The Debate about Folk Psychology

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Philosophy - Philosophy of the 20th century, grade: 1,3, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Institut für Philosophie), course: Seminar: Mental Representations, language: English, abstract: Folk psychology is often simply addressed as a rough-known set of concepts, generalisations and rules of thumb we all standardly use to explain and predict human behaviour. It is also often referred as common sense psychology since the term ¿folk¿ seems to be depictive and unscientific as in ¿folk physics¿ or ¿folk biology¿ which seem to characterize a more simplistic and superfluous version of the ¿real¿ sciences.

The idea of folk psychology seems to be claiming for scientific grounding to be true. But with that certain problems, such as the very basic question of folk psychology as a real science and theory arise, which shall be inquired in the following sections.