Abstract

Mind as Metaphor develops a new approach to the mind. This approach is called mental fictionalism. It claims that our concept of mind is fundamentally metaphorical: we project the “outer world” of human culture (especially spoken and written language) onto the “inner world” of the mind. This inner world is a useful fiction: it does not exist, and yet talking as if it exists allows us to make sense of people’s behavior. The result is a view that sits somewhere between Cartesianism and behaviorism. If Cartesianism takes the metaphor of the inner world metaphor too seriously, behaviorism fails to take it seriously enough, overlooking the crucial role it plays in our concept of mind.