Folk Psychologies Across Cultures
R. Murray Thomas
SAGE Publications, Inc
<p>Without taking a single psychology course, ordinary people learn to understand, predict, and explain one another's actions, thoughts, and motivations. Many cognitive scientists and philosophers claim that our everyday or <i>folk</i> understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind.  That theory is widely called <i>folk psychology</i> (sometimes <i>commonsense psychology</i>). The terms in which folk psychology are couched are familiar ones of "belief" and "desire," "hunger," "pain," and so forth.  According to many theorists, folk psychology plays a central role in our capacity to predict and explain the behavior of ourselves and of others. This book has two goals: (a) to provide a framework for analyzing folk psychologies, and (b) to describe multiple forms that folk psychologies assume in different cultures. </p>