Folk Psychology Research Articles

Linguocognitive Analysis of the Concept of «Diligence/Laziness» in Kazakh Paremiology

The article examines the paremiological picture of the world based on the concepts of «diligence\\laziness». The concept defines the worldview of a certain people, notifies about the culture of an entire epoch. To define the concept, it is necessary to determine the features of the worldview and their relationship with objects, their activities and descriptions of national consciousness. The purpose of the article under study is to analyze the concepts of «diligence \\ laziness» in the manner of Kazakh proverbs and sayings and to define in them the national-cultural form and the cognitive part. Speaking about national traditions and customs, the thinking of the Kazakh people, proverbs and sayings are of great importance, which summarize folk psychology with only one or two oral words, including the linguistic expression of the human soul – especially inherent in the Kazakh people, the teaching about different life moments.The purpose and idea of the article under study is to study the picture of the world in the concepts of «diligence \\ laziness» on the example of Kazakh proverbs and sayings. Proverbs and sayings of the Kazakh people are included in the national code of culture, and the study of proverbs and sayings of the Kazakh people of the concept of «diligence \\laziness», as well as the definition of the characteristics of the semantic volume, ethno-linguistic conceptual analysis and methods of associative experiment are used. The value of the article under study is to rid society of laziness by discovering the essence of linguistic units that idealize diligence to do work honestly and strengthen the idea of diligence.

Триада «философия культуры — психология — лингвистика»: концепция Бронислава Малиновского в аспекте интердисциплинаризма

<p>A shift in philosophical thinking towards language, signs and their meanings marked an early 20<sup>th</sup> century. It was a contrast to the metaphysical and rationalist thought style of classical philosophy, centred on reason as expressed in Descartes’ «Cogito, ergo sum». Language, like culture, reveals the essence of what is happening; the word is the key to understanding the truth that can unite peoples and destroy civilizations. In 20<sup>th</sup> century, too, culture continued to be studied from various angles, including biological and psychological. Influenced by W. Wundt’s ideas on folk psychology (Völkerpsychologie), B. Malinowski considered it crucial to explore the local language and culture to discover the full meaning of words and expressions. He argued that the true meaning of a word could only be seen by contextualizing it with other words, and offered his own approach to translating. Malinowski’s term «situational context» became a key concept in functional linguistics.</p>

Infants expect friends, but not rivals, to be happy for each other when they succeed.

A friend telling you good news earns them a smile while witnessing a rival win an award may make you wrinkle your nose. Emotions arise not just from people's own circumstances, but also from the experiences of friends and rivals. Across three moderated, online looking time studies, we asked if human infants hold expectations about others' vicarious emotions and if they expect those emotions to be guided by social relationships. Ten- and 11-month-old infants (N=154) expected an observer to be happy rather than sad when the observer watched a friend successfully jump over a wall; infants looked longer at the sad response compared to the happy response. In contrast, infants did not expect the observer to be happy when the friend failed, nor when a different, rival jumper succeeded; infants' looking times to the two emotion responses in these conditions were not reliably different. These results suggest that infants are able to integrate knowledge across social contexts to guide expectations about vicarious emotional responses. Here infants connected an understanding of agents' goals and their outcomes with knowledge of social relationships to infer an emotion response. Biased concern for friends but not adversaries is not just a descriptive feature of human relationships, but an expectation about the social world present from early in development. Further, the successful integration of these information types welcomes the possibility that infants can jointly reason about goals, emotions, and social relationships under an intuitive theory of psychology. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: 11-month-old infants use knowledge of relationships to make inferences about others' vicarious emotions. In Experiment 1 infants expected an observer to respond happily to a friend's success but not their failure. Experiments 2 and 3 varied the relationship between the observer and actor and found that infants' expectation of vicarious happiness is strongest for positive relationships and absent for negative relationships. The results may reflect an intuitive psychology in which infants expect friends to adopt concern for one another's goals and to thus experience one another's successes as rewarding.

Socially intelligent machines that learn from humans and help humans learn.

A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to understand and influence other minds. Humans engage in inferential social learning (ISL)by using commonsense psychology to learn from others and help others learn. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are raising new questions about the feasibility of human-machine interactions that support such powerful modes of social learning. Here, we envision what it means to develop socially intelligent machines that can learn, teach, and communicate in ways that are characteristic of ISL. Rather than machines that simply predict human behaviours or recapitulate superficial aspects of human sociality (e.g. smiling, imitating), we should aim to build machines that can learn from human inputs and generate outputs for humans byproactively considering human values, intentions and beliefs. While such machines can inspire next-generation AI systems that learn more effectively from humans (as learners) and even help humans acquire new knowledge (as teachers), achieving these goals will also require scientific studies of its counterpart: how humans reason about machine minds and behaviours. We close by discussing the need for closer collaborations between the AI/ML and cognitive science communities to advance a science of both natural and artificial intelligence. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Cognitive artificial intelligence'.

Hey Robot, the Mind Is Not Enough to Join the Moral Community! The Effect of Assigning a Mind and a Soul to a Humanoid Robot on Its Moral Status

Current research explored the link between beliefs about the mind, the soul, and the moral status (MS) of humanoid robot (HR). Determining the conditions for the assignment of MS to artificially intelligent agents is important from the point of view of their inclusion in the moral community. The indication of the role of beliefs about the mind and the soul is consistent with the tendency to distinguish these two incorporeal entities observed in folk psychology. In an online study, participants (N = 223), who believed in the existence of the mind and the soul, assessed the MS of the HR Sophia and assigned attributes to it; based on this, two dimensions of the mind perception (MP) were distinguished: Experience and Agency. As expected, we found that the participants attributed the mind more than the soul to the robot, and these projections significantly affected the MS of the robot. Path analysis revealed that the dimensions of MP acted as a mediator in the mind-MS relationship, while the soul-MS relationship was direct. The analysis of the obtained results leads to a more general conclusion that the soul attribution is a diverse and parallel condition to the mind attribution in individuals.

Folk psychology without metaphysics: An expressivist approach

Folk psychology without metaphysics: An expressivist approach

Conspiracy Theory and (or as) Folk Psychology

ABSTRACT One issue within conspiracy theory theory is whether, or to what extent, our central concept – <conspiracy theory> – should map on to the common, lay sense of the term. Some conspiracy theory theorists insist that we use the term as everyday people use it. So, for example, if the term has a pejorative connotation in everyday parlance, then academic work on the concept should reflect that. Other conspiracy theory theorists take a more revisionist approach, arguing instead that while their use of the theoretical concept should bear some relation to its use in natural language, it need not follow it subserviently. I argue that elements of this debate mirror related debates that were prominent in the philosophy of mind in the 1980s over folk psychology and eliminative materialism (debates that continue today, such as within the philosophy of perception and theories over how to individuate the senses). Then, there was a debate over whether the concepts of commonsense psychology, such as <belief> or <desire>, should be treated as theoretical posits, and hence open to significant revision or elimination, or whether they were instead the targets of explanation. I will argue that an eliminativist approach to <conspiracy theory> has significant merit.

CULTURAL LINGUISTICSAND ETHNOLINGUISTICS:THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS, CONCEPTS AND RESEARCH DIRECTIONSIN CONTEMPORARY POLAND AND EASTERN EUROPE

The author reviews contemporary cultural linguistics (as one of the fields of anthropological lin-guistics) in two Slavic regions: Poland and Eastern Europe. The first part of the article discusses the general theoretical foundations of cultural linguistics, as well as the circumstances in which it was established in Poland and Eastern Europe (USSR). In the second part, the author discusses the dis-tinguishing features of both these linguistic traditions. So, he writes that, in Eastern Europe, re-searchers are more interested in linguoculturology, particularly in the description of concepts and the so-called conceptosphere. In Poland, there is a stronger tradition of folk culture research, folk psychology and folk language. For this reason, the methodology of Polish research is based to a greater extent on empirical procedures, such as field research and surveys.

Commonsense psychology in human infants and machines

Human infants are fascinated by other people. They bring to this fascination a constellation of rich and flexible expectations about the intentions motivating people's actions. Here we test 11-month-old infants and state-of-the-art learning-driven neural-network models on the “Baby Intuitions Benchmark (BIB),” a suite of tasks challenging both infants and machines to make high-level predictions about the underlying causes of agents' actions. Infants expected agents' actions to be directed towards objects, not locations, and infants demonstrated default expectations about agents' rationally efficient actions towards goals. The neural-network models failed to capture infants' knowledge. Our work provides a comprehensive framework in which to characterize infants' commonsense psychology and takes the first step in testing whether human knowledge and human-like artificial intelligence can be built from the foundations cognitive and developmental theories postulate.

Making sense of mental health: a qualitative study of student counsellors

ABSTRACT More and more people in the UK have poor mental health. Consequently, there is a growing demand for mental health professionals such as counsellors and psychotherapists. The aim of this study was to explore how trainee counsellors make sense of mental health in general and concepts like disorder, diagnosis and treatment in particular. We employ semi-structured interviews to explore what seven UK-based trainee counsellors thought and felt about mental health and disorders and how this affects their motives and intentions in relation to practice. A four-dimensional “Folk Psychology Model” (pathologising, moralising, medicalising and psychologising) provides a useful framework to illustrate and explain tension, complexity, diversity, contradiction and confusion among trainee counsellors' views. These views reflect more general contested epistemological, and perhaps even ontological beliefs, operating within and between relevant parent disciplines and professions about the mind and mental health.

Little puritans?

I propose that young children may be a useful test case for Fitouchi et al.'s theory that certain seemingly harmless acts are moralized because they are seen as risk factors for future poor cooperation. The theory predicts that prior to the development of certain folk-psychological beliefs about self-control, children should be untroubled by violations of puritanical morality, and that an adult-like folk psychology of self-control should develop in tandem with disapproval of such violations.

Opaque windows in puppet studies: A response to Lillard (2022), Rakoczy (2022), Wellman & Yu (2022), and Yu & Wellman (2022)

In our article (Packer & Moreno-Dulcey, 2022) we pointed out that the use of puppets in Theory of Mind tasks (1) requires young children to pretend, which (2) introduces a confound, and also (3) reflects a failure to distinguish scientific and folk psychology. In their comments Lillard (2022) and Wellman and Yu (2022; Yu & Wellman, 2022) claim that use of puppets requires not pretense but an understanding that they ‘stand-in’ for people, without explaining how this differs from pretense, or how it avoids a confound. Rakoczy (2022) in contrast agrees with us that pretense is required but argues that it uses the same “code” and “concepts” as “the real world.” We recall his earlier appreciation that institutional reality has the logical form of pretense. We suggest that ‘mind’ is a culturally and historically bound institutional fact, and point out that a typical ToM task involves multiple levels of pretense, games, and institutional reality.

TEACHING AND PREACHING IN THE FIRST PRINTED SHORT NOVEL (‘POVEST’) BY NIKOLAI GOGOL (“BISAVRYUK, OR THE EVENING ON THE EVE OF IVAN KUPALA”, 1830)

One of the “key” works of Gogol's heritage is analyzed ― the first prose work that appeared in print, the short novel (‘povest’) “Bisavryuk, or The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” (1830). Gogol’s literary debut in prose is a key work in the sense that it opens the door to understanding the writer’s subsequent work. Based on numerous facts, it is established that since his very first steps in literature, Gogol played the role of a conscious spiritual mentor and preacher. His first prose work (Gogol began as the author of the poems “Italy” and “Gantz Kuchelgarten”) is a sort of literary ekphrasis, which is centered around the theme of spiritual discipline. The short novel (‘povest’) is “theology in images,” and the clergyman, a representative of the common man’s milieu, a rural deacon (church reader, psalm reader), on whose behalf the story is narrated, becomes the author’s alter ego. For the first time, an analytical comparison of two editions of “Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” was undertaken: the original journal version on one side and the subsequent one included in the “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” collection (the first edition of the short novel (‘povest’) was called “Bisavryuk, or Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”; in the second, Gogol dropped the beginning of the title, leaving only the second part, “Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”). The comparison shows that the first edition is more frank in expressing the religious views of the author than the second one. In the second edition, Gogol tempered the excessive edification and categorical nature of the original version. It is emphasized that as early as in this short novel (‘povest’), Gogol separates himself from superstitions and “childish prejudices” inherent in popular consciousness and focuses his talent on exposing those phenomena that have survived in the public, folk life from the pagan era. As a faithful ethnographer, a deep connoisseur of folk psychology and folklore, in the first short novel (‘povest’), contrary to the widespread interpretations of his work in radical criticism, the writer already appears not only as an original writer of everyday life, but also an astute thinker and theologian, like his predecessor, St. Tikhon of Zadonsk. From the first “Little Russian” short novel (‘povest’) one can guess many features of the future creator of “Dead Souls”, “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends”, and “Reflections on the Divine Liturgy”.

On the Newen’s Person Model Theory

Introduction. Strategies for understanding another person, which play an important role in social interactions, are focused on recognizing the mental states of the person who is under consideration. These various strategies require a general theoretical conceptualization. One of attempts of this kind of conceptualization is carried out by A. Neven's person model theory. This theory is a subject of our investigation and the aim of this study is to critically analyze A. Neven's person model theory and demonstrate its advantages and disadvantages in comparison with other approaches.Methodology and sources. A. Neven's approach is compared with three competing approaches: folk psychology theory, A. Goldman's simulation theory, and S. Gallagher's interaction theory. Conceptual analysis shows that these theories face a number of serious difficulties, which are discussed in article.Results and discussion. Based on our analysis, we conclude that none of these three theories can be accepted as universal. At the same time, A. Newen's person model theory suggests a multiple strategy for understanding another person and seeks to incorporate the merits of other theories. Thus, the main advantage of this approach is that it allows us to consider the process of understanding another person not as a predetermined one, but as a variable dynamic process. Conclusion. This approach allows considering as a person not only an adult, but also a collective of people, as well as artificial intelligence, which has a great importance for the further improvement of moral practices. At the same time, the person model theory is not devoid of weaknesses; however, when overcoming them, it is able to present the most complete mechanism for understanding the personality

Visual representations on Nigerian trucks: a semiotic study

Abstract The public transport sector in the urban landscape in Nigeria is a prominent social site for the spatial distribution of automobile graffiti signatures. Transporters have various kinds of symbolic tags on their vehicles that convey different messages which represent their local attitudes, beliefs, religious identities, folk psychology, and safety precautionary measures to recipients (other road users and passers-by). This article, based on two case studies, examines the practice of automobile graffiti on trucks and lorries in Calabar metropolis, Cross River State, south-eastern Nigeria. It investigates the motivations, thematic categories, and subjective semiotic interpretations of these verbal signatures from the perspectives of visual semiotics theory using participant observations, semi-structured interviews, and informal conversations. The study demonstrates that truck drivers/owners use their vehicles as visible artistic platforms in the public space to express their thoughts and sentiments on personal, social, and religious issues affecting the society. The study concludes that these inscriptions and imageries are artistic subcultures that mirror wide ranging value categories and provide outlets for spatial transformation, creative agencies, and social commentaries.

IX—In Defence of Individual Rationality

AbstractCommon-sense (or folk) psychology holds that (generally) we do what we do for the reasons we have. This common-sense approach is embodied in claims like ‘I went to the kitchen because I wanted a drink’ and ‘She took a coat because she thought it might rain and hoped to stay dry’. However, the veracity of these common-sense psychological explanations has been challenged by experimental evidence (primarily from behavioural economics and social psychology) which appears to show that individuals are systematically irrational—that often we do not do what we do because of the reasons we have. Recently, some of the same experimental evidence has also been used to level a somewhat different challenge at the common-sense view, arguing that the overarching aim of reasoning is not to deliver better or more reason-governed decisions for individual reasoners, but to improve group decision making or to protect an individual’s sense of self. This paper explores the range of challenges that experimental work has been taken to raise for the common-sense approach and suggests some potential responses. Overall, I argue that the experimental evidence surveyed should not lead us to a rejection of individual rationality.

Nietzsche's Last Will

Nietzsche's Last Will

Phenomenology of social explanation

The orthodox view of social cognition maintains that mentalizing is an important and pervasive element of our ordinary social interactions. The orthodoxy has come under scrutiny from various sources recently. Critics from the phenomenological tradition argue that phenomenological reflection on our social interactions tells against the orthodox view. Proponents of pluralistic folk psychology argue that our ordinary social interactions extend far beyond mentalizing. Both sorts of critics argue that emphasis in social cognition research ought to be on other elements of our social practices. In this paper, I consider social explanations specifically and argue that social explanations are implicated in many of the social practices highlighted by critics of the orthodox view.

Advocating a Valid Cultural Alltagspsychologie

In the present article, I criticize the narrow-minded definitions of validity as done by mainstream psychology and its quantitative imperative. I argue that validity should be defined in a broader way such as enhancing the transparency of a present scientific inquiry. The consequence of a too narrow-minded focus upon validity is that specific psychological phenomena are bracketed, and its analysis is argued as non-valid or non-scientific. Psychological phenomena such as watching television, going to sleep, and talking to friends—among many others—are part and parcel of human everyday life. For such phenomena, we are not able to control variables or a specific setting. Yet, I argue that this is not necessary as we can unravel those psychological mechanisms within a different scientific lens that I call a cultural Alltagspsychologie (folk psychology) in tradition of Jerome Bruner. This Alltagspsychologie analyzes a person’s individual social relatedness in time that is argued to demonstrate his/her personal culture and accounts for his/her relations with his environment as well as with himself/herself. Analyzing this relatedness is possible by the TEM diagrams that can decipher the development of culture from past to future and show equally potential alterations of exactly that culture. In the end, I argue that such a scientific approach can be also called valid.

Folk Psychological Models and the Metaphysics of Belief. A Reply to Curry

The aim of this paper is to show that Curry’s recent defence of the interpretivist approach to beliefs is unsuccessful. Curry tries to argue that his version of interpretivism, which is based on the model-theoretic approach to folk-psychological attributions, is well-suited to resisting the epistemological argument that is directed at interpretivism. In this paper, I argue that even if Curry’s defence is successful in this case, his theory does not have enough resources to solve the metaphysical problems of interpretivism. In particular, I argue that the model-theoretic version of interpretivism that Curry espouses does not explain the claim that beliefs are constituted by the process of attribution, which is central to the interpretivist project. In the final parts of the paper, I discuss the issue of the relation between interpretivism and other forms of the broadly superficial/deflationary approach to beliefs, especially dispositionalism. I contend that if one wants to adopt a superficial/deflationary approach, it is best not to adopt interpretivism as it is an unnecessarily complex and problematic version of this broad view.