Resumo

ARAUJO, Saulo de Freitas. Cognitive science and the problem of folk psychology. Temas psicol. [online]. 2001, vol.9, n.1, pp. 45-53. ISSN 1413-389X.

The feeling that language can be an obstacle to human knowledge is not new in the history of western thought. As such issue is approached within psychology, the following question arises: is there a language of psychology which would guarantee its own identity among the other sciences? Once this question is formulated, one faces one of the central problems of cognitive science, concerning the place of folk psychology -the ordinary terms usually employed to describe, explain, predict and evaluate people's attitudes and behaviour - in the development of a science of the mind. It is possible to detect three divergent perspectives: Fodor's realism, Churchland's eliminativism and Dennett's instrumentalism. After analysing these different approaches, it is concluded that their discussions are based on a very limited conception of folk psychology and that they make what may be called "an ontological mistake".

Palavras-chave : philosophy of psychology; cognitive science; folk psychology.

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