mentalistic
mentalistic adjective: 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).
Adjective
mentalistic (comparative more mentalistic, superlative most mentalistic)
- 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).
- Mentalistic explanations allay curiosity and bring inquiry to a stop.1974, B. F. Skinner, About Behaviorism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, page 15
- 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.2021, Daniel D. Hutto, “Folk Psychology as a Theory”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Of or relating to mentalism or mentalists.
Examples of mentalistic in a sentence
- 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.2020, Howard Robinson, “Dualism”, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
- The findings … show that syntactic information is a more reliable indicator of mentalistic interpretations than even the most cooperative contextual cues.2007, Anna Papafragou, Kimberly Cassidy, Lila Gleitman, “When we think about thinking: The acquisition of belief verbs”, in Cognition...
Forms of mentalistic
| comparative | more mentalistic |
|---|---|
| superlative | most mentalistic |
Origin of mentalistic
From mentalist + -ic.
Words formed from mentalistic
Questions about mentalistic
- What does mentalistic mean?
- Mentalistic means 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).
- How do you use mentalistic in a sentence?
- 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.
- What part of speech is mentalistic?
- Mentalistic is an adjective.
Words near mentalistic in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: mentalistic (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “mentalistic.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mentalistic. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.