Philosophy of Psychology

I defend pain eliminativism against three recent challenges for its adequacy as a prediction of and a prescription for the fate of folk psychology in the face of mature neuroscience. While some challenges consist in showing that folk psychology is thriving in coexistence with advanced pain neuroscience, others claim that the term ‘pain’ has its utility for everyday purposes and thus should not be eliminated from commonsense vocabulary. I will show how the success of interventions for the treatment of chronic pain based on neuroscience education of chronic pain sufferers proves pain eliminiativism successful both descriptively and prescriptively.

Studying consciousness in prelinguistic infants presents a challenge. We cannot ask them what they saw, and they cannot understand complex task instructions. This paper offers an optimistic methodology for studying infant consciousness, by drawing on philosophical work concerning natural kinds. I argue that this methodology is scientifically realistic. I also use it to interpret recent neuroscientific results concerning conscious perception in infants.

Conflicting accounts of thought insertion share the assumption of realism: that the subject of thought insertion has a thought that corresponds to the description of her thought insertion episode. I argue against realism on the grounds that we should adopt a fictionalist, anti-realist interpretation of first-person thought insertion discourse. I then offer an anti-realist account of thought insertion, according to which sufferers merely simulate having a thought with certain properties. This alternative forces us to reconsider whether cognitive explanations of schizophrenia symptoms must be intelligible, and provides for a novel view of delusion.

A comprehensive ontology of mind includes some mental phenomena that are neither (a) explanatorily fecund posits in any branch of cognitive science that aims to unveil the mechanistic structure of cognitive systems nor (b) ideal (nor even progressively closer to ideal) posits in any given folk psychological practice. Indeed, one major function of scientific psychology has been (and will be) to introduce just such (normatively sub-optimal but real) mental phenomena into folk psychological taxonomies. The development and public dissemination of IQ testing over the course of the 20th Century is a case in point.