Psychological Fictionalism, and the Threat of Fictionalist Suicide

Abstract

1. IntroductionEliminativism is an ambiguous term. When applied to entities, like beliefs and desires, (as in materialism) usually denotes the view that the entities widely referred to do not exist. This position-championed most famously by Paul Churchland (1979, 1981) and Patricia Churchland (1986)-is an error theory regarding entities. In this context, the verb eliminate denotes the act of banishing something from our ontology, we realize that there is no place for beliefs and desires in our mature world view. It is not the intention of this paper to assess the truth of eliminativism; despite its being a radical and fairly unpopular view, I will simply assume that there are respectable arguments in its favor. (For defense of the view, beyond the Churchlands, see Rorty [1970]; Stich [1983]; Ramsey et al. [1990]; Taylor [1994],)'In other contexts, by contrast, is a theoretical option one may or may not choose to adopt after one has embraced the error theory. Here, the verb eliminate denotes the act of banishing something from our language, we decide that most uses of the terms belief, desire, etc., should be dropped.Thus one might be a eliminativist twice over: one might decide that there are no such things as beliefs and desires, and then one might decide that most uses of these terms should be jettisoned. Let us call these views ontological eliminativism and eliminativism, respectively. It is so natural to assume that the latter form of should accompany the former that many of the classic statements of eliminative materialism fudge the matter.2 Yet the two can come apart. One can be an eliminativist in the first sense-endorsing an error theory for certain classes of entity-yet resist in the second sense-allowing that talk of these entities should be maintained. This combination of views, which may be called psychological factionalism, will be explored in this paper. I will delineate a number of different kinds of factionalism. My goal is not to advocate any of these theories, though the final section of this paper is devoted to rebutting a charge that may be leveled at factionalism: the threat of fictionalist suicide.As a preliminary, let me explain what I mean by saying that according to linguistic most uses of the offending term should be dropped. Churchlands liken folk psychology to talk of vitalism (Paul Churchland 1981, 71, 89; Patricia Churchland 1981, 100-101)-something about which one should be an error theorist. Yet nobody claims that all appearances of the phrase life must be dropped from our discourse-even sentences like There is no such thing as vitalistic life and Pasteur designed experiments to test whether there is a vitalistic life Rather, the linguistic eliminativist about vitalism argues for the abolition of all utterances that commit the speaker to the existence of vitalistic force. Assertion of these sentences do not carry this commitment. Nor does the mere utterance of the sentence Vitalistic life force exists commit one to the existence of vitalistic force. One might, for example, utter this sentence without assertoric force, if asked to provide an example of a false four-word sentence; or one might say it as a joke, or as a line in a play. As W.V. Quine once put it: The parent who tells the Cinderella story is no more committed to admitting a fairy godmother and a pumpkin coach into his own ontology than to admitting the story as true (Quine 1961, 103). linguistic eliminativist about entities argues for the abolition of all utterances that commit the speaker to the existence of certain entities.Characterizing linguistic in this way does not succeed in distinguishing it from the fictionalist alternative, for the fictionalist about entities also shuns utterances that commit the speaker to the existence of these entities. …