ABSTRACT
The debate between the intentional realist and the intentional eliminativist has become all too familiar. On the one hand, the eliminativist argues that folk psychology “suffers explanatory failures on an epic scale… has been stagnant for at least twenty-five centuries, and [has categories which] appear (so far) to be incommensurable with or orthoganal to the categories of the background physical science whose long-term claim to explain human behaviour seems undeniable,” and therefore “must be allowed a serious candidate for outright elimination” (Churchland, 1981, p. 76; reprinted in this volume, p. 49). While on the other, the realist argues that “the predictive adequacy of common sense psychology is beyond rational dispute”; that folk psychology displays the same deductive structure that is characteristic of explanation in real science; that the vocabulary of folk psychological explanation is actually indispensable because “we have no other way of describing our behaviours and their causes if we want our behaviours and their causes to be subsumed by any counterfactual-supporting generalisations that we know about”; and thus that beliefs, desires and the other folk psychological entities will find a secure place in the ontology of a mature cognitive theory of mind (Fodor, 1987, pp. 2-10; reprinted in this volume, pp. 222–229). 1
