mentalistic

English

Etymology

From mentalist +‎ -ic.

Adjective

mentalistic (comparative more mentalistic, superlative most mentalistic)

  1. (philosophy, psychology) Characterized by appeal to mental states (such as beliefs, desires, intentions, feelings) in describing, explaining, or predicting behaviour or other phenomena; employing or pertaining to vocabulary or predicates about such states (often contrasted with behaviorist or purely physicalist approaches).
    • 1974, B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism‎[1], New York: Alfred A. Knopf, page 15:
      Mentalistic explanations allay curiosity and bring inquiry to a stop.
    • 2021, Daniel D. Hutto, “Folk Psychology as a Theory”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy‎[2]:
      In this respect, our familiar mentalistic vocabulary (viz. our talk of thoughts, feelings, and expectations) would be similar in important respects to other theoretically embedded vocabularies.
    • 2020, Howard Robinson, “Dualism”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy‎[3]:
      Predicate dualism is the theory that psychological or mentalistic predicates are essential for a full description of the world and are not reducible to physicalistic predicates.
    • 2007, Anna Papafragou, Kimberly Cassidy, Lila Gleitman, “When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs”, in Cognition, volume 105, number 1, →DOI, pages 125–165:
      The findings … show that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues.
  2. Of or relating to mentalism or mentalists

Derived terms

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