11.4.3—
Need Mentalistic Discourse Be Scientific to Be Legitimate?

To tell the awful truth, though, I have my doubts about whether there can be a causal-nomological science of the intentional. Apart from all the problems in formulating actual theories with so many hard-to-isolate, mutually dependent variables, I share the Wittgensteinian suspicion that ordinary-language belief ascriptions are not causal explanations; and hence, whatever a computational psychology might do, it would not render whatever ordinary language is doing in such cases scientific, but add a new kind of discourse, perhaps only loosely inspired by the original. I also believe in free will, which seems in tension with a thoroughgoing nomological psychology. There are also other reasons that I find harder to articulate. But none of this makes me doubt the existence or legitimacy of mental states . And this is because I do not think that the considerations that exclude an object from a specifically scientific ontology (i.e., the domain of a science) exclude it from ontology generally. I will discuss some parts of this issue here and others later in the chapter.

First, different kinds of discourse have different purposes, and the conditions for legitimation for a given kind of discourse vary with its purpose. The natural sciences aim at describing and explaining the regularities of nature. The good-making qualities of the natural sciences are thus conditioned by the practical constraints governing what counts as a good enough explanation, the need for truth-conditional evaluation, and the availability of real regularities to be found in nature. Most of our human discourses, however, have different sets of constraints. Many speech acts do not have truth conditions at all, but other kinds of felicity conditions (see Austin 1962; Searle 1969). Indeed some entire language games may lack truth conditions, though of course they have felicity conditions of some kind. For example, if two people play mental chess, saying "King to Queen one" constitutes a move, not an assertion. Now some people would go so far as to think that mental state ascriptions are similarly nonassertoric. And perhaps some mental state ascriptions are not assertions and do not have truth conditions. But I think many of them are assertions and are subject to truth-conditional evaluation.

What I think they might lack is a nomic character. Categories of nonscientific discourses can be legitimate and can pick out real objects even if those categories do not pick out things that are the subjects of natural laws. Dollars can be bills or coins, and there are no physical laws regarding dollars; yet I do not conclude that I am broke.^[4] I suspect that there are no laws regarding Toyotas, but I do not feel trepidation when I look out in the driveway every morning in fear that my car was an illusion. I suspect that there are no natural laws applying only to jigs, but I am not dissuaded from buying recordings of Irish music as a result. There are no physical laws regarding numbers, but that does not excuse me from balancing my check book properly or tallying my taxes. Nor do my doubts about natural laws governing dollars (or Toyotas or jigs) give me reason to accuse my employer (or my car dealer or the Bothy Band) of fraud. In general, the failure of a category to appear in a science does not cause me to doubt the reality of things to which that category is supposed to apply, or to doubt the legitimacy of the category. Indeed, the only cases in which I am inclined to make inferences in anything like this way are those in which an object-kind is introduced by hypothesis within the context of a scientific theory (e.g., phlogiston). I do, of course, doubt the existence of trolls and unicorns. But the reason I doubt them is that there seems to be no reliable evidence of their existence. It is not because there are no theories in which the kind "troll" or

"unicorn" plays a nomic role. If I were inclined to doubt trolls and unicorns on that basis, I would have to doubt dogs and Toyotas as well. In short, what you need to qualify a category for legitimacy in a scientific theory is something far stronger than what you need to qualify it for mere ontological legitimacy. Scientific kinds are reasonably orderly. Ontology is a motley.