A brickhouse defence for folk psychology

Abstract

Eliminativists about folk psychology hold that it presents a mistaken picture of what causes human behaviour – they regard its principles to be false, and its ontology empty. Even more to the point, given what we already know and are likely to discover, they argue that folk psychology has no place in serious explanations of human action and behaviour. This paper aims to identify the scariest form of eliminativist threat and to show that there is a way not only to protect against it but, ultimately, defeat it. The action unfolds as follows. Section 1 provides an analysis of various eliminativist threats and identifies the scariest and most threatening version, dubbing it Big Bad Wolf Eliminativism. The rest of the paper then reviews three options that the friends of folk psychology have of potentially defusing the threat posed by Big Bad Wolf Eliminativism. The first, explicated and examined in Section 2, proves woefully inadequate. The second, explicated and examined in Section 3, also proves inadequate. But the third, explicated and examined in Section 4, proves to be both secure and capable of not only protecting folk psychology but also of giving the means to defeat its opponent.