ABSTRACT
Two conceptions of cognitive science have been proposed which promise an affirmative answer [to the question of whether the folk psychological notion of belief was likely to find a comfortable place in cognitive science, viz…], namely, the Strong and the Weak Representational Theories of the Mind. But I have argued in previous work (Stich, 1983) that neither of these views is tenable. To replace them, I have urged the adoption of the Syntactic Theory of the Mind (STM), which construes cognitive mental states as relations to purely formal or syntactic mental sentences. If as I have argued, cognitive science is and should be adhering to the STM paradigm, then it would appear that there is no place for the folk concept of belief in cognitive science. This conclusion follows from three related observations. First, the mental state tokens postulated by cognitive theories in the STM mold need not and often will not admit of any comfortable ascription of content. Second, an STM theory may view mental state tokens to which content can be ascribed as type identical to tokens with quite a different content. Thus, third, it will generally not be possible to correlate the state types postulated by STM theories with any truth condition or content sentence. But it is of the essence of folk psychological belief state types that they have content or truth conditions. Folk psychology individuates beliefs and specifies the causal relations among them in terms of their content. Thus we cannot identify folk psychological belief state types with mental state types as they are conceived in STM theories. The folk psychological property of believing that snow is white cannot be identified with any property recognized by an STM cognitive theory.
