Philosophers, as a general rule, are a conservative lot when it comes to ontology: when trying to describe "what there is in the world," it pays to be a minimalist. There are quite a number of good reasons for this, but perhaps the best is that it becomes very difficult, once new (classes of) entities are posited, to come up with principled reasons for doing so that don't allow you to posit endless new ones.
Put another way, there are principled reasons for saying that the basic particles of physics exist, and maybe atoms and molecules. But something like "living thing" is much harder to encapsulate (What about viruses? Estivating fish? Yeast in suspended animation?) and "mental state" is one of the most notoriously ephemeral targets for delineation in Western philosophy. So if we go on admitting these creatures into our ontological zoo, and we can't draw firm lines to delineate what falls into these classes and what does not, then "I think they exist and this is what I think they are" becomes a very feeble ontological principle. Does it make sense to admit "red sofas" and "propane tankers" into our accepted ontological classes? Surely this is an unappetizing consequence of one's metaphysical practices.
Philosophers have long appreciated this: Occam's razor may be the single most widely known philosophical rule in the Western world. The last century has seen the rule become all but systematized and internalized. W. V. O. Quine, arguably the most influential Anglosphere philosopher of the 20th century, famously announced his ontological preference for "austere desert landscapes," and most of the analytical philosophical world has shared the preference.
But this very conservative ontology has its downside as well, and probably the biggest casualty is common sense. Now, common sense is neither necessary nor sufficient for correspondence with reality: just ask a physicist to talk about relativity and quantum mechanics. (Hey! I can do that!)
Philosophy often gets an undeserved bad rap for its seeming uselessness. Now, as someone with some decent scientific training, I am cheerfully happy to defend philosophy from that charge. On the other hand, as a philosopher, sometimes it's hard to not to be exasperated with our less sensible pronouncements.
What 20th century philosophy did to philosophy of mind shouldn't have happened to a dog. Now, in philosophy's defense, science started it: with Watson and Skinner's (possibly) well-meaning but (horrifically) misguided Behaviorism, the idea that the mind was simply an "ontological danger" - an isolated, inexplicable, and therefore unrespectable part of academic discourse - became entrenched. Thus began the unwarranted exile of the category of mental states from philosophic discussion.
And while philosophy didn't start it, they certainly made it worse. What happened to philosophy was the result of our merely nascent scientific understanding of so many interesting facets of universe, such as psychology, bumping up against sloppy and confused patterns of thought that have been culturally entrenched by millennia of unquestioning acceptance. The last few generations of philosophers, seeing the genuinely difficult problem of understanding the mind resist scientific investigation, were panicked into simply pretending the problem didn't exist and then convinced themselves the problem had been solved.
The bad old days of mid- to late-20th century philosophy of mind saw such annoyingly short-sided and premature pronouncements: the non-existence of mental states (eliminativism); the identity of mental states with specific brain states; the causal irrelevance of beliefs and desires. I can't help but wonder, sometimes, if philosophers were going through a rebellious phase and were simply trying to seem dark and edgy.
So... an overly permissive ontology is a bad idea. But an overly restrictive ontology defies common sense. So what is to be done?
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