Abstract
DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxix1.01
Recent years have brought a revival of the debate on the ontological status of beliefs. The debate was originally shaped in the 1980s by a controversy between representationism, most notably Fodor’s psychofunctionalism (1987), on the one hand, and eliminativism, which treated belief as a relic of an outdated theory of mind to be replaced by a mature cognitive science free of the propositional attitudes vocabulary, on the other (Churchland, 1981; Stich 1983). Nowadays, hardly anyone is willing to defend this radical form of antirealism about belief, chiefly due to the apparent indispensability of the central concepts of folk psychology both in everyday social cognition and in the sciences of the mind. For this reason, scepticism toward robustly realist views on belief tends to take one of two main forms: either mental fictionalism (Demeter, 2022; Parent, 2013; Toon, 2023), which treats talk about belief as a useful fiction, or superficialism (Curry, 2021; Mölder, 2010; Schwitzgebel, 2026), which accepts belief’s existence but denies its status as a deep, scientifically respectable component of our mental architecture [...].
References
1. Boyd, R. (1991). Realism, Anti-Foundationalism and the Enthusiasm for Natural Kinds. Philosophical Studies, 61(1/2), 127–148.
2. Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78(2), 67–90.
3. Curry, D. S. (2021). How Beliefs Are Like Colors. Synthese, 199(3–4), 7889–7918.
4. Demeter, T. (2022). A Mental Fictionalism Worthy of Its Name. In T. Demeter, T. Parent, A. Toon (Eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations (pp. 186–103). New York; London: Routledge.
5. Dennett, D. C. (1998). Two Contrasts: Folk Craft versus Folk Science and Belief versus Opinion. In D. Dennett (Ed.), Brainchildren (pp. 81–95). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
6. Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. MIT Press.
7. Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., Norenzayan, A. (2010). The Weirdest People in the World? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83.
8. Khalidi, M. A. (2013). Natural Categories and Human Kinds: Classification in the Natural and Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press.
9. Lewis, D. (1983). New Work for a Theory of Universals. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61(4), 343–77.
10. Mölder, B. (2010). Mind Ascribed. An Elaboration and Defence of Interpretivism. John Benjamins.
11. Parent, T. (2013). In the Mental Fiction, Mental Fictionalism is Fictitious. The Monist, 96(4), 605–621.
12. Posłajko, K. (2020). Can Deflationism Save Interpretivism? Philosophia, 48(2), 709–725.
13. Posłajko, K. (2024). Unreal Beliefs: An Anti-Realist Approach in the Metaphysics of Mind. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
14. Russell, B. (1921). The Analysis of Mind. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.
15. Schwitzgebel, S. (2026). “Dispositionalism, Yay! Representationalism, Boo!”. In J. Jong, E. Schwitzgebel (Eds.), The Nature of Belief. Oxford: OUP.
16. Stich, S. P. (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief. MIT Press.
17. Toon, A. (2023). Mind as Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright (c) 2025 Semiotic Studies