Abstract
This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research program encompassing both revisionary and more traditionally inspired approaches to folk psychology. After reviewing the origins of pluralistic folk psychology, the papers in the current issue are introduced. These papers fall into three thematic clusters: Folk-psychological strategies beyond propositional attitude attribution (Section 2.1); Enculturation and regulative folk psychology (Section 2.2); and Defenses of pluralism (Section 2.3).
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Notes
Importantly, Zawidzki makes it clear that his account aims to explain how we use person-level, linguistically expressible folk psychological concepts. He distinguishes these from sub-personal, implicit forms of mentalizing (Butterfill and Apperly 2013; Zawidzki 2011), which he thinks do serve predictive rather than regulative functions.
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Acknowledgements
We are extremely grateful to all the authors who contributed papers to this special issue, and to all of the reviewers who refereed submissions. We also thank Tad Zawidzki and Heidi Maibom for their comments on this introduction, and the editors of this journal for their guidance and administrative support. KA was supported by SSHRC Insight Grant 435-2016-1051 and by the York University Research Chair Program. EW was supported by SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship 756-2018-0012.
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Dedicated to Ron Giere (1938–2020), who forged the path.
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Andrews, K., Spaulding, S. & Westra, E. Introduction to Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches. Synthese 199, 1685–1700 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02837-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02837-3