The Domain of Folk Psychology

2003 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 25-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Bermúdez
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Social World ◽  
Social Understanding ◽  
Interpersonal Interactions ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Coordination ◽  
The Social

My topic in this paper is social understanding. By this I mean the cognitive skills underlying social behaviour and social coordination. Normal, encultured, non-autistic and non-brain-damaged human beings are capable of an impressive degree of social coordination. We navigate the social world with a level of skill and dexterity fully comparable to that which we manifest in navigating the physical world. In neither sphere, one might think, would it be a trivial matter to identify the various competences which underly this impressive level of performance. Nonetheless, at least as far as interpersonal interactions are concerned, philosophers show a rare degree of unanimity. What grounds our success in these interactions is supposed to be our common mastery of (more or less similar versions of) folk psychology.

scholarly journals An Approach to the Analysis of Religious Reality in the Social Phenomenology of Alfred Schütz

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 309-327
Author(s):  
Alexey Sitnikov
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Alfred Schutz ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Multiple Realities ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Alfred Schütz ◽  
Social Phenomenology

The article deals with the social phenomenology of Alfred Schütz. Proceeding from the concept of multiple realities, the author describes religious reality, analyses its relationship with everyday, theoretical, and mythological realities, and identifies the areas where they overlap and their specifics. According to Schütz’s concept, reality is understood as something that has a meaning for a human being, and is also consistent and certain for those who are ‘inside’ of it. Realities are structurally similar to one another as they are similar to the reality that is most obvious for all human beings, i.e., the world of everyday life. Religious reality has one of the main signs of genuine reality, that of internal consistency. Religious reality has its own epoché (special ascetic practices) which has similarities with the epoché of the theoretical sphere since neither serve practical objectives, and imply freedom from the transitory issues of everyday life. Just as the theoretical sphere exists independently of the life of a scientist in the physical world and is needed to transfer results to other people, so the religious reality depends on ritual actions and material objects in its striving for the transcendent. Individual, and especially collective, religious practices are performed physically and are inextricably linked with the bodily ritual. The article notes that although Schütz’s phenomenological concept of multiple realities has repeatedly served as a starting point for the development of various social theories, its heuristic potential has not been exhausted. This allows for the further analyzing and development of topical issues such as national identity and its ties with religious tradition in the modern era, when religious reality loses credibility and has many competitors, one of which is the modern myth of the nation. Intersubjective ideas of the nation that are socially confirmed as the self-evident reality of everyday life cause complex emotions and fill human lives, thus displacing religious reality or forcing the latter to come into complex interactions with the national narrative.

Belief in the Human

2018 ◽  
pp. 250-281
Author(s):  
Ethan H. Shagan
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social World ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Suspension Of Disbelief

This chapter cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge's concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief” in order to describe the timeless process by which human beings believe in their own creations. As seen before, Europeans influenced by new ideas in the seventeenth century were freed to believe in spiritual objects in much the same way they believed in mundane ones, as acts of sovereign judgment. With the category so perforated, there was no intrinsic reason why belief had to remain bound to objects judged “true” in a transcendent or universal sense; it might also alight upon objects judged true in more provisional or instrumental ways. Crucially, this included the social world: ephemeral human creations, the ideas and things that humans themselves make.

Computer Mediated Technology as Tools for Social Interaction and Educational Processes

2008 ◽  
pp. 719-732
Author(s):  
Karen Rohrbauck Stout
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Collaborative Learning ◽  
Virtual Teams ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Interaction Space ◽  
Social World ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
The Social ◽  
Enhance Student Learning

Computer mediated technologies (or CMTs) enhance educational processes and are tools that have particular implications for learning and interacting in virtual teams. To better understand how educational tools may be implemented to enhance student learning in virtual teams, the author addresses Wartofsky’s (1979) explication of tools as cultural artifacts. Distinctions about primary, secondary, and tertiary tools provide a framework to analyze implementations of educational CMT research. Implications of these tools on virtual team’s cognitive skills and collaborative learning are explored. Tertiary tools are explored in particular, as they may provide virtual teams with shared interaction space and alternative representations of the social world. The author provides examples of CMT implementation and suggestions for technological and pedagogical advancements.

Symbolic interactionism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Brittan
Keyword(s):  
Symbolic Interactionism ◽  
Social World ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
The Self ◽  
Psychological Perspective ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Language Identity ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interactive View

Symbolic interactionism is in the main a US sociological and social psychological perspective that has focused on the reciprocal relationship between language, identity and society. Philosophically it has largely been associated with pragmatists such as James (1907), Mead (1934), Dewey (1922) and Pierce (1958), although in the European context it has affinities with hermeneutics and phenomenology. In addition, it has links with various ‘dramaturgical’ approaches to communication that emphasize the interactive processes underpinning the construction, negotiation, presentation and affirmation of the self. In brief, symbolic interactionism is premised on the supposition that human beings are ‘active’ and not ‘reactive’. Although it is not easy to spell out the central propositions of Symbolic Interactionism in a systematic way, nevertheless, most of its proponents are committed to an interactive view of self and society, that is, they take issue with those views that see the social world as a seamless unity that completely encapsulates and determines individual conduct.

Computer Mediated Technology as Tools for Social Interaction and Educational Processes

2006 ◽  
pp. 246-267
Author(s):  
Karen R. Stout
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Collaborative Learning ◽  
Virtual Teams ◽  
Cognitive Skills ◽  
Interaction Space ◽  
Social World ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
Computer Mediated ◽  
The Social ◽  
Enhance Student Learning

Computer mediated technologies (or CMTs) enhance educational processes and are tools that have particular implications for learning and interacting in virtual teams. To better understand how educational tools may be implemented to enhance student learning in virtual teams, the author addresses Wartofsky’s (1979) explication of tools as cultural artifacts. Distinctions about primary, secondary, and tertiary tools provide a framework to analyze implementations of educational CMT research. Implications of these tools on virtual team’s cognitive skills and collaborative learning are explored. Tertiary tools are explored in particular, as they may provide virtual teams with shared interaction space and alternative representations of the social world. The author provides examples of CMT implementation and suggestions for technological and pedagogical advancements.

The Resemblance of Twins with Regard to Perseveration

1935 ◽  
Vol 81 (334) ◽  
pp. 489-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella Pratt Yule
Keyword(s):  
Social Behaviour ◽  
Monozygotic Twins ◽  
Direct Methods ◽  
Genetic Constitution ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
Standard Of Comparison ◽  
Uterine Environment ◽  
The One

The social behaviour which is the material of psychological observation at any given time is the product of a certain genetic constitution on the one hand, and of a complex process of social, educational, familial and, to some extent, uterine environment on the other. The social behaviour of human beings cannot be subjected to direct methods of genetic analysis. The genetic psychologist may be compared to the astronomer, in so far as he has to rely on Nature to perform the experiments which he himself is unable to undertake. To the category of such experiments belongs the phenomenon of twin production. In the production of monozygotic twins Nature provides us with individuals of the same genetic constitution. Such differences as they exhibit arise uniquely from the operation of differences in the environment in which they are placed. In ordinary circumstances they share many more features of environment than any other two individuals selected at random from the population. When reared together, the extent of their dissimilarity can only throw light on such differences of nurture as may operate on members of the same family unit and of the same age. If they are reared apart, the measure of resemblance exhibited by monozygotic twins may throw light on the influence of social environment in a less restricted sense. With a sufficiently large sample of twins reared apart, a satisfactory standard of comparison for assessing the extent of resemblance due to genetic constitution, plus the effects of a common uterine environment, would be provided by the degree of resemblance existing between their foster sibs in families into which they have been adopted. Such data cannot be collected easily. As yet they do not exist in sufficient quantity to yield satisfactory conclusions.

The Police

2021 ◽  
pp. 466-487
Author(s):  
Simon Holdaway
Keyword(s):  
Social World ◽  
Participatory Methods ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Academic Knowledge ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
What Works ◽  
The Social ◽  
Police Policy ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

This chapter interrogates the contemporary dominance of a “What Works” approach in studies of the police. It examines and finds wanting the methodological and theoretical foundations of this orientation. Instead, it argues that researchers should begin with an understanding of human beings, adopting research methods resonating with their conclusion. Ethnography is based on the meanings human beings attribute to the social world; it is concerned with a systematic, detailed description and analysis of the police and policing. After this introduction, major ethnographic studies of the police are discussed, and their main findings analyzed. Studies conducted beyond Anglo-American societies are covered. Each study reveals a key feature of policing that would not have been identified if ethnographic, participatory methods had not been used. The consequences of each finding for policing and for academic knowledge are discussed briefly, and somewhat ironically, key implications for police policy are considered.

Human dignity as a structural feature of functional differentiation – a precondition for modern responsibilization

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gesa Lindemann
Keyword(s):  
Structural Feature ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Functional Differentiation ◽  
Social World ◽  
Sociological Analysis ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Philosophical Discussion ◽  
New Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Open Question

AbstractThis article offers a new sociological understanding of human dignity as a structural feature of modern functionally differentiated society. Durkheim and Luhmann build their analyses of dignity on the notion that functional differentiation and individualization are interconnected. At the same time, both assume implicitly that only living human beings can be bearers of dignity. The philosophical discussion around dignity does not take this for granted, however. Fichte responded to Kant's analysis of dignity by treating as an open question who can be identified as a bearer of dignity and by what criterion. If it is to take this seriously, sociological analysis must combine the theory of functional differentiation with an analysis of the borders of the social world. This paper follows this insight by presenting a new approach to human dignity that provides a systematic sociological answer to the question of how the borders of the social world are connected with the structure of social differentiation. In conclusion, I explore the implications for the concept of responsibility: how can bearers of human dignity be held responsible in a functionally differentiated society?

scholarly journals Collective intentionality or documentality?

2015 ◽  
Vol 41 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 423-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Ferraris
Keyword(s):  
Exponential Growth ◽  
Social World ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Technological Developments

In this article I defend two theses. The first is that the centrality of recording in the social world is manifested through the production of documents, a phenomenon which has been present since the earliest phases of society and which has undergone an exponential growth through the technological developments of the last decades (computers, tablets, smartphones). The second is that the centrality of documents leads to a view of normativity according to which human beings are primarily passive receptors of rules manifested through documents. We are not intentional producers of values. The latter, as I shall suggest in my conclusion, should be viewed as being ‘socially dependent’ rather than ‘socially constructed’.

Folk Psychology and the Biological Basis of Intersubjectivity

2005 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 18-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Ratcliffe
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Folk Psychology ◽  
Social World ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
Intentional States ◽  
The Social ◽  
Interpersonal Understanding

Recent philosophical discussions of intersubjectivity generally start by stating or assuming that our ability to understand and interact with others is enabled by a ‘folk psychology’ or ‘theory of mind’. Folk psychology is characterized as the ability to attribute intentional states, such as beliefs and desires, to others, in order to predict and explain their behaviour. Many authors claim that this ability is not merely one amongst many constituents of interpersonal understanding but an underlying core that enables social life. For example, Churchland states that folk psychology ‘embodies our baseline understanding’ of others (1996, p. 3). Currie and Sterelny similarly assert that ‘our basic grip on the social world depends on our being able to see our fellows as motivated by beliefs and desires we sometimes share and sometimes do not’ (2000, p. 143). And, as Frith and Happé put it, ‘this ability appears to be a prerequisite for normal social interaction: in everyday life we make sense of each other’s behaviour by appeal to a belief-desire psychology’ (1999, p. 2).

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