CFP: The Monist: Mental Fictionalism

Deadline for Submissions: October 31, 2012 
Advisory Editor: Tamas Demeter, MPIWG, Berlin ([email protected])

Fictionalist accounts of various classes of sentences are increasingly being offered as alternatives to realism about moral and modal talk as well as about science and mathematics. In contrast to non-cognitivists, fictionalists hold that the sentences in the disputed class involve genuine representations, while in contrast to realists they insist that the sentences do not aim at truth. Rather they hold that it is some other virtue which provides the key to their understanding. This issue of The Monist will explore the prospects and problems for such fictionalism about psychological talk. Are there tenable fictionalist, as opposed to realist, renderings of psychological talk? Which particular version of fictionalism corresponds best to folk practice in talking about mental phenomena? And what role should be assigned to folk psychology in human interaction, if we deny that its role is to supply us with true representations of mental states? Is it possible to maintain mental fictionalism without slipping into a global fictionalism which would apply to all sentences? Submissions are welcome that address these and related issues pertaining to the topic of fictionalism in the domain of mind and psychology.