Mental Fictionalism

Abstract

l. IntroductionSome of our sentences look prima facie fact-stating, but when a closer look is taken they turn out to be otherwise. The sentences 'This table is made of wood' and 'This action is vicious' are grammatically similar, they may seem to be true or false depending on whether the table has the property of being made of wood or the action has some property in virtue of which it is vicious. With the first sentence the case is pretty straightforward: the table either has the relevant physical properties that make the sentence true or not. But the second sentence is more problematic: what properties must an action have in order to be vicious? The moral status of an action does not follow from its descriptive properties. It does not help if I describe the trajectory of the hand that moves the weapon, the physiological background of the movement, or the properties of the matter it is bumped into etc.; this description will not help in telling whether the action is vicious or not.This problem may not only arise in exclusively moral contexts, but in evaluative contexts in general. The questions whether an object is beautiful or whether an action is rational are equally problematic. It is far from obvious which properties make an action vicious or rational, or make an object beautiful. The aesthetic value of an object cannot be straightforwardly derived from its physical properties, and the rationality of an action does not follow from its naturalistic description; it can only be made visible via the attribution of beliefs, desires, and other intentional states. The fit of these ascriptions into the physical description of the world is problematic because the latter does not mention properties or states directed at something else. The matter of which a table is made or the momentum of a lethal weapon are not 'about' anything in the world, as opposed to our beliefs and desires that are purportedly 'about' certain states of affairs, i.e., the former represent the latter somehow.mFictionalist approaches try to render these discourses unproblematic, and promise to give an account of how these discourses work, while solving the problems posed by the properties they postulate. This issue of The Monist focuses exclusively on problems pertaining to the fictionalist interpretations of psychology. In this introductory paper I endeavor to provide a big picture of folk psychology that characterizes a possible form of mental factionalism, certain aspects of which will be strengthened, and others of which will be questioned and undermined in the papers published in this issue. First I will suggest some considerations that may motivate the elaboration of a mental fictionalist position by undermining the commitment to the interpretation of folk psychology as a fact-stating discourse. In the second step, against this background, I take a quick look at how folk psychology might work in alternative ways once deprived of this interpretation. Third, I sketch a way of understanding how folk psychology can fulfill this alternative function, and I draw an analogy with musical expression. Finally I sketch a fictionalist interpretation that suits folk psychology so understood.2. Why Folk Psychology Is Not a Fact-Stating DiscourseWe have good reasons to contemplate the possibility that folk psychology (by which I mean everyday intentional psychology invoking beliefs, desires, emotions, etc.) is not a fact-stating discourse. That is to say, we have good philosophical reasons to argue that folk psychology is not a discoiorse in which we can describe how things are with respect to the putative mental components of the world. We have good reasons to say this despite the prima facie appearance of folk-psychological sentences as descriptive, declarative and bona fide fact-stating. Let me provide some.Rationality. We can rely on psychological concepts in understanding behavior only if we presuppose that the agent is rational. …