Ontology After Folk Psychology; or, Why Eliminativists Should Be Mental Fictionalists
Parent T.
March 2026John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Analytic Philosophy
2026#67Issue 11 - 11 pp.
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 contributing anything substantial. The paper then rebuts the objection, illustrating that prefix semantics resolves a lingering problem for eliminativism from Boghossian. The problem is that eliminativists seem unable to adopt realism about neuroscience, for such realism implies that neuroscientific statements represent reality accurately. However, a deflationary version of prefix semantics allows the eliminativist to draw an ontologically relevant distinction (roughly) between truths that have a storytelling prefix and those that do not. (Deflationism means there is no implication that the unprefixed sentences robustly represent reality). The overarching lesson is that eliminativists need to approach ontology carefully so as to avoid self-refutation; however, prefix-semantical mental fictionalism provides the resources for them to do so.
deflationism and disquotationalism about truth , eliminative materialism , fictionalism in metaphysics , ontological commitment , the nature of folk psychology
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Department of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan
Department of History
10 лет помогаем публиковать статьи Международный издатель
Книга Публикация научной статьи Волощук 2026 Book Publication of a scientific article 2026