Ontology After Folk Psychology; or, Why Eliminativists Should Be Mental Fictionalists
Ted Parent
Abstract:Mental fictionalism holds that folk psychology should be regarded as a kind of fiction. The present version gives a Lewisian prefix semantics for mentalistic discourse, where roughly, a mentalistic sentence “p” is true iff “p” is deducible from the folk psychological fiction. An eliminativist version of the view can seem self‐refuting, but this charge is neutralized. Yet a different kind of “self‐effacing” emerges: Mental fictionalism appears to be a mere “parasite” on a future science of cognition without con… Show more
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