Animism, Realism and Anti-Realism

Abstract

The contemporary debate about the status of folk-psychology is a continuation and extension of criticisms of introspection offered by philosophers and psychologists earlier in the century. These efforts grew out of the failure of introspectionism to provide a basis for a scientific psychology. Boring (1933) and others advanced the view that far from yielding a pure and incorrigible account of mental states introspection delivers an ‘interpreted’ (theorized) picture.