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.