Demeter, T., Parent, T., & Toon, A. (2022). What is mental fictionalism? In T. Demeter, T. Parent, & A. Toon (Eds.), Mental fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations (pp. 1-24). Routledge.
[Abstract]This chapter introduces several versions of mental fictionalism, along with the main lines of objection and reply. It begins by considering the debate between eliminative materialism (“eliminativism”) versus realism about mental states as conceived in “folk psychology” (i.e., beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.). Mental fictionalism offers a way to transcend the debate by allowing talk of mental states without a commitment to realism. The idea is to treat folk psychology as a “story” and three different elaborations of this are reviewed. First, prefix semantics paraphrases a sentence like ‘Biden believes that Trump lost’ as ‘According to folk psychology, Biden believes that Trump lost’, whereby ontological commitment to belief is avoided. Similarly, pretense theory suggests that we do not assert ‘Biden believes that Trump lost’, but only pretend to assert it. Third, affective theory proposes that such discourse is used in a metaphorical way to understand a person’s affective and dispositional states vis-a-vis the community. The main objections concern whether folk psychology has the features of storytelling, and whether mental fictionalism ends up being self-refuting. The chapter also recaps a less discussed fictionalist view about “qualia” or phenomenal states, and closes by summarizing the papers contained in the volume.
Note:
The "no location" argument is wrongly attributed to Place (1956) and Smart (1959).
[Citing Place (1956)]
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
Section 4. Fictionalism about qualia
* ... some stock examples of qualia: The peculiar salty taste of Vegemite, that specific shade of red experienced when looking at a stoplight, the distinctive smell of fresh-baked blueberry pie, etc.
Such qualitative properties of experience have been quite difficult to account for as part of the natural, scientific order of things. A vivid illustration of this is the "no location" argument from U.T. Place (1956) and Jack Smart (1959) ... The "no location" argument starts by supposing that you are now experiencing a green after image, perhaps as a result of flash photography. Then, one might be inclined to adopt the following premises:
(1) There is a green thing.
(2) The green thing is not located outside the skull.
The second premise seems correct, given that the green patch is a mere after image, not something extended in the external world. However, it also seems true that:
(3) The green thing is not inside the skull.
After all, if surgeons were to open up your skull, they would not find anything green in there. It is now also plausible to add that:
(4) If both (2) and (3) are true, then the green thing is not in physical space.
(5) If the green thing is physical, it is in physical space.
But from (1) to (5), it follows that:
(6) There is a nonphysical green thing.
Thus, the green quale in this case (the green after image) seems to be outside the physical order, which would mean that some kind of mind-body dualism would be true.
Fictionalism about qualia thus would be seem to deserve serious consideration here, and in fact it is underexplored in the existing literature. (The lead paper in Frankish 2017 is an important exception.)