Mind as Metaphor
Adam Toon (University of Exeter)
We often talk about the mind as an inner world. Once, this inner world was taken to be a strange, immaterial substance—a “ghost in the machine”, in Gilbert Ryle’s memorable phrase. Today, we are told it will be found in the brain. I will argue that this is a mistake. In fact, our concept of mind is fundamentally metaphorical: we project the “outer world” of human culture onto the “inner world” of the mind. This inner world is a useful fiction: it does not exist—and yet we cannot avoid talking about it.
Adam Toon is Director of Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He studied at King’s College, Cambridge and the London School of Economics. He works in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind and is also interested in the sociology of scientific knowledge. He is the author of Models as Make-Believe: Imagination, Fiction and Scientific Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Mind as Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism (Oxford University Press, 2023).
For further inquiries: Yuxin Su (yuxin.su.16@ucl.ac.uk).
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