In Dominic Murphy & Michael A. Bishop (eds.),
Stich and His Critics. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 14 (
2009)
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Abstract
Steve Stich used to be an eliminativist. As far as I can tell, he renounced eliminativism
about the time that he moved from the west to the east pole.1 Stich was right to reject
eliminativism, though I am not convinced that he rejected it for the right reasons. Stich
1983 contains a comprehensive attack on representational content, a central feature
of both folk psychology and the Representational Theory of Mind, the leading philosophical
construal of scientific psychology. Stich’s current position on the role of content
in psychological explanation is not entirely clear. One of my aims in this chapter is
simply to invite Stich to clarify his views on representational content; the question that
forms the title of this chapter is therefore addressed directly to Stich. I begin by sketching
his original anti-content argument. I then trace some later developments in his
thinking about content. I argue that content does play an important role in scientific psychology,
for precisely the reasons that Stich identified in his original argument against
content. I conclude with some general remarks on eliminativism.