my mind on books

Narrative and Folk Psychology, ed. by Daniel Hutto (Imprint Academic, 2009) is a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (v.16, no. 6-8, June-August 2009) available in book form.

The journal website has full text of the editor’s introduction, plus abstracts of the articles.

Here is the abstract of the introduction:

Abstract: There has been a long-standing interest in the putative roles that various so-called ‘theory of mind’ abilities might play in enabling us to understand and enjoy narratives. Of late, as our understanding of the complexity and diversity of everyday psychological capacities has become more nuanced and variegated, new possibilities have been articulated: (i) that our capacity for a sophisticated, everyday understanding of actions in terms of reason (our folk psychology) may itself be best characterized as a kind of narrative practice and (ii) that acquiring the capacity for supplying and digesting reasons explanations might (at least normally) depend upon having a special training with narratives. This introductory paper to the volume situates the claims of those who support the narrative approach to folk psychology against the backdrop of some traditional and new thinking about intersubjectivity, social cognition and ‘theory of mind’ abilities. Special emphasis is laid on the different reasons for being interested in these claims about narrative practice and folk psychology in light of various empirical and philosophical agendas.

Editor Daniel D. Hutto is the author of Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons (Bradford Books) (MIT Press, 2008)