Publication Details

Abstract

Folk psychology and its status in the scientific study of mind was a major topic in the philosophy of mind in the 1980s and 90s. However, it has seen a renewal of interests in recent years in the debate on cognitive ontologies in cognitive neuroscience. The goal of the article is to introduce the cognitive ontologies debate and examine how it relates to the older debate concerning the status of folk psychology. First, I will recapitulate the main points of the philosophical debate about the status of folk psychology. Second, I will introduce the debate on cognitive ontologies, analyze its motivations, its aims and give several examples of specific ontology building projects. In the last part, I will evaluate how the debate on cognitive ontologies relates to the question of the status of folk psychology and how it revives the eliminativism challenge. I will also outline the potential consequences of the development of new cognitive ontologies for the status of folk psychology in the scientific study of mind-brain.