The Personal Stance

Abstract

What is left of FP? Stich and Ravenscroft (1996) distinguish three different senses of the term ‘folk psychology’. It can be employed to refer to the various platitudes about beliefs and desires. It can also be used in a more specific sense, to refer to the view that our familiarity with these platitudes is symptomatic of a systematically organised ‘theory of mind’, embedded in the architecture of the human brain. The third option is that ‘folk psychology’ refers neither to the platitudes nor to an internalised theory that facilitates our appreciation of them. Rather, it is an externally imposed systematisation of the platitudes that is not part of everyday social life but a framework through which certain people think about social life. In this sense, folk psychology is still a ‘theory’. But it is not a theory that the ‘folk’ implicitly or explicitly depend upon when interpreting each other. If ‘folk psychology’ is understood in this way alone, there are no issues as to which processes facilitate it, how they develop or how they evolved, given that it is not something people actually do but a way of thinking about what people do. As Stich and Ravenscroft recognise, everyday practices could be systematised in a variety of different ways. Some systematisations will be more or less useful than others and the utility of any one systematisation may be restricted to only certain contexts of enquiry.