Common sense knowledge held by members of a society or culture, and incorporated, for example, into proverbs. A part of folk wisdom is folk psychology: the method used by non-professionals for explaining, predicting and manipulating other people’s behavior by the use of propositional attitudes (e.g., belief, desire, fear). A number of philosophers and cognitive scientists claim that our everyday or ‘folk’ understanding of mental states constitutes a theory of mind. Opposition to folk psychology is provided by eliminative materialism, sometimes called eliminativism. In its strongest form it holds that beliefs and desires, as well as a variety of other mental states, do not exist. They are constructions, and at worse fictional concepts, such as ‘mental energy’, ‘cognitive resonance’ or any term with ‘transcendental’ in it.
See Cognitive science, Crystallized intelligence, Intelligence, Metaphor, Monism, Theory of child’s mind (ToM)