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The contributors to this volume examine recent controversies about the importance of common sense psychology for our understanding of the human mind. Common sense provides a familiar and friendly psychological scheme by which to talk about the mind. Its categories (belief, desire, intention, consciousness, emotion, and so on) tend to portray the mind as quite different from the rest of nature, and thus irreducible to physical matters and its laws. In this volume a variety of positions on common sense psychology from critical to supportive, from exegetical to speculative, are represented. Among the questions posed are: Is common sense psychology an empirical theory, a body of analytic knowledge, a practice or a strategy? If it is a legitimate enterprise can it be naturalized or not? If it is not legitimate can it be eliminated? Is its fate tied to our understanding of consciousness? Should we approach its concepts and generalizations from the standpoint of conceptual analysis or from the philosophy of science?



Table of Contents

1. The folklore of the mind Radu J. Bogdan
2. Analysis without noise Jonathan Bennett
3. Folk psychology and the explanation Paul M. Churchland
4. Methodological reflections on belief Robert Cummins
5. Consciousness and content Colin McGinn
6. The inevitability of folk psychology Adam Morton
7. How is eliminative materialism possible? Alexander Rosenberg
8. The long past and the short history Kathleen V. Wilkes
9. Common sense naturalized: the practical stance Radu J. Bogdan
Index.