Víctor Fernández Castro, Miguel Núñez de Prado-Gordillo (2026), Philosophical Psychology (online first, pp. 1–25) — DOI-10.1080/09515089.2026.2638974
Key takeaways
- Affective fictionalism — reading mental-state attributions as normative evaluations rather than factual reports — is argued to meet three demands the neurodiversity paradigm places on any theory of folk psychology.
Seeded from the abstract alone, not a reading. What follows is what the work says about itself.
The paper connects affective fictionalism about folk psychology with the neurodiversity movement, which treats conditions such as autism and ADHD as natural cognitive variation that can be disabling but is not an inner deficit. The authors hold that fictionalism of this kind, on which attributing mental states is an evaluative act rather than a statement of fact, handles three desiderata that neurodiversity imposes: it recognizes diverse cognitive styles, it allows that practices of attribution can change socially, and it helps reduce the contributory and epistemic injustices neurodivergent people face. Looking at disagreements and resistance within neurodiversity activism, they conclude that the view captures both the evaluative character of mental ascription and its role in shaping social dynamics. The “(or not)” in the title suggests the defence is qualified, which only the full text could confirm.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 0 seconds of active reading over 0 sessions. Deferred because nobody has read it closely here yet, not on merit.
Priority for a deeper reading: low — never opened (t = 0), paywalled, and the abstract states the thesis clearly.
What a deeper reading should check:
- A normative, non-factualist account of mental ascription is relevant to how people attribute minds to AI systems. The paper itself is about neurodivergent humans.
- Check what “(or not)” concedes: whether the authors end up endorsing affective fictionalism or only its compatibility with neurodiversity.
- Check how it relates to Toon’s and Drayson’s mental-fictionalism debate (see LIT-112).
Access when seeded: tandfonline.com blocked (Cloudflare). Authors, date (2026-03-03) and pagination from Crossref and the first author’s publications page; abstract from OpenAlex. Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar list no open copy, and the author’s site gives no preprint, so no full text was read. Keywords are mine, drawn from the abstract.