Abstract

My focus is the proper understanding of so called "folk psychology" the view we have of ourselves as agents subject to a range of internal, meaningful states . Most theorists within the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences hold that the attribution of such propositional attitudes is a form of theoretical explanation, with beliefs, desires, and the rest its theoretical postulates. I argue that if this is correct, then the only way to secure the attitudes an explanatory role in future psychology and thus to avoid their elimination, is to interpret folk psychology instrumentally. On this analysis, the descriptions of folk psychology are fully meaningful, and pragmatically ineliminable, but do not refer to the actual, internal states causally salient in the behavior of the agent.