Common-sense psychology and science

2015 ◽  
pp. 62-75
Keyword(s):  
Common Sense ◽  
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.

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.

The Discovery of Common-Sense Psychology

2008 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 125-133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rainer Reisenzein ◽  
Udo Rudolph
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Causal Attribution ◽  
Hindsight Bias ◽  
50Th Anniversary ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Organizational Contexts ◽  
Current State ◽  
Common Sense Psychology

This special issue of Social Psychology commemorates the 50th anniversary of Fritz Heider’s 1958 book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. The contributions to the special issue address the history and current state of attribution research, or illustrate contemporary research in the field. The historical articles document that Heider’s analysis of causal attribution and of common-sense psychology was significantly influenced by his academic teachers Alexius Meinong and Ernst Cassirer. We distinguish between the mainstream reception of Heider’s book, which has given rise to an extensive empirical research program, and a minority reception by authors who emphasized aspects of Heider’s thinking not well represented in mainstream psychology. Currently, there are indications of a “back to Heider” movement in social psychology. This new phase of attribution research is inspired by a fresh reading of Heider’s book, and is marked by an interdisciplinary orientation. The articles illustrating current attribution research address both classic and novel topics: the causality implicit in language, the role of causal attribution in hindsight bias, the justification of actions, and the attribution of mistakes in organizational contexts.

RESPONSIBLE CHOICES, DESERT-BASED LEGAL INSTITUTIONS, AND THE CHALLENGES OF CONTEMPORARY NEUROSCIENCE

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 233-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael S. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
The Real ◽  
Brain States ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Sense Psychology

AbstractNeuroscience is commonly thought to challenge the basic way we think of ourselves in ordinary thought, morality, and the law. This paper: (1) describes the legal institutions challenged in this way by neuroscience, including in that description both the political philosophy such institutions enshrine and the common sense psychology they presuppose; (2) describes the three kinds of data produced by contemporary neuroscience that is thought to challenge these commonsense views of ourselves in morals and law; and (3) distinguishes four major and several minor kinds of challenges that that data can reasonably be interpreted to present. The major challenges are: first, the challenge of reductionism, that we are merely machines; second, the challenge of determinism, that we are caused to choose and act as we do by brain states that we do not control; third, the challenge of epiphenomenalism, that our choices do not cause our actions because our brains are the real cause of those actions; and fourth, the challenge of fallibilism, that we do not have direct access to those of our mental states that do cause our actions, nor are we infallible in such knowledge as we do have of them.

Afterthoughts on biases in history perception

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-90
Author(s):  
Maciej Dymkowski
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Cultural Environment ◽  
The West ◽  
Sequence Of Events ◽  
Cultural Sphere ◽  
Common Sense Psychology

Afterthoughts on biases in history perception Contemporary social psychology describes various deformations of processing social information leading to distortions of knowledge about other people. What is more, a person in everyday life refers to lay convictions and ideas common in his/her cultural environment that distort his/her perceptions. Therefore it is difficult to be surprised that authors of narrations in which participants of history are presented use easily available common-sense psychology, deforming images of both the participants of history and their activities, as well as the sequence of events determined by these activities. Which cognitive biases, how often, and in what intensity they will be presented in historical narrations depend on statements of dominating common-sense psychology. The article outlines some biases made by historian-lay psychologists, such as attributional asymmetry or hindsight effects, whose occurrence in their thinking, as formed in the cultural sphere of the West, influences history perception and conducted historical interpretations.

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