Zoe Drayson (2025), Philosophical Psychology, 39(3), 1127–1139 — DOI-10.1080/09515089.2025.2577403
Key takeaways
- Toon’s case for mental fictionalism fails because rejecting the representational theory of mind does not remove internal, intentional, causal truthmakers for folk psychology (non-representational functionalism supplies them), and his positive argument actually commits him to such states.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-117. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Mental fictionalism holds that we should keep engaging in truth-apt talk about the mind while believing that talk lacks truthmakers. Drayson examines the two arguments Adam Toon’s Mind As Metaphor (2023) offers for it. Against the negative argument — that there are no internal states with intentional and causal properties, so folk psychology has no truthmakers — she argues that committing to internal mental states does not commit one to the representational theory of mind. Against the positive argument — that treating the discourse as make-believe best explains the mind–behaviour relation — she argues it undermines fictionalism by ontologically committing Toon to the very mental states he denies.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 10 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-117 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a short, well-aimed critique that locates exactly where the case for mental fictionalism (Toon 2023) depends on equating realism about propositional attitudes with the representational theory of mind; it is a commentary on one book and argues against a motivation, not against fictionalism’s coherence.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-117, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — 10 s dwell, a short critical commentary on one book; the skim captures the argument structure.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-117 is that reading):
- Relevant to debates over whether ML systems “have” beliefs: the functionalist route to realism without internal representations is the move usually made for LLMs too.
- Check the full treatment of premise 3 (the incoherence of internal representations) and whether Drayson accepts it.
- Check whether Toon has replied (the preprint mentions Egan 2025, Curry 2025 and others in the same debate).
Access when seeded: philpapers.org/tandfonline blocked (Cloudflare/403). Identified the work by web search; DOI and online date (2025-10-25), volume/issue/pages from Crossref. Full text read from the author’s preprint PDF linked on her site (sites.google.com/site/zdrayson/papers → Dropbox), 14 pp: abstract, keywords, §§1–4 heads, §2 argument reconstruction, §3 opening, §4 conclusion. Page numbers below are the preprint’s.