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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Appropriate attribution of mental states requires tracking real psychological properties, not merely instrumentally useful fictions (Fodor's realist response to Dennett).

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Instrumentalism succeeds across science (thermodynamics, evolutionary fitness); why assume psychology requires fundamentally different ontological standards?
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    • 2.No neuroscientific discovery could confirm 'real' beliefs exist; the realist position may be empirically indistinguishable from instrumentalism.
      ?

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    • 3.Useful fictions enable successful prediction and control of behavior; additional metaphysical claims about reality add no explanatory work.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Mental states cause behavior via specific causal mechanisms; instrumentalism cannot explain why particular physical states reliably produce actions.
      ?

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    • 2.Scientific progress requires identifying real properties (like 'electron'), not mere predictive tools; psychology should aim for equivalent rigor.
      ?

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    • 3.If beliefs and desires are fictional, their causal explanations are vacuous; we'd need real properties doing the actual causal work instead.
      ?

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