11.2—
The "Received View"

There are, of course, many kinds of philosophical theories directed at solving or dis solving this problem: various kinds of dualism, materialism, and idealism, as well as linguistic and social theories that rework the apparently fundamental metaphysical issues into epiphenomena of

language, cognition, or sociality. CTM and many of its favorite adversaries (behaviorism, reductionism, eliminativism) share a grounding in a particular materialist approach to the Cartesian Gap: namely, a normative claim to the effect that particular kinds of connections to physicalistic discourse are necessary conditions for the legitimation of mentalistic discourse . One might call this view normative naturalism . CTM's advocates differ with behaviorists and reductionists on the nature of the needed connections. They differ with eliminativists on the issue of whether the grounding of the mental in the world of nature can in fact be accomplished. However, they generally share the assumption that if push comes to shove between naturalism and intentional realism, it is intentional realism that should be abandoned.^[1]

Now one might well think that, since CTM's original appeal drew in large measure from its ability to address concerns that arose directly out of positivist, behaviorist, and reductionist projects, the perceived need to address those concerns would not long survive the demise of the projects that spawned them. But almost no one believes the verification theory of meaning anymore or embraces a reductionism of the form popular in the 1950s, and even methodological behaviorists are increasingly difficult to find. But concerns about vindicating intentional psychology live on. Indeed, the current orthodoxy in philosophy of mind—the "Received View," if you will—seems to treat as axiomatic the claims (1) that materialism is true, (2) that there are no mentalistic properties that are fundamental (as opposed to derived from more primitive physical properties), (3) that sciences must deal in causal-nomological explanations, (4) that the only legitimate entities are those that appear in the explanatory inventory of some natural science, and hence (5) that, however useful or well-confirmed mentalistic ascriptions and explanations may be, they are nonetheless in the position of needing to be justified on metaphysical grounds. According to the Received View, it is our discourses about the mind (whether scientific or commonsensical) that must answer to a materialist and naturalistic metaphysics and a causal-nomological view of science, and not the other way around. Fodor, for example, writes,

The deepest motivation for intentional irrealism derives . . . from a certain ontological intuition: that there is no place for intentional categories in a physicalistic view of the world; that the intentional can't be naturalized . . . .

. . . It's hard to see . . . how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and the intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their iden-

tity with (or maybe their supervenience on?) properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else. (Fodor 1987: 97, 98)

Thus it becomes an intelligible move in the game to claim such otherwise outrageous things as that mental states are "explanatory posits" of "folk psychology" and might be "eliminated" if this "folk psychology" cannot be made into a rigorous causal-nomological science.