Agata Machcewicz-Grad

Rodriguez’s book offers an intriguing account of self-knowledge and privileged access in terms of how we non-relationally express our minds through behaviour. This paper argues that non-relational expressivism is fundamentally unstable, because it attempts to preserve a privileged, first-person perspective on one’s own mental states while rejecting the epistemic reading of the privileged access thesis. Section 2 explores the problems non-relational expressivism faces in accounting for psychological phenomena such as (in)sincerity and pretence, while Sect. 3 considers Rodriguez’s semantic analysis of expressive and descriptive first-person mental utterances, showing how he cannot avoid giving an account of the truth conditions of first-person self-ascriptions of belief. Section 4 formulates a dilemma for Rodriguez: in order to coherently explain how mental states can be non-relationally expressed, he must either give them an ontological status independent of the behavior that expresses them, or accept that, ultimately, there is nothing besides behavior. Neither option appears attractive for Rodriguez.

In this paper, I discuss a hybrid view of beliefs developed by Tim Crane and Katalin Farkas, which combines a fictionalist treatment of standing beliefs with a realist account of occurrent judgments. The view is promising: on the one hand, it offers a pragmatic solution to the puzzle of non-integrated subjects and, on the other, it provides a realistic account of conscious mental phenomena. However, it faces challenges due to its hybridity. First, I argue that detaching judgment from belief makes it difficult to account for the dynamics of deliberation. I also point out the inconsistency between the hybrid view and our subjective understanding of the nature of conscious judgment. I contend that realism about both occurrent mental acts and standing mental states is a more plausible account of the mind. Secondly, I claim that if one accepts the thesis of privileged access to one’s conscious mind, then one should develop a realist explanation of the puzzle of non-integrated agents, rather than a pragmatic analysis defended by Crane and Farkas. In conclusion, I argue that the hybrid account of standing and occurrent mental phenomena does not provide a plausible alternative to the globally realist and globally pragmatist accounts of belief.

In this paper, I provide a critique of the version of mental fictionalism presented in the recent book by Adam Toon (2023). I contend that Toon’s attempt to reconcile the explanatory power of folk psychology with the denial of its substantial ontological commitments eventually fails. I point out three worries regarding Toon’s position. First, I argue that his claim that folk psychological metaphors are about behaviour – although they are untranslatable into descriptions of behaviour – looks ad hoc. As such, this claim does not protect Toon’s position from the traditional objections to behaviourism. Second, I argue that Hutto’s (2022) objection that fictionalism makes mysterious the success of folk psychology is in force and I show why Toon’s reply to this objection is unsatisfactory. Third, I point out the problems resulting from Toon’s claim that the concepts of folk psychology are internally incoherent.