A natural history of belief

Contemporary philosophy of mind is dominated by a conception of our propositional attitude concepts as comprising a proto-scientific causal-explanatory theory of behavior. This conception has given rise to a spate of recent worries about the prospects for 'naturalizing' the theory. In this paper I return to the roots of the 'theory-theory' of the attitudes in Wilfrid Sellars's classic 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'. I present an alternative to the theory-theory's account of belief in the form of a parody of Sellars's 'myth of Jones', one that highlights the normative and pragmatic aspects of this concept and, hopefully, enables us to bypass questions about its physical 'realization'.