Journal Article

Folk personality psychology

Westra, Evan

2021

Overview

Character-trait attribution is an important component of everyday social cognition that has until recently received insufficient attention in traditional accounts of folk psychology. In this paper, I consider how the case of character-trait attribution fits into the debate between mindreading-based and broadly ‘pluralistic’ approaches to folk psychology. Contrary to the arguments of some pluralists, I argue that the evidence on trait understanding does not show that it is a distinct, non-mentalistic mode of folk-psychological reasoning, but rather suggests that traits are ordinarily understood as mentalistic dispositions. I also examine several ways in which trait attribution might also serve regulative, ‘mindshaping’ functions by promoting predictable normgoverned behavior, and argue that mindreading plays several important roles in these cases as well. I conclude that an appreciation of the relationship between trait attribution and mindreading is crucial to understanding the role it plays in our folk psychology.

• Publisher: Springer Science + Business Media,Springer Netherlands,Springer Nature B.V
• Subject: Cognition & reasoning / Education / Epistemology / Evidence / FOLK PSYCHOLOGY: PLURALISTIC APPROACHES / Logic / Metaphysics / Multiculturalism & pluralism / Personality / Philosophy / Philosophy of Language / Philosophy of Science / Psychology / Reasoning / Social perception