties and subjective qualities of conscious states pose special problems for physicalism. Yet 'consciousness' is a term of the vernacular that picks out such a heterogeneous group of phenomena that it will not be a good explanandum for science. This thesis adopted the position that we are licensed to theorize about the phenomena of consciousness, provided we are careful to dump all excess folk-psychological baggage surrounding the term. It was argued that the purposes and goals of folk psychology differ considerably from those of scientific psychology, for folk psychology is first and foremost a craft. Cognitive psychology is bound to the analytical strategy by way of functionalism. Various forms of functionalism were investigated, and two non­ mutually exclusive versions were favoured: homuncular functionalism and microfunctionalism. This led to the view that nature is multi-levelled, and therefore that functionalism may be better known as structural-functional theory. S-F theory should seek to explain the processes and structures of the mind­ brain, rather than attempt to find the states posited by folk psychology within the cognitive system. Traditional cognitive models view the mind as a highly structured system of semi-autonomous processors under the monitoring and guidance of a central executive. But this thesis argued that to postulate a 'consciousness module', while a natural extension of functionalist 'boxology', is merely to pander to our folk-psychological intuitions of the will or 'inner self'. Some of the 'new wave' of cognitive models -those that do not posit an executive -were reviewed. Phenomenal consciousness is the one major stumbling block for physicalist theories. Although this thesis agreed that qualia do not exist, it was evident that no theory has yet provided a bridge across the explanatory gap between third-person science and first-person phenomenology over which sceptics feel safe to cross. Nevertheless, it was argued that Dennett's (1991a) latest theory, with its intelligent use of metaphors and analogies, is one of the most promising steps in the right direction. Finally, it was argued throughout that an interdisciplinary approach is crucial if science is to uncover the mysteries of consciousness