Folk Psychology, Psychological Concepts and the Second Person. Diana I. Pérez UBA/IIF-SADAF-CONICET A week ago I sent to the publisher the final version of a book whose title will be: Feeling, desiring, believing. A philosophical approach to psychological concepts. I cannot explain the content of the entire book (do not worry you´ll be at home at dinner!) but I would like to present some of the ideas I try to defend there (although not exactly in the way I am doing it here). Folk Psychology (FP) is the mean by which we understand, describe, explain and predict the actions of our fellows (and our own) Traditionally, it was supposed to include (a) a set of an attributive, predictive and explicative practices; + (b) a set of psychological concepts used on them. The paradigmatic examples of application of our FP are like the following: Betty believes that it is safest to stop at red traffic signals. Betty desires to be safe, Therefore, Betty will stop at the red traffic signal. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/folkpsych-theory/) For a long time it was conceived in terms like this: Common sense psychology works so well it disappears. …. Someone I don’t know phones me at my office in New York from—as it might be—Arizona. ‘Would you like to lecture here next Tuesday?’ are the words he utters. ‘Yes thank you. I’ll be at your airport on the 3 p.m. flight’ are the words that I reply. That’s all that happens, but it’s more than enough; the rest of the burden of predicting behavior—of bridging the gap between utterances and actions—is routinely taken up by the theory. And the theory works so well that several days later (or weeks later, or months later, or years later; you can vary the example to taste) and several thousand miles away, there I am at the airport and there he is to meet me. Or if I don’t turn up, it’s less likely that the theory failed than that something went wrong with the airline. … The theory from which we get this extraordinary predictive power is just good old common sense belief/desire psychology. (Fodor 1987, pp. 3-4) The ‘80s and ‘90s was the time for the dispute between those who, like Fodor, defended the “Theory-Theory” of FP, against those who, like Gordon, Heal and Goldman defended the “Simulation Theory”. Except for Gordon –whose position is less obvious- all of the participants of this dispute accepted two theses: a. The concepts of belief and desire are the core of FP; and