Mind and Supermind offers a new perspective on the nature of belief and the structure of the human mind. Keith Frankish argues that the folk-psychological term 'belief' refers to two distinct types of mental state, which have different properties and support different kinds of mental explanation. Building on this claim, he develops a picture of the human mind as a two-level structure, consisting of a basic mind and a supermind, and shows how the resulting account sheds light on a number of puzzling phenomena and helps to vindicate folk psychology. Topics discussed include the function of conscious thought, the cognitive role of natural language, the relation between partial and flat-out belief, the possibility of active belief formation, and the nature of akrasia, self-deception and first-person authority. This book will be valuable for philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists.

Keith Frankish is Lecturer in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, The Open University. He has published in Analysis and Philosophical Psychology and contributed to Language and Thought: Interdisciplinary Themes (eds. Carruthers and Boucher, Cambridge, 1998).

List of figures; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Divisions in folk psychology; 3. Challenges and precedents; 4. The premising machine; 5. Superbelief and the supermind; 6. Propositional modularity; 7. Conceptual modularity; 8. Further applications; Conclusion; References; Author index; Subject index.