2026/05/13 by Ross Pain · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Narrative Theory and Analysis #Philosophy and Theoretical Science #Child and Animal Learning Development
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/09515089.2026.2668426
Adam Toon defends a version of mental fictionalism: the view that our everyday talk about inner representations should be treated metaphorically, not literally. I develop a methodological distinction between two approaches to the study of the mind, which I call the philosophy-first view and the science-first view. Philosophy-first theorists are concerned with identifying and resolving philosophical problems, whereas science-first theorists are concerned with the explanation and prediction of empirical data. I argue that Toon’s case for fictionalism is distinctly philosophy-first in character, and hence we are only motivated to accept his fictionalism if we likewise accept the philosophy-first view. Being explicit about these background methodological commitments has an important implication: it helps avoid unnecessary disputes. A science-first theorist may well disagree that we should be fictionalists, but that disagreement is best understood as a second-order, methodological dispute between the relative merits of the philosophy-first view and the science-first view.