Mind as quasi-miracle

Adam Toon’s<i> Mind as Metaphor </i>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<i> quasi-miracle</i> 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 <i>would </i>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.<br/><br/>