Mind as quasi-miracle
C. Bourne, Emily Caddick Bourne
April 3, 2026 DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2025.2527860 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that Toon's fictionalist account of the mind, combining fiction and metaphor, is problematic, and proposes an alternative using Lewis's quasi-miracle to explain the suitability of folk-psychological explanations, linking it to the uncanny and offering a route to the hard problem of consciousness. |
Abstract
ABSTRACT Adam Toon’s Mind as Metaphor ends with an epilogue on the ghost in the machine. For Toon, the story of the mind is a ghost story told for good reason. His account of how a disbelieved story can be worth telling attempts to combine appeals to fiction and to metaphor. We start by raising concerns about the cogency of the elements Toon has selected to articulate such a view, which draws on Kendall Walton’s treatment of metaphor as prop-oriented make-believe. We then develop David Lewis’s notion of a quasi-miracle to suggest an alternative which retains the spirit of Toon’s fictionalism, but which better accommodates how agents’ behaviors are recognized as being suited to (untrue) folk-psychological explanations. This reveals something new about why ghost stories are a telling reference point: recognizing agents’ behaviors as things that would be explained by inner representations parallels the aesthetic experience of the uncanny. Our alternative also offers fictionalists a neat way to address an aspect of mind that Toon does not tackle: the hard problem of consciousness.