1 The Architectural Nonchalance of Commonsense Psychology

Eliminativism assumes that commonsense psychology describes and explains the mind in terms of the internal design and operation of the mind. If this assumption is invalidated, so is eliminativism. The same conditional is true of intentional realism. Elsewhere (Bogdan 1991) I have argued against this 'folk-theory-theory ' assumption by showing that commonsense psychology is not an empirical prototheory of the mind but a biosocially motivated practice of coding, utilizing, and sharing information from and about conspecifics. Here, without presupposing a specific analysis of commonsense psychology, I want to challenge a key implication of the 'folk-theory-theory ' assumption to the effect that commonsense psychology is committed to a definite architecture of the mind. It is this architectural commitment that invites the elimination of commonsense psychology by connectionism (Stich 1983, ch. 11; Stich 1988; Ramsey, Stich, Garon 1990) or its vindication by the language of thought or syntax-over symbols view, which I will call syntactic computationalism (Davie