Keywords
belief anti-realism
natural kinds
mental causation
folk psychology
Abstract
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxix1.04
Posłajko (2024) suggests viewing beliefs (and possibly other mental attitudes) as holding a unique ontological status: they exist but are not real. This is Posłajko?s belief non-realism. Posłajko also argues that the folk concept of belief is realistic in the sense in question (it is a concept of natural entities), and the conjunction of this claim and belief non-realism yields his belief anti-realism, namely the view that beliefs do not satisfy this folk concept. The purpose of the present paper is to challenge Posłajko?s case for belief non-realism. In part I, I argue that since Posłajko?s argument for the claim that mental kinds are not natural kinds because they fail to ground similarities presupposes that functional similarities cannot fulfil the similarity requirement for naturalness, this argument establishes the claim that beliefs are non-natural and hence non-real in a rather weak sense. In part II, I argue that Posłajko?s claim that beliefs are not causally relevant states, as well as its entailment of the claim that beliefs are non-real, depends upon a terminological choice. In part III, I take issue with Posłajko?s claim that the soundness of the success argument for the existence of beliefs requires, first, that we be successful at prediction and coordination because we use the theory of folk psychology, and second, that folk psychology provide an accurate description of the internal structure of the mind (requirements that are not met). However, I will point out my own reasons for the view that the success argument fails to establish the existence or reality of beliefs qua psychofunctional content-bearing states, and further, that there are no such states, though, in my opinion, predictively and explanatorily successful ascriptions of propositional attitudes do expose aspects of the mind?s architecture, namely its logico-syntactic structures.
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