The Importance of Being Understood: Folk Psychology as Ethics

The Importance of Being Understood is an innovative and thought-provoking exploration of the links between the way we think about each other's mental states and the fundamentally cooperative nature of everyday life.

Adam Morton begins with a consideration of 'folk psychology', the tendency to attribute emotions, desires, beliefs and thoughts to human minds. He takes the view that it is precisely this tendency that enables us to understand, predict and explain the actions of others, which in ...