(Ebook) Folk Psychologies Across Cultures by R. Murray Thomas ISBN 9780761924593, 0761924590

(Ebook) Folk Psychologies Across Cultures by R. Murray Thomas ISBN 9780761924593, 0761924590

Without taking a single psychology course, ordinary people learn to understand, predict, and explain one another's actions, thoughts, and motivations. Many cognitive scientists and philosophers claim that our everyday or folk understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. That theory is widely called folk psychology (sometimes commonsense psychology). The terms in which folk psychology are couched are familiar ones of "belief" and "desire," "hunger," "pain," and so forth. According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and of others. This book has two goals: (a) to provide a framework for analyzing folk psychologies, and (b) to describe multiple forms that folk psychologies assume in different cultures.