scholarly journals The representational theory of mind and common sense psychology

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (esp) ◽  
pp. 71-86
Author(s):  
Raquel Krempel
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Representational Theory Of Mind ◽  
Common Sense Psychology

“The Teacher Who had the Greatest Influence on My Thinking”

2008 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 141-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Reisenzein ◽  
Irina Mchitarjan
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Responsibility Attribution ◽  
Alexius Meinong ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
Psychological Inquiry ◽  
Academic Teacher ◽  
Common Sense Psychology

According to Heider, some of his ideas about common-sense psychology presented in The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations ( Heider, 1958 ) originally came from his academic teacher, Alexius Meinong. However, Heider makes no reference to Meinong in his book. To clarify Meinong’s influence on Heider, we compare Heider’s explication of common-sense psychology with Meinong’s writings, in particular those on ethics. Our results confirm that Heider’s common-sense psychology is informed by Meinong’s psychological analyses in several respects: Heider adopts aspects of Meinong’s theory of emotion, his theory of value, and his theory of responsibility attribution. In addition, Heider more or less continues Meinong’s method of psychological inquiry. Thus, even without Meinong’s name attached, many aspects of Meinong’s psychology found their way into today’s social psychology via Heider. Unknowingly, some of us have been Meinongians all along.

Mechanical Choices

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
Legal Punishment ◽  
Common Causes ◽  
Moral Blame ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Common Sense Psychology

This book assays how the remarkable discoveries of contemporary neuroscience impact our conception of ourselves and our responsibility for our choices and our actions. Dramatic (and indeed revolutionary) changes in how we think of ourselves as agents and as persons are commonly taken to be the implications of those discoveries of neuroscience. Indeed, the very notions of responsibility and of deserved punishment are thought to be threatened by these discoveries. Such threats are collected into four groupings: (1) the threat from determinism, that neurosciences shows us that all of our choices and actions are caused by events in the brain that precede choice; (2) the threat from epiphenomenalism, that our choices are shown by experiment not to cause the actions that are the objects of such choice but are rather mere epiphenomena, co-effects of common causes in the brain; (3) the threat from reductionist mechanism, that we and everything we value is nothing but a bunch of two-valued switches going off in our brains; and (4) the threat from fallibilism, that we are not masters in our own house because we lack the privileged knowledge of our own minds needed to be such masters. The book seeks to blunt such radical challenges while nonetheless detailing how law, morality, and common-sense psychology can harness the insights of an advancing neuroscience to more accurately assign moral blame and legal punishment to the truly deserving.

Thinking about Things

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Sainsbury
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Semantic Description ◽  
President Obama ◽  
Representational Theory Of Mind

In the blink of an eye, I can redirect my thought from London to Cairo, from cookies to unicorns, from former President Obama to the mythical flying horse, Pegasus. How is this possible? How can we think about things that do not exist, like unicorns and Pegasus? Thinking About Things addresses these and related questions, taking as its framework a representational theory of mind. It explains how mental states are attributed, what their aboutness consists in, whether or not they are relational, and whether any of them involve nonexistent things like unicorns. The explanation centers on display theory, a theory of what is involved in attributing attitudes like thinking, hoping, and wanting. These attributions are intensional: some of them seem to involve nonexistent things, and they typically have semantic and logical peculiarities, like the fact that one cannot always substitute one expression for another that refers to the same thing without affecting truth. Display theory explains away these seeming anomalies. For example, substituting coreferring expressions does not always preserve truth because the correctness of an attribution depends on what concepts it displays, not on what the concepts refer to. And a concept that refers to nothing may be used in an accurate display of what someone is thinking. The book describes how concepts can be learned, originated, and given a systematic semantic description, independently of whether there exist things to which they refer. There being no things we are thinking about does not mean that we are not thinking about things.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Michael S. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Human Brain ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Academic Psychology ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Sense Psychology

This introductory chapter lays out the dramatic challenge neuroscience is taken to issue to our sense of who and what we are and to our responsibility for our choices and for our actions. Neuroscience is seen as the newest of a series of challenges issued to the criminal law, retributivist punishment, moral blameworthiness, and the common-sense psychology all of these presuppose. Backed by a better science of the human brain, neuroscience reissues the challenges to responsibility that have long been issued by academic psychology, be that psychology introspectionist, Freudian, behaviorist, genetic, or whatever.

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