Idealization and mental fictionalism
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Cognitive scientists speak of codes, signals, encoding, decoding, computation, representation, and information-processing. The orthodox view is to take talk of neuronal signaling and computational processes over mental representations literally – as as truth-conditioned descriptions of brain and cognitive activity. Mental fictionalism challenges the orthodox view. Mental fictionalism is, broadly speaking, the view that talk about mental representation is a useful fiction. Many mental fictionalists motivate this view by an analogy with how scientists make use of idealization techniques in model-based sciences such as physics. I assume, without argument, that discourse about mental representation in cognitive science is fictional. However, I argue that it is not a useful fiction because fictional discourse about mental representation fails to be genuinely explanatory. It fails to be genuinely explanatory because idealized posits such as mental representation are functionally disanalogous to useful idealizations in other sciences such as biology and physics.
Source: Philosophical Psychology
Author: Michael D. Kirchhoff
Institution: University of Wollongong
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4413636648