Psychological Explanation, Ontological Commitment, and the Semantic view of Theories

1 Introduction Naturalistic philosophers of mind must assume some philosophy of science. For naturalism demands that we look to psychology—but to be guided by psychological theories, one must have some story about what theories are and how they work. In this way, philosophy of mind was subtly guided by philosophy of science. For the past forty years, mainstream philosophy of mind has implicitly endorsed the so-called 'received' or 'axiomatic' view of theories. On such a view, theories are sets of sentences formulated in first-order predicate logic, explanations are deductions from the theories, and the ontology of a theory can be read off from the predicates used in explanations. The persistence of the received view in in philosophy of mind is surprising, given that few philosophers of science these days would endorse the it. An alternative, the so-called semantic view of theories, has become far more popular. With it comes a new view about