Eliminating Eliminative Materialism
نویسنده
چکیده
Eliminative materialism is a bold position in philosophy of mind: proponents of it hold that folk psychology is a primitive theory of human behavior, and like most primitive theories, it is, unfortunately, false. The alarming implications of this are that mental states don’t actually exist—humans don’t actually believe anything. In this paper I try to show that several central claims of eliminative materialism (specifically Paul Churchland’s version) are mistaken and, further, that it is, in fact, false. I first argue that folk psychology is not a theory, and that a proper understanding of the nature of basic beliefs, nonbasic beliefs, and theories makes this clear; next, I claim that the eliminative materialist response to the charge of incoherence is inadequate as it misunderstands what mental states are; finally, I offer an argument for the falsity of eliminative materialism on common sense grounds, while undercutting objections to the argument by way of scientific anti-realism.
منابع مشابه
An Empirical Case against Materialism
Empirical arguments for materialism are highly circumstantial—based, as they are, upon inductions from our knowledge of the physical and upon the fact that mental phenomena have physical correlates, causes and effects. However, the qualitative characteristics of first-person conscious experience are empirically distinct from uncontroversially physical phenomena in being—at least on our present ...
متن کامل[Neurocosmetics, transhumanism and eliminative materialism: toward new ways of eugenics].
In this paper I present similarities and connections between Transhumanism and Eliminative Materialism. Concretely, I study the arguments with which in both positions it is defended a merely instrumental idea of human body and, because of that, one infinitely mouldable. First, I show the social relevance of this idea and its projections in phenomena as medicalization of human condition and, esp...
متن کاملThe Flight to Reference , or How Not to Make Progress in the Philosophy of Science
The flight to reference is a widely-used strategy for resolving philosophical issues. The three steps in a flight to reference argument are: (1) offer a substantive account of the reference relation, (2) argue that a particular expression refers (or does not refer), and (3) draw a philosophical conclusion about something other than reference, like truth or ontology. It is our contention that wh...
متن کاملBrain and Consciousness: The Ghost in the Machines
This paper reviews four current theories of brain-consciousness relations—classical Cartesian Dualism, the Identity Theory, Eliminative Materialism, and a new form of Substance Dualism that includes a modifi ed form of the Cartesian theory. This entails a critical examination of our basic concepts of what consciousness is, of the nature of the body image, and the relation of phenomenal space to...
متن کاملThe Illusion of Internal Joy
J. Schmidhuber proposes a "theory of fun & intrinsic motivation & creativity" that he has developed over the last two decades. This theory is precise enough to allow the programming of artificial agents exhibiting the requested behaviors. Schmidhuber's theory relies on an explicit 'internal joy drive' implemented by an 'information compression indicator'. In this paper, we show that this indica...
متن کامل