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Eliminative materialism

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Philosophy

   Eliminativists argue that our modern belief in the existence of mental
   phenomena is analogous to our ancient belief in obsolete theories such
   as the geocentric model of the universe.
   Enlarge
   Eliminativists argue that our modern belief in the existence of mental
   phenomena is analogous to our ancient belief in obsolete theories such
   as the geocentric model of the universe.

   Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist
   position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's
   common-sense understanding of the mind (or folk psychology) is false
   and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in
   do not exist. Some eliminativists claim that no neural correlates will
   be found for many everyday psychological concepts, such as belief and
   desire, and that behaviour and experience can only be adequately
   explained on the biological level. Other versions entail the
   non-existence of conscious mental states such as pains and visual
   perceptions.

   Eliminativism about a class of entities is the view that that class of
   entities does not exist. For example, atheism is eliminativist about
   God and other supernaturnatural entities; all forms of materialism are
   eliminativist about the soul; modern chemists are eliminativist about
   phlogiston; and modern physicists are eliminativist about the existence
   of ether. Eliminative materialism is the relatively new (1960s-70s)
   idea that certain classes of mental entities that commonsense takes for
   granted, such as beliefs, desires and the subjective sensation of pain,
   do not exist. The most common versions are eliminativism about
   propositional attitudes, as expressed by Paul and Pat Churchland, and
   eliminativism about qualia (subjective experience), as expressed by
   Daniel Dennett and Georges Rey.

   Various arguments have been put forth both for and against eliminative
   materialism over the last forty years. Most of the arguments in favour
   of the view are based on the assumption that people's commonsense view
   of the mind is actually an implicit theory, to be compared and
   constrasted with other scientific theories as to its explanatory
   success, accuracy and ability to allow us to make correct predictions
   about the future. Eliminativists argue that, based on these and other
   criteria, commonsense "folk" psychology has failed and will eventually
   need to be replaced with explanations derived from the neurosciences.
   These philosophers therefore tend to emphasize the importance of
   neuroscientific research as well as developments in artificial
   intelligence to sustain their thesis.

   Philosophers who argue against eliminativism may take several
   approaches. Some argue that folk psychology is not a theory and should
   not be compared to one. Others argue that folk psychology is, in fact,
   a theory and a very successful, even indispensable, one. Another view
   is that since eliminativism assumes the existence of the beliefs and
   other entities it seeks to "eliminate", it must be self-refuting.

Overview

   Schematic overview: Some sciences can be reduced (blue). Theories that
   are in principle irreducible are eventually eliminated (orange).
   Enlarge
   Schematic overview: Some sciences can be reduced (blue). Theories that
   are in principle irreducible are eventually eliminated (orange).

   Eliminativism maintains that the common-sense understanding of the mind
   is mistaken, and that the neurosciences will one day reveal that the
   mental states that are talked about in every day discourse, using words
   such as intend, believe, desire, and love, do not refer to anything
   real. Because of the inadequacy of natural languages, people mistakenly
   think that they have such beliefs and desires. Some eliminativists,
   such as the early Frank Jackson, claim that consciousness does not
   exist except as an epiphenomenon of brain function; others, such as
   Georges Rey, claim that the concept will eventually be eliminated as
   neuroscience progresses. Consciousness and folk psychology are separate
   issues and it is possible to take an eliminative stance on one but not
   the other. The roots of eliminativism go back to the writings of
   Wilfred Sellars, W.V. Quine, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty. The
   term "eliminative materialism" was first introduced by James Cornman in
   1968 while describing a version of physicalism endorsed by Rorty. The
   later Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an important inspiration for
   eliminativism, particularly with his attack on "private objects" as
   "grammatical fictions".

   Early eliminativists such as Rorty and Feyerabend often confused two
   different notions of the sort of elimination that the term eliminative
   materialism entailed. On the one hand, they claimed, the cognitive
   sciences that will ultimately give us a correct account of the workings
   of the mind will not employ terms that refer to common-sense mental
   states like beliefs and desires; these states will not be part of the
   ontology of a mature cognitive science. But critics immediately
   countered that this view was indistinguishable from the identity theory
   of mind. Quine himself wondered what exactly was so eliminative about
   eliminative materialism after all.

     Is physicalism a repudiation of mental objects after all, or a
     theory of them? Does it repudiate the mental state of pain or anger
     in favour of its physical concomitant, or does it identify the
     mental state with a state of the physical organism (and so a state
     of the physical organism with the mental state)

   On the other hand, the same philosophers also claimed that common-sense
   mental states simply do not exist. But critics pointed out that
   eliminativists could not have it both ways: either mental states exist
   and will ultimately be explained in terms of lower-level
   neurophysiological processes or they do not. Modern eliminativists have
   much more clearly expressed the view that mental phenomena simply do
   not exist and will eventually be eliminated from our thinking about the
   brain in the same way that demons have been eliminated from our
   thinking about mental illness and psychopathology.

   During the late 1960s and early 1970s, eliminativism gained a wide
   variety of adherents because of the influence of scientific
   behaviourism. Proponents of this view, such as B.F. Skinner, often made
   parallels to previous pseudoscientific theories (such as that of the
   the four humours, the phlogiston theory of combustion, and the vital
   force theory of life) that have all been successfully eliminated in
   attempting to establish their thesis about the nature of the mental. In
   these cases, science has not produced more detailed versions or
   reductions of these theories, but rejected them altogether as obsolete.
   Behaviorists argued that folk psychology is already obsolete and should
   be replaced by descriptions of stimulus and response patterns. Such
   views were eventually abandoned. According to Quine and the
   Churchlands, it will take decades before folk psychology is finally
   replaced by real science.

   Eliminativism is not only motivated by philosophical considerations,
   but is also a prediction about what form future scientific theories
   will take. Eliminativist philosophers therefore tend to be very
   concerned with the data coming from the relevant brain and cognitive
   sciences. In addition, because eliminativism is essentially predictive
   in nature, different theorists can, and often do, make different
   predictions about which aspects of folk psychology will be eliminated
   from our folk psychological vocabulary. None of these philosophers are
   eliminativists "tout court".

   Today, the eliminativist view is most closely associated with the
   philosophers Paul and Patricia Churchland, who deny the existence of
   propositional attitudes (a subclass of intentional states), and with
   Daniel Dennett, who is generally considered to be an eliminativist
   about qualia and phenomenal aspects of consciousness. One way to
   summarize the difference between the Churchlands's views and Dennett's
   view is that the Churchlands are eliminativists when it comes to
   propositional attitudes, but reductionists concerning qualia, while
   Dennett is a reductionist with respect to propositional attitudes, and
   an eliminativist concerning qualia.

Arguments for eliminativism

Problems with folk theories

   Eliminativists such as Paul and Patricia Churchland argue that folk
   psychology is a fully developed but non-formalized theory of human
   behavior. It is used to explain and make predictions about human mental
   states and behaviour. This view is often referred to as the
   theory-theory, for it is a theory which theorizes the existence of an
   unacknowledged theory. As a theory in the scientific sense,
   eliminativists maintain, folk psychology needs to be evaluated on the
   basis of its predictive power and explanatory success as a research
   program for the investigation of the mind/brain.

   Such eliminativists have developed different arguments to show that
   folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory and needs to be
   abolished. They argue that folk psychology excludes from its purview or
   has traditionally been mistaken about many important mental phenomena
   that can, and are, being examined and explained by modern
   neurosciences. Some examples are dreaming, consciousness, mental
   disorders, learning processes and memory abilities. Furthermore, they
   argue, folk psychology's development in the last 2,500 years has not
   been very significant and it is therefore a stagnating theory. The
   ancient Greeks already had a folk psychology comparable to ours. But in
   contrast to this lack of development, the neurosciences are a rapidly
   progressing science complex that, in their view, can explain many
   cognitive processes that folk psychology cannot.

   Folk psychology retains characteristics of now obsolete theories or
   legends from the past. Ancient societies tried to explain the physical
   mysteries of nature by ascribing mental conditions to them in such
   statements as "the sea is angry". Gradually, these everyday folk
   psychological explanations were replaced by more efficient scientific
   descriptions. Today, eliminativists argue, there is no reason not to
   accept an effective scientific account of our cognitive abilities. If
   we had such an explanation, then there would be no need for
   folk-psychological explanations of behaviour, and the latter would be
   eliminated the same way as the mythological explanations the ancients
   used.

   Another line of argument is the meta-induction based on what
   eliminativists view as the disastrous historical record of folk
   theories in general. Our ancient pre-scientific "theories" of folk
   biology, folk physics and folk cosmology have all proven to be
   radically wrong. Why shouldn't the same thing happen in the case of
   folk psychology? There seems no logical basis, to the eliminativist,
   for making an exception just because folk psychology has lasted longer
   and is more intuitive or instinctively plausible than the other folk
   theories. Indeed, the eliminativists warn, considerations of intuitive
   plausibility may be precisely the result of the deeply entrenched
   nature in society of folk psychology itself. It may be that our beliefs
   and other such states are as theory-laden as external perceptions and
   hence our intuitions will tend to be biased in favour of them.

Specific problems with folk psychology

   Much of folk psychology involves the attribution of intentional states
   (also known as propositional attitudes). Eliminativists point out that
   these states are generally ascribed syntactic and semantic properties.
   An example of this is the language of thought hypothesis, which
   attributes a discrete, combinatorial syntax and other linguistic
   properties to these mental phenomena. Eliminativists argue that such
   discrete and combinatorial characteristics have no place in the
   neurosciences, which speak of action potentials, spiking frequencies,
   and other effects which are continuous and distributed in nature.
   Hence, the syntactic structures which are assumed by folk psychology
   can have no place in such a structure as the brain. Against this there
   have been two responses: on the one hand, there are philosophers who
   deny that mental states are linguistic in nature and see this as a
   straw man argument; on the other, those who subscribe to something like
   a language of thought assert that the mental states can be multiply
   realized and that functional characterizations are just higher-level
   characterizations of what's happening at the physical level.

   It has also been urged against folk psychology that the intentionality
   of mental states like belief imply that they have semantic qualities.
   Specifically, their meaning is determined by the things that they are
   about in the external world. This makes it difficult to explain how
   they can play the causal roles that they are supposed to in cognitive
   processes.

   In recent years, this latter argument has been fortified by the theory
   of connectionism. Many connectionist models of the brain have been
   developed in which the processes of language learning and other forms
   of representation are highly distributed and parallel. This would tend
   to indicate that there is no need for such discrete and
   semantically-endowed entities as beliefs and desires.

Arguments against eliminativism

Intuitive reservations

   The thesis of eliminativism seems to be so obviously wrong to many
   critics, under the claim that people know immediately and indubitably
   that they have minds, that argumentation seems unnecessary. This sort
   of intuition pumping is nicely illustrated by simply asking what
   happens when one asks oneself honestly if one has mental states.
   Eliminativists object to such a rebuttal of their position by claiming
   that intuitions very often are completely wrong. Analogies from the
   history of science are frequently invoked to buttress this observation:
   It may appear obvious that the sun travels around the earth, for
   example, but for all its apparent obviousness this conception was
   proved wrong nevertheless. Similarly, it may appear obvious that apart
   from neural events there are also mental conditions. Nevertheless, this
   could equally turn out to be false.

   But even if one accepts the susceptibility to error of our intuitions,
   the objection can be reformulated: If the existence of mental
   conditions seems perfectly obvious and is central in our conception of
   the world, then enormously strong arguments are needed in order to
   successfully deny the existence of mental conditions. Those who accept
   this objection say that the arguments in favour of eliminativism are
   far too weak to establish such a radical claim; therefore there is no
   reason to believe in eliminativism.

   Quine's strategy for replying to such "introspective" arguments was to
   show how to account for the activities of introspection and science in
   appropriately sanitized terms, such as the replacement of "belief" by
   "dispositions to utter certain sentences in certain circumstances".
   Sentences, on this view, are just sequences of certain sounds, and
   theories just sets of sentences. Introspective claims may be replaced
   by dispositions to utter certain sentences as a result of physical
   events in one's body.

Self-refutation

   Some philosophers, such as Paul Boghossian, have attempted to show that
   eliminativism is in some sense self-refuting, since the theory itself
   presupposes the existence of mental phenomena. If eliminativism is
   true, then the eliminativist must permit an intentional property like
   truth, supposing that in order to assert something one must believe it.
   Hence, for eliminativism to be asserted as a thesis, the eliminativist
   must believe that it is true; if that is the case, then there are
   beliefs and the eliminativist claim is false.

   Georges Rey and Michael Devitt reply to this objection by invoking
   deflationary semantic theories that avoid analysing predicates like "x
   is true" as expressing a real property. They are construed, instead, as
   logical devices so that asserting that a sentence is true is just a
   quoted way of asserting the sentence itself. To say, "'God exists' is
   true" is just to say, "God exists". This way, Rey and Devitt argue, in
   so far as dispositional replacements of "claims" and deflationary
   accounts of "true" are coherent, eliminativism is not self-refuting.

Qualia

   Another problem for the eliminativist is the consideration that human
   beings undergo subjective experiences and, hence, their conscious
   mental states have qualia. Since qualia are generally regarded as
   characteristics of mental states, their existence does not seem to be
   compatible with eliminativism. Eliminativists, such as Daniel Dennett
   and Georges Rey, respond by rejecting qualia. This is problematic,
   since the existence of qualia also seems perfectly obvious. Many
   philosophers consider the "elimination" of qualia implausible, if not
   even incomprehensible. They assert that, for instance, the existence of
   pain is simply beyond denial.

   The classical refutation of this objection comes from Daniel Dennett.
   Admitting that the existence of qualia seems obvious, Dennett states,
   nevertheless, that "qualia" is a theoretical term from an outdated
   metaphysic stemming from Cartesian intuitions. He argues that a precise
   analysis shows that the term is in the long run empty and full of
   contradictions. The eliminativist's claim with respect to qualia is
   that there is no unbiased evidence for such experiences when regarded
   as something more than propositional attitudes. Influenced by Ludwig
   Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Dennett and Rey have
   defended eliminativism about qualia, even when other portions of the
   mental are accepted.

Efficacy of folk psychology

   Some philosophers simply argue that folk-psychology is a quite
   successful theory. Others doubt that our understanding of the mental
   can be explained in terms of a theory at all. Jerry Fodor is one of the
   objectors that believes in folk psychology's success as a theory,
   because it makes for an effective way of communication in everyday life
   that can be implemented with few words. Such an effectiveness could
   never be achieved with a complex neuroscientific terminology.
   Furthermore, the eliminativist's claim that folk psychology cannot
   explain phenomena such as mental disorders or many memory processes has
   become often the objector's premise, namely that it is not at all the
   task of folk-psychology to account for these phenomena.
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