Brains and Beliefs

I suggest there are three ways to see the role of folk psychology in a mature cognitive neuroscience. First, integration says that folk psychology plays a decisive role in defining the objects of scientific inquiry and guiding that inquiry. Second, autonomy is the view that folk psychology deals in personal rather than subpersonal explanations and as such has aims that are incompatible with science. Third is eliminativism, which argues that folk psychology will be replaced by a scientific theory of the mind. I argue that the integrationist perspective is an unstable position because folk psychology cannot play the role that integrationists have in mind for it. Any psychology that plays this role must be heavily revised enough to count as a successor theory, and that is a vindication of eliminativism from the point of view of scientific theory-construction.