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Theory theory




   What is folk psychology? Its common knowledge that it is human to understand other people, to attribute motives and feelings to them and to change our own behavior accordingly. In child development is the dawning that other people might not know what we know and may believe something different. Less likely for other animals, except chimps; who are known to keep food hidden if they thought other chimps could see it. This ability is known as a theory of mind or ‘folk psychology’.



    A classic experiment in ‘folk psychology’, an interviewer, an accomplice and a child are in a room, when the interviewer puts a toy in box A. The accomplice leaves the room. The interviewer moves the toy into box B. The child is then asked where the child should tell the accomplice to look for the toy. Where the accomplice last saw it or where the child knows its been moved to?



   Any mental faculty, or way of thinking, may, in an unpredictably different ways, be relevant to the way we understand each other and that’s, probably, the truth.



Encyclopedia of Philosophy