scholarly journals Folk Psychology Revisited: The Methodological Problem and the Autonomy of Psychology

2017 ◽  
pp. 22-54
Author(s):  
Daniel F. Hartner

'Folk psychology' is a term that refers to the way that ordinary people think and talk about minds. But over roughly the last four decades the term has come to be used in rather different ways by philosophers and psychologists engaged in technical projects in analytic philosophy of mind and empirical psychology, many of which are only indirectly related to the question of how ordinary people actually think about minds. The result is a sometimes puzzling body of academic literature, cobbled together loosely under that single heading, that contains a number of terminological inconsistencies, the clarification of which seems to reveal conceptual problems. This paper is an attempt to approach folk psychology more directly, to clarify the phenomenon of interest, and to examine the methods used to investigate it. Having identified some conceptual problems in the literature, I argue that those problems have occluded a particular methodological confound involved in the study of folk psychology, one associated with psychological language, that may well be intractable. Rather than attempt to solve that methodological problem, then, I suggest that we use the opportunity to rethink the relationship between folk psychology and its scientific counterpart. A careful look at the study of folk psychology may prove surprisingly helpful for clarifying the nature of psychological science and addressing the contentious question of its status as a potentially autonomous special science.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wesley Buckwalter ◽  
David Rose ◽  
John Turri

We distinguish between two categories of belief—thin belief and thick belief—and provide evidence that they approximate genuinely distinct categories within folk psychology. We use the distinction to make informative predictions about how laypeople view the relationship between knowledge and belief. More specifically, we show that if the distinction is genuine, then we can make sense of otherwise extremely puzzling recent experimental findings on the entailment thesis (i.e. the widely held philosophical thesis that knowledge entails belief). We also suggest that the distinction can be applied to debates in the philosophy of mind and metaethics.


Leonardo ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Davis

This article presents a reflection on a body of creative work carried out during four years of Ph.D. research that explored the relationship between complexity theory and music. The article highlights conceptual problems that arose during the creation of the work, especially those associated with the exploration of scientific models for the creation of art. The author does not attempt to offer any final solutions but rather presents the journey undertaken through the combined artistic and research practice as a way of documenting the strategies he developed during this period of creative practice.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147490412110146
Author(s):  
Ellen Boeren

This paper borrows insights from the literature on European welfare regimes to analyse the relationship between happiness and participation in adult education. The academic literature and policy discourses on adult education tend to claim that participation in learning is correlated with happiness despite the lack of strong European comparative empirical evidence on this topic. This paper uses data from the latest Wave of the European Social Survey to analyse the happiness perceptions of nearly 20,000 adults between the ages of 25 and 64 who live in 16 European countries (15 European Union countries and the United Kingdom). Results indicate that while adult learners on average tend to be happier than non-learners, this correlation weakens when controlling for determinants of participation and happiness and for the countries in which these adults live. Confirming the importance of welfare regimes, this study found that adults in Finland tend to be happier than those in other countries, regardless of their participation in adult education. Happiness scores were lowest in Bulgaria and Hungary, countries with low participation rates in adult education and with the biggest differences in happiness scores between learners and non-learners. It is argued that the presence of well-structured adult learning provision might be an important characteristic of welfare regimes but that happiness is determined by much more than being an adult learner.


1989 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ned Landsman

The most persistent difficulty confronting historical interpreters of popular religion in the early modern world is that of establishing the relationship between ideas enunciated by religious leaders and those held by their hearers. The causes of that uncertainty are obvious; where historical materials for the former are plentiful, sources that address the latter are far more difficult to obtain. The great majority of evidence that we have concerning lay religiosity derives from clerical rather than lay sources, and most of it tells us more about religious behavior than belief. Even those rare accounts we have that purport to narrate the spiritual experiences of ordinary people tend to be both unrepresentative and stylized, to the point where the ultimate implications of such materials for understanding popular belief often are far from certain.Problems of documentation lead to equally significant but less often noted distortions in perspective. Where they have lacked adequate source materials for recovering the mental world of the laity, historians almost by necessity have had to approach their task as one of ascertaining the portion and proportion of the expressions of the ministry that lay men and women adopted. Thus deviations from clerical orthodoxy can only be understood as indicative either of a lack of intellectual sophistication on the part of the laity, or, at best, of a latent “folk” worldview that remains almost inaccessible to historical description. Yet there is ample documentation in the historical record that the laity possessed a rather remarkable capacity to integrate seemingly disparate beliefs and actively forge their own understandings of the delivered message and create their own religious symbols.


1995 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 551-564
Author(s):  
Dawn Oliver

First, I want to express my gratitude and sense of honour in being invited to deliver the Lionel Cohen lecture for 1995. The relationship between the Israeli and the British legal systems is a close and mutually beneficial one, and we in Britain in particular owe large debts to the legal community in Israel. This is especially the case in my field, public law, where distinguished academics have enriched our academic literature, notably Justice Zamir, whose work on the declaratory judgment has been so influential. Israeli courts, too, have made major contributions to the development of the common law generally and judicial review very notably.In this lecture I want to discuss the process of constitutional reform in the United Kingdom, and to explore some of the difficulties that lie in the way of reform. Some quite radical reforms to our system of government — the introduction of executive agencies in the British civil service, for instance—have been introduced without resort to legislation. There has been a spate of reform to local government and the National Health Service.


Mental fragmentation is the thesis that the mind is fragmented, or compartmentalized. Roughly, this means that an agent’s overall belief state is divided into several sub-states—fragments. These fragments need not make for a consistent and deductively closed belief system. The thesis of mental fragmentation became popular through the work of philosophers like Christopher Cherniak, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker in the 1980s. Recently, it has attracted great attention again. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the topic of mental fragmentation. It features important new contributions by leading experts in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Opening with an accessible Introduction providing a systematic overview of the current debate, the fourteen essays cover a wide range of issues: foundational issues and motivations for fragmentation, the rationality or irrationality of fragmentation, fragmentation’s role in language, the relationship between fragmentation and mental files, and the implications of fragmentation for the analysis of implicit attitudes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (87) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Sidorenko ◽  
◽  
Natalia Grisenko ◽  

The article is devoted to the study of such an important psychological phenomenon as an attitude of women to their own motherhood. It is summarizes the study of the problem of motherhood in psychological science in general. The article analyzes the problem of the influence of the relationship with the mother in childhood on the formation of a woman's attitude to her own motherhood in adult age. It is illuminates views of foreign and national researchers on the study of this phenomenon, as well as the essence of different areas of research on this phenomenon. Based on the theoretical analysis of the literature on this topic, the concept of "motherhood", its content and psychological essence is studied. Cultural-historical, biological, physiological and psychological aspects to the study of motherhood are singled out. The main content of scientific views on the formation of the phenomenon of motherhood is generalized. The main factors influencing the development of a woman's maternal sphere and the formation of the attitude to one's own motherhood are analyzed and considered. The content of such basic concepts as "mother's image" and "maternal relations" is revealed. The psychological features of the formation of an adequate image of the mother in the theoretical analysis of the ontogenesis of the maternal sphere are analyzed. The article also reveals the dynamics of motherhood in ontogenesis. The types of maternal relations and their role in the life of a mature woman are determined, as well as the influence of these relations on the formation of a woman's attitude to her own motherhood. The influence of different types of relationships between women and their own mothers on the level of formation of their attitude to personal motherhood has been empirically studied. Two groups of women were studied, one group had a positive relationship with their own mother, and the other had a negative one. In the course of the research the differences between different types of maternal relations and the level of formation of a woman's personal attitude to motherhood are singled out.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (44) ◽  
pp. 22-36
Author(s):  
Busra ERTOGRUL ◽  
Gizem KILICSIZ ◽  
Aysun BOZANTA

Social media platforms have become an inevitable part of our daily lives. Companies that noticed the intense use of social media platforms started to use them as a marketing tool. Even ordinary people have become famous by social media and companies have been sending their products to them to try and advertise. Many people have gained a considerable amount of money in this way and today new jobs are emerged like "Youtuber" and "Instagram Influencer". Therefore, ordinary people realized the power of social media and many people started to strength their digital identity over social media. The question raising in people’s mind is that “What is the difference between the influencers and the ordinary people who have also digital identity over social media?”. This study examined Instagram influencers for five categories namely fashion, makeup, photography, travel, and fitness in Turkey. As an exploratory study, the relationship between the influencers’ average number of posts, the number of likes, the number of views, the number of comments, number of followers, and the number of following were examined. As well as the engagement rates of the followers to the influencers were calculated. In addition, the words they mostly used in the captions of the posts were examined.


2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-210
Author(s):  
Tatjana Ivanovic ◽  
Sonja Ivancevic ◽  
Milica Maricic

Contemporary research on disorders in modern-day work environment marks burnout among employees in different professions as an important disorder with serious consequences. Practice has shown that recruiters are one of the professions frequently facing burnout. The relationship between burnout, work engagement and turnover intention has often been investigated in the literature. However, even though scholars are increasingly interested in these relationships in other professions, there is a growing need for studies evaluating the relationship between the three concepts among human resource (HR) professionals, particularly recruiters. Having this in mind, the aim of this study is to identify, understand and examine the relationship between burnout, engagement and turnover intention of recruiters in Serbia. The data was collected using an online questionnaire within a sample of 100 recruiters in Serbia. Copenhagen Burnout Inventory was used for measuring burnout, UWES-9 for measuring work engagement and TIS-6 for measuring turnover intention. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used for evaluating the relationships between burnout, turnover intention and work engagement. The results of the research showed that work engagement has a negative impact on burnout and that burnout has a positive impact on turnover intention, while the relationship between work engagement and turnover intention was not confirmed. The correlation analysis confirmed all three examined relationships. The results largely support the findings from the literature for other professions confirming that employees who suffer from a high degree of burnout are more likely to have a turnover intention. Finally, the implications of these results and recommendations for organizations and recruiters themselves to prevent and decrease burnout are discussed. The findings of this study can make a contribution to the specific academic literature on burnout among recruiters and initiate further research on this topic of high interest.


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