The Folk Psychology of Consciousness

This chapter addresses the idea of consciousness as a personal matter, something that cannot be publicly acknowledged. Philosophers are baffled by the fact that human beings tend to ascribe conscious states to other creatures, prompting them to develop various theories in an attempt to explain this phenomenon. John Stuart Mill was among these speculators and his analogical theory is discussed in this chapter, along with Susan Johnson and her colleagues' study of the intrinsic processes of the attribution of a mind to an individual. It also looks at the so-called Agency model; a theory derived from developmental psychology which explains what causes man to think that other creatures possess conscious states.