MENTAL FICTIONALISM AS AN UNDERMOTIVATED THEORY

Mental fictionalism maintains that: (i) folk psychology is a radically false theory, but (ii) we should nonetheless keep using it, because it is useful, convenient, or otherwise beneficial to do so. We should (or do) treat folk psychology as a useful fiction-false, but valuable. Some argue that mental fictionalism is incoherent: if a mental fictionalist rejects folk psychology then she cannot appeal to fictions in an effort to keep folk psychological discourse around, because fictions presuppose the legitimacy of folk psychology. In this paper, I defend the mental fictionalist against such objections. Whatever disadvantages mental fictionalism may have, it need not suffer from cognitive collapse.

The Monist, 96.4, 2013

Here I explore the prospects for fictionalism about the mental, modeled after fictionalism about possible worlds. Mental fictionalism holds that the mental states posited by folk psychology do not exist, yet that some sentences of folk psychological discourse are true. This is accomplished by construing truths of folk psychology as “truths according to the mentalistic fiction.” After formulating the view, I identify five ways that the view appears self-refuting. Moreover, I argue that this cannot be fixed by semantic ascent or by a kind of primitivism. Even so, I also show that the “self-refutation” charges are subtly question-begging. Nevertheless, the reply reveals that a mental fictionalist ought to be a kind of quietist.

What are mental states? When we talk about people's beliefs or desires, are we talking about what is happening inside their heads? If so, might cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states do not exist? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these longstanding questions about the mind. Its core idea is that mental states are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we are not formulating hypotheses about people's inner machinery. Instead, we simply talk "as if " people had certain inner states, such as beliefs or desires, in order to make sense of their behaviour. This is the first book dedicated to exploring mental fictionalism. Featuring contributions from established authors as well as up-and-coming scholars in this burgeoning field, the book reveals the exciting potential of a fictionalist approach to the mind, as well as the challenges it faces. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on foundational debates in the philosophy of mind, such as the nature of mental states and folk psychology, as well as hot topics in the field, such as embodied cognition and mental representation. Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations is essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and professionals alike.

A special feature of contemporary cognitive science is the prominence of semantic concepts. Cognitive scientists speak of codes, signals, encoding, decoding, computation, representation and information-processing. The orthodox view is to take talk of neuronal signalling and computational processes over mental representations literally—as truth- conditioned descriptions of brain and cognitive activity. Mental fictionalism challenges the orthodox view. Mental fictionalism is, broadly speaking, the view that talk about mental representations is a useful fiction. This means that mental fictionalism treats such discourse in the same way as scientists treat useful idealizations in model-based science. In this paper, I assume, without argument, that discourse about mental representation in cognitive science is fictional. However, it is not a useful fiction because talk of mental representation fails to be genuinely explanatory. It fails to be genuinely explanatory because idealized posits such as mental representation are functionally disanalogous to useful idealizations in other sciences such as biology and physics.

Organon F, 2020

In this paper, we defend the main claims of our earlier paper "Mental Fictionalism as an Undermotivated Theory" (in The Monist) from Gábor Bács's criticism, which appeared in his "Mental fiction-alism and epiphenomenal qualia" (in Dialectica). In our earlier paper, we tried to show that mental fictionalism is an undermotivated theory , so there is no good reason to give up the realist approach to the folk psychological discourse. The core of Bács's criticism consists in that our argumentation rests on an equivocation concerning the folk psychological concepts of conscious experiences. In our present argu-mentation, at first, we shortly recapitulate our earlier argumentation and Bács's main objection to it. After that, we argue against the case of equivocation, claiming that it rests on a highly implausible and unsupported verificationist approach. Lastly, in answering another remark of Bács's, we discuss the possibility of a realist mental fic-tionalism and conclude that it is an incoherent standpoint.

Res Philosophica, 2016

Mental fictionalism maintains that: (1) folk psychology is a false theory, but (2) we should nonetheless keep using it, because it is useful, convenient, or otherwise beneficial to do so. We should (or do) treat folk psychology as a useful fiction-false, but valuable. Yet some argue that mental fictionalism is incoherent: if a mental fictionalist rejects folk psychology then she cannot appeal to fictions in an effort to keep folk psychological discourse around, because fictions presuppose the legitimacy of folk psychology. Call this the Argument from Cognitive Collapse. In this paper, I defend several different mental fictionalist views against cognitive collapse.

forthcoming in Tamas Demeter, Ted Parent, Adam Toon (eds.) Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations (Routledge), 2022

This chapter argues that mental fictionalism can only be a successful account of our ordinary folk-psychological practices if it can in some way preserve its original function, namely its explanatory aspect. A too strong commitment to the explanatory role moves fictionalism unacceptably close to the realist or eliminativist interpretation of folk psychology. To avoid this, fictionalists must degrade or dispense with this explanatory role. This motivation behind the fictionalist movement seems to be rather similar to that of Sellars when he came up with the Myth of Jones, his proto-theory of mental concepts. He was faced with the problem of preserving the explanatory status of mental concepts without turning them into proper theoretical entities. By introducing the Sellarsian proto-theory of concepts related to the mental and outlining its main points, this chapter aims to provide a critique of the two versions of mental fictionalism that are arguably the strongest: Adam Toon's prop-oriented pretence theory and Tamás Demeter's expressive storyism.

Filozofia, 2017

Fictionalism about fictional entities is an antirealist approach. It suggests that statements of literary criticism are to be understood in the same way as are fictional statements. The latter are naturally understood as being uttered in a pretend mode, i.e. not seriously. Fictionalism has it that the same holds for the former. It is sometimes argued that this is unfaithful to our actual linguistic practice with critical statements. My aim is to strengthen this objection by pointing to some unwelcome consequences of the fictionalist position. It seems plausible that our practice with critical statements allows us: a) to supplement their utterances by remarks such as " And I mean it " or " What I have just said is true " ; b) to report on their utterances by using statements such as 'X asserted that C' (where X is a speaker and C is a proposition expressed by a critical statement); c) to ask for arguments that would support the truth of critical statements; d) to agree or disagree with other speakers over the truth of critical statements. If fictionalism were correct, our practice with critical statements would not permit moves of these kinds.

Philosophia, 2019

Critical statements, if true, bear ontological commitments to fictional entities. A well-known version of fictionalism about fictional characters tries to eliminate these ontological commitments by proposing that we understand critical statements as prefixed by a special sentential operator, such as 'according to a fictional realist theory'. The aim of the present paper is to show that fictionalism about fictional characters is underdeveloped as it stands because it can be shown to be systematically inadequate. Because the fictionalist's paraphrases of critical statements suggest that fictional realists affirm the propositions expressed by critical statements, the fictionalist mistakenly attributes to fictional realists an expertise in matters that pertain to literary criticism. Importantly, this problem of misattributed expertise paves the way to other issues that might be much more devastating to the fictionalist project. It can be shown that, because she wrongly attributes expertise to fictional realists, the fictionalist unintentionally portrays fictional realist theories in a way that renders them inconsistent and self-defeating. This undermines fictionalism about fictional characters because it leaves no workable fictional realist account in which to ground a fictionalist explanation. This is why the fictionalist about fictional characters should try to eliminate the problem of misattributed expertise and its related issues. At the end of the paper, I sketch some of the available options in this regard.