Vol. 39 No. 1 (2025)

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notably Fodor’s psychofunctionalism (1987), on the one hand, and eliminativism, which treated belief as a relic of an outdated theory of mind to be replaced by a mature cognitive science free of the propositional attitudes vocabulary, on the other (Churchland, 1981; Stich 1983).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 [...].