ABSTRACT
The title question (Is “mind” a scientific kind?) invites a consideration of just about every major problem in Philosophy of Science and several in Philosophy of Mind. Needless to say, I do not propose to attempt anything quite so grand. Instead, I will address the somewhat narrower question: how should we conceive the relation between scientific studies of cognition and the folk ontology that depicts minds as loci of beliefs, desires, concepts, prepositional attitudes, etc.? In particular, I shall first consider and reject two extreme options, viz.: (a) That the folk ontology must, on pain of eliminativism, be reconstructible
using only the resources of some scientific study of cognitive processes. (b) That the folk ontology is legitimated by gross behaviour patterns alone and
is conceptually independent of whatever science can tell us about inner states and processes.
