Folk psychology

Folk psychology is the everyday framework for explaining and predicting behavior through beliefs, desires, intentions, and related mental states.

Belief: A mental state in which a person takes a proposition to be true. Beliefs explain actions by representing what someone takes the world to be like.
Theory of mind: The capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others. This capacity supports the inferences through which folk explanations operate.
Eliminative materialism: The view that some or all common-sense mental concepts belong to a mistaken framework that mature science may replace. It challenges whether belief and desire explanations describe real mental states.
Folk psychology debate: A philosophical dispute over whether common-sense mental explanations are adequate, reducible, or eliminable. This debate directly tests the status and future of the everyday framework.
Desire: A motivational state in which an agent wants an outcome or object. Desires supply the goals that beliefs and intentions help explain.
False-belief task: A test of whether someone understands that another person can hold a mistaken belief. It measures a core ability to predict behavior from another person's belief.
Identity theory: The theory that mental states are identical to physical states of the brain. It recasts familiar mental-state explanations in terms of physical processes.
Folk psychology and cognitive science: The relationship between everyday mental-state explanations and scientific theories of cognition. Cognitive science asks whether scientific models preserve or replace folk categories.
Intention: A commitment to perform an action or bring about an outcome. Intentions connect an agent’s goals to planned conduct.
Rationality principle: The assumption that agents’ beliefs and desires make their actions intelligible as goal-directed. Everyday explanations often interpret conduct as sensible relative to an agent’s perspective.

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