This book offers arguments against the view that interpersonal understanding involves a 'folk' or 'commonsense' psychology, a view which Ratcliffe suggests is a theoretically motivated abstraction. His alternative account draws on phenomenology, neuroscience and developmental psychology, exploring patterned interactions in shared social situations.

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Reviews

'Rethinking Commonsense Psychology offers the to-date most detailed and sophisticated critique of the wide-spread philosophical dogma according to which humans understand each other by means of 'folk psychology'. Drawing on a number of philosophical traditions as well as recent results in psychology and neuroscience, Ratcliffe not only refutes the dogma, but replaces it with a novel view. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology will be required reading for philosophers of psychology, developmental psychologists and cognitive scientists alike.' - Professor Martin Kusch, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge

'Ratcliffe covers every detail of a thorough repudiation of standard accounts of how we understand other people. Folk psychology is dead and we can forget it since, as Ratcliffe shows, we clearly do not need it for purposes of understanding others or even explaining how we understand others. Ratcliffe has eliminated FP, not in the way that some hard-line reductionists would want it eliminated, but by showing its irrelevancy. The hard-line reductionists no longer need to worry about FP; at the same time, Ratcliffe provides them with much more serious things to worry about, since reductionism is dead too.' - Shaun Gallagher, Chair and Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Florida, editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences

About the author

MATTHEW RATCLIFFE is Reader in Philosophy at Durham University, UK. He is the author of Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (2008) and co-editor of Folk Psychology Re-assessed (2007).

Bibliographic Information

Book Title: Rethinking Commonsense Psychology
Book Subtitle: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation
Authors: Matthew Ratcliffe
Series Title: New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-62529-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy Collection, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2007
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-230-22120-8Published: 11 September 2008
eBook ISBN: 978-0-230-62529-7Published: 07 November 2006
Series ISSN: 2946-2959
Series E-ISSN: 2946-2967
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 271
Topics: Philosophy of Mind, Analytic Philosophy, Cognitive Psychology

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

Front Matter

Back Matter

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