Folk Psychology

Over the last two decades, debates over the viability of commonsense psychology have been centre stage in both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. Eliminativists have argued that advances in cognitive science and neuroscience will ultimately justify a rejection of our "folk" theory of the mind, and of its ontology. In the first half of this book Stich, who was at one time a leading advocate of eliminativism, maintains that even if the sciences develop in the ways that eliminativists foresee, none of the arguments for ontological elimination are tenable. Rather than being resolved by science, he contends, these ontological disputes will be settled by a pragmatic process in which social and political considerations have a major role to play. In later chapters, Stich argues that the widespread worry about "naturalizing" psychological properties is deeply confused, since there is no plausible account of what naturalizing requires on which the failure of the naturalization project would lead to eliminativism. He also offers a detailed analysis of the many different notions of folk psychology to be found in philosophy and psychology, and argues that simulation theory, which purports to be an alternative to folk psychology, is not supported by recent experimental findings.

In this book, Hodgson presents a clear and compelling case against today's orthodox mechanistic view of the brain-mind, and in favor of the view that "the mind matters." In the course of the argument he ranges over such topics as consciousness, informal reasoning, computers, evolution, and quantum indeterminancy and non-locality. Although written from a philosophical viewpoint, the book has important implications for the sciences concerned with the brain-mind problem. At the same time, it is largely non-technical, and thus accessible to the non-specialist reader.

This book presents an original and accessible analysis of the relationship between commonsense, or "folk," psychology and contemporary scientific psychology, focusing on the ways in which cognitive science presents a challenge to our commonsense self-image. It is designed as a textbook for upper-level undergraduate and beginning postgraduate students in philosophy and cognitive science, but as a text that not only surveys but advances the debates on the topics discussed, it will also be of interest to researchers working in these areas.

Approaches to Intentionality is an authoritative and accessible account of a problem central to contemporary philosopy of mind. Lyons first gives a critical survey of the current debate about the nature of intentionality, then moves on to offer an original new theory. The book is written throughout in a clear, direct, and lively style.

Since the time of Bacon, Galileo and Descartes, philosophers have identified strongly with the aims of natural science and the rationality of its methods. This is the first full-length study of scientism, the belief that science is the best and most important branch of learning.Tom Sorell is critical of the scientistic tendency in philosophy. However, he does not seek to denigrate science. Rather he argues that the arts and humanities are undervalued. Sorell insists that philosophy is not science and condemns recent attempts in the name of 'naturalism' to revive the project of scientific philosophy.

This book provides a radical alternative to naturalistic theories of content, and offers a new conception of the place of mind in the world. Confronting the scientific conception of the nature of reality that has dominated the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, Morris presents a detailed analysis of content and propositional attitudes based on the idea that truth is a value. He rejects the causal theory of the explanation of behavior and replaces it with an alternative that depends upon a rich conception of the behavior we explain with references to state of mind. His lucid and detailed exposition of this controversial arguments poses an emphatic challenge to the naturalistic orthodoxy in areas as diverse as metaphysics, ethics, and cognitive science.