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Full Idea
Folk psychology is a powerful instrument of prediction, …which associates with each mental state a typical causal role.
Clarification
'Folk psychology' is the way we describe thoughts and motives in ordinary language
Gist of Idea
Folk psychology makes good predictions, by associating mental states with causal roles
Source
David Lewis (Lewis: reduction of mind (on himself) [1994], p.416)
Book Ref
'A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind', ed/tr. Guttenplan,Samuel [Blackwell 1995], p.416
A Reaction
This seems a good account of why we should take folk psychology very seriously, even if it is sometimes wrong (e.g. about people who are mentally ill).
| 3990 | The whole truth supervenes on the physical truth [Lewis] |
| 3989 | I am a reductionist about mind because I am an a priori reductionist about everything [Lewis] |
| 3991 | Where pixels make up a picture, supervenience is reduction [Lewis] |
| 3992 | Folk psychology makes good predictions, by associating mental states with causal roles [Lewis] |
| 3993 | Arguments are nearly always open to challenge, but they help to explain a position rather than force people to believe [Lewis] |
| 3994 | Human pain might be one thing; Martian pain might be something else [Lewis] |
| 3995 | A mind is an organ of representation [Lewis] |
| 3996 | Folk psychology doesn't say that there is a language of thought [Lewis] |
| 3998 | If you don't share an external world with a brain-in-a-vat, then externalism says you don't share any beliefs [Lewis] |
| 3997 | Nothing shows that all content is 'wide', or that wide content has logical priority [Lewis] |
| 3999 | A spontaneous duplicate of you would have your brain states but no experience, so externalism would deny him any beliefs [Lewis] |
| 4000 | Wide content derives from narrow content and relationships with external things [Lewis] |