2025/08/26 by Michael D. Kirchhoff · 2 voices
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · #Philosophy and History of Science #Philosophy, History, and Historiography #Cognitive Science and Education Research
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/09515089.2025.2552422
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.