What Could Anti - Realism About Ordinary Psychology Possibly Be ?

Descartes observed that you could not lucidly doubt that you exist nor that you are a thinking thing. It would follow that there can be no lucid doubt about the reality of those psychological states and attributes whose possession is distinctive of thinkers, par excellence their being subject to the various kinds of doxastic and conative states involved in goal-directed thought. Thus it seems a short step from the Cogito to a form of realism about ordinary psychology. Yet many leading modern philosophers—for instance, Dennett, Stich, the Churchlands and, above all, Quine—have been united, notwithstanding other differences, in a tendency to scepticism about the reality of (explanation in terms of) intentional states. The connection with the Cogito explains why such scepticism seems like a contradiction of the obvious. It seems to flout the characteristic self-evidence of intentional states—the fact that a subject’s being in such a state is, as it seems, in typical cases effortlessly, non-empirically and noninferentially available to them. Surely each of us does have—really have—beliefs, desires, hopes, intentions, wishes, and so on. Can't we each just tell that we do? Don't we do so all the time?