Inner World as a Useful Fiction: An Interview with Adam Toon

Abstract

Adam Toon is an Associate Professor at the University of Exeter and Director of Egenis, Centre for the Study of Life Sciences. He did his PhD in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
He works in philosophy of science and philosophy of mind, mainly investigating the idea of representations as fictions. Toon is the author of Mind as Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Models as Make-Believe: Imagination, Fiction and Scientific Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is also co-editor (with Tamás Demeter and Ted Parent) of Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations (Routledge, 2022).
Adam Toon gave the Gottlob Frege Lectures in Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Tartu on December 5–7, 2023, under the title “The Story of the Mind: Cartesianism, Behaviourism, and Fictionalism”. The interview took place in Tartu on December 7, 2023.