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	Eliminative materialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a view in the philosophy of mind that argues for an absolute version of materialism with respect to mental entities and mental vocabulary.
		The term "eliminative materialism" was first introduced by James Cornman in 1968 while describing a version of physicalism endorsed by Rorty.
		Churchland, P.M. Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Eliminative_materialism (2547 words)

	Materialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		In philosophy, materialism is that form of physicalism which holds that the only thing that can truly be said to exist is matter; that fundamentally, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions.
		Materialism is sometimes allied with the methodological principle of reductionism, according to which the objects or phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description -- typically, a more general level than the reduced one.
		Marxism also uses materialism to refer to the scientific world view, It emphasizes a "materialist conception of history", which is not concerned with metaphysics but centers on the empirical world of actual human activity (practice, including labor) and the institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history).
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Materialism (858 words)

	Eliminative Materialism
		Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist.
		Because eliminative materialism is grounded in the claim that common sense psychology is radically false, arguments for eliminativism are generally arguments against the tenability of folk psychology.
		Eliminative materialism entails unsettling consequences not just about our conception of the mind, but also about the nature of morality, action, social and legal conventions, and practically every other aspect of human activity.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/materialism-eliminative (6801 words)

	What is "eliminative materialism"? What difficulties (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Eliminative materialism is a branch of the materialist school of philosophy of mind.
		Materialism is the view that the mind is explainable by the physical functions of the brain, as opposed to dualism, which claims that something more is necessary to encapsulate the mind, and idealism, which rejects the existence of physical matter in favour of mental substance alone.
		Eliminative materialism is in total agreement with most materialist doctrines in the basics of the mechanics of mind workings.
	www.neologism.co.uk /phil/html/materialism.html (1518 words)

	Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - eliminativism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Eliminative materialism appeared to dissolve the problems with establishing identities between mental states and brain states, but it also created a whole set of new problems.
		Searle, in his 1992, dismisses eliminative materialism by pointing out that if the entities posited by folk psychology don't exist because they cannot be reduced smoothly to the entities of science, we must also deny ontological status to split level ranch houses, tennis rackets, golf clubs, etc. (p.47).
		When Paul Churchland wrote "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes" (chapter one of Churchland 1989.), one of the main arguments in that paper was that folk psychology was a likely candidate for elimination because it was different from physics in several crucial ways.
	www.artsci.wustl.edu /~philos/MindDict/eliminativism.html (9937 words)

	Philosophical Materialism
		So materialism has always inferred its theories from the best empirical evidence at hand and has as a result always had its metascientific hypotheses scientifically confirmed, because the basic assumption of valid science has also always been that nature is governed by coherent, discoverable physical laws.
		Examples of this kind of elimination are: the theory of demonic possession being eliminated by the theory of mental disease, the theory of phlogiston being eliminated by the discovery of oxygen as the cause of combustion, or creationism being eliminated by evolution as an explanation of the earth's history.
		Materialism is now the dominant systematic ontology among philosophers and scientists, and there are currently no established alternative ontological views competing with it" (p.
	www.infidels.org /library/modern/richard_vitzthum/materialism.html (5252 words)

	Eliminative Materialism: eliminativism
		This essay assesses eliminative materialism, a material monist theory of mind proposed by Paul and Patricia Churchland in the 1960s.
		As with all materialist theories it supposes that all phenomena are physical (in contrast to substance dualism and idealist monism).
		Another key driver for the development of the theory was the march of progress in philosophy: previous materialist theories had been posited in response to dualism and idealist monism, and eliminative materialism provided a response to the problems of reductive materialist theories.
	www.arrod.co.uk /essays/eliminative-materialism.php (1620 words)

	What Is a Good Materialist?
		Eliminative materialism or 'robust' materialism?" Eliminative materialism is in keeping with the overall philosophy of empiricism.
		If the eliminativist wants to eliminate consciousness as irrelevant and confused, then he or she will have to rely on a normative position that attributes to this individual (the eliminativist him- or herself) an intentionality.
		On the other hand, the "robust" materialist doesn't stay true to strict empiricist materialism, but the intent is that he or she wants to show that everything that we experience is accountable to a physical substance.
	ebbs.english.vt.edu /cgi-bin/hnews/get/cogsci/10.html?frame=response (541 words)

	Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - materialism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		If there is indeed a coherently conceivable distinction between minds and material bodies, we must reject the view that materialism, understood as entailing mind-body identity, is conceptually, or analytically, true—that is, true just in virtue of the meanings of `mind' and `body'.
		Compositional materialism implies that physical (and thus, for the physicalist, psychological) events are not typically identical to their smaller constituent features.
		The complex relation between the material substrate and conscious experience is likely to leave the explanation of this relation nontransparent, as it does in other cases of complex phenomena.
	www.artsci.wustl.edu /~philos/MindDict/materialism.html (2251 words)

	Beyond Eliminative materialism
		The relationship between old scientific theories and new ones is thus seen as essentially the same as that between science and superstition: The old theory is shown to be false by the new one, in the same sense that science falsified existence claims for demons and witches.
		Searle, in his 1992, dismisses eliminative materialism by pointing out that if the entities posited by folk psychology don't exist because they cannot be reduced smoothly to the entities of science, we must also deny ontological status to split level ranch houses, tennis rackets, golf clubs, etc. (p.47){4}.
		This fear of having one's area of study eliminated is, I think, at the heart of most people's objections to Eliminative Materialism.
	www.california.com /~mcmf/beyondem.html (6904 words)

	Eliminative Materialism (
		This form of materialism claims that once we have a fully developed neuroscience or current, common-sense view of the working of our minds (involving hopes, beliefs, desires and so on) will be eliminated, having been found to be false or useless.
		An example of elimination like this occurring in the past is the case of heat and caloric, which was supposed to be a liquid contained between the particles of an object.
		Eliminative Materialism predicts that once we have a fully developed neuroscience our common-sense way of understanding the mind, folk psychology, will be eliminated.
	www.portfolio.mvm.ed.ac.uk /studentwebs/session3/61/elimin.htm (530 words)

	Review of "The Rediscovery of the Mind"
		The first two chapters in Searle's book are a description, and criticism, of materialism in general and of its various forms: behaviourism, type identity theory, token identity theory, functionalism, and eliminative materialism.
		The form of materialism of which this description is most clearly true is the theory known as "eliminative materialism", the theory which explicitly denies the existence of the mind or of mental states such as beliefs, desires, etc.
		In its most sophisticated version, eliminative materialism argues as follows: our commonsense beliefs about the mind constitute a kind of primitive theory, a "folk psychology".
	www.geocities.com /Athens/Delphi/4082/rom.html (4697 words)

	Naturalism and the Philosophy of Mind
		One extreme non-reductive account of the mind eliminates the non-physical aspects of the mind on the grounds that it is explanatorily useless.
		This view is known as eliminative materialism, and it has been defended by eminent philosophers such as Paul Churchland and Richard Rorty.
		Eliminative materialists contend that the non-physical aspects of the mind are unnecessary postulates.
	apologetics.johndepoe.com /naturalism-mind.html (2591 words)

	LM1003 Lecture 21 Handout (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Eliminative materialism = a materialist theory that denies the existence of (‘eliminates’) a certain phenomenon.
		But not all reductions are smooth: an example of a theory being reduced roughly would be the replacement of the old theory of heat (in which heat was thought to be caloric fluid) with the theory in which heat is seen as a form of energy.
		Consequently it may be necessary to eliminate much or all of folk psychology, including beliefs, desires and other propositional attitudes.
	www.st-andrews.ac.uk /~sjp7/LM1003/handout_21.htm (1326 words)

	Book Reviews: Smythies, John (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		As such, the book is a clean refutation of eliminative materialism, strict (or neural) identity theory, functionalism and the fairly traditional understanding of Cartesian dualism which has it that minds exist as distinct from bodies but are not extended in space (141).
		Either way, it is a non-reductive dualism that lends itself to a materialistic world-view without adopting the usual and fashionable forms of materialism that typically gravitate toward eliminative materialism, reductive materialism, neural-identity theories, or functionalism...
		I find it hard to believe that Descartes thought of material substance as more like nothing than something: in that case, his view would amount to the thesis that the non-extensional nature of minds means no more and no less than that this real stuff cannot be measured or accessed in 3D space.
	www.scientificexploration.org /jse/bookreviews/10-2/smythies.html (1640 words)

	Introduction
		Where eliminative materialism parts from competing theories in the philosophy of mind (such as functionalism, about which we will have more to say) is in the sophistication of the material description of conscious phenomena that is hoped to be achieved by a complete neuroscience.
		It is judged that the elimination of semantic and intentional idioms per se would embody attempts to neurobiologically encompass phenomena of such a high level of complexity and which exhibit such a power of scope at social and historical levels independent of actual physical conditions, that problems of practical insolubility will no doubt linger.
		Eliminative materialism is strictly consistent with the claim that the essence of a cognitive system resides in the abstract functional organization of its internal states.
	home.cfl.rr.com /jessehenson/THESISMLS.html (19250 words)

	Eliminative Materialism (from philosophy of mind) -- Encyclopædia Britannica
		For Marx and Engels, materialism meant that the material world, perceptible to the senses, has objective reality independent of mind or spirit.
		It denies the existence of spirits, souls, and gods, and it insists that all activities of mind and emotion are based on physical properties.
		Some schools of materialism allow for the existence of gods, souls, and spirits; but they insist that these, too, are fundamentally...
	www.britannica.com /eb/article-11953 (875 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Token Materialism and Anomalous Monism To be defensible, standard, noneliminative materialism must not prevent us from describing mental states in terms of their distinctively mental characteristics.
		Most discussions of mind-body materialism from Smart to Rorty focus on bodily sensations, such as pains, and perceptual sensations, such as visual sensations of red and auditory sensa- tions of a trumpet.
		Many discussions of mind-body materialism, such as the func- tionalist theories as those put forth by Fodor, Putnam, and Lewis, apply indifferently to both intentional states and sensations.
	web.gc.cuny.edu /cogsci/mmbp-add.htm (3762 words)

	IMNotes5.htm
		Eliminative Materialists think that many of the folk concepts we use to explain actions of others are not scientifically acceptable.
		Eliminative materialists differ from behaviorists in thinking that is it acceptable to use theoretical terms that lack observational definitions.
		Note that Reductive Materialism and Functionalism are alike in many ways, so objections and replies to an objection to the Functionalist position may also apply to Reductive Materialism, and vice versa.
	www.hfac.uh.edu /phil/garson/IMNotes5.htm (3039 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-06)
		Churchland 184L Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.
		196L an argument to the effect that the thesis of eliminative materialism is incoherent...
		the reductio proceeds by pointing out that the statement of eliminative materialism is just a meaningless string of marks or noises, unless that string is the expression of certain belief, and a certain intention to communicate, and a knowledge of the grammar of the language, and so forth.
	grimpeur.tamu.edu /~colin/Phil289/churchland (566 words)

	ontolog2
		Eliminative materialism (Churchland, early Rorty): folk-psychology ways of speaking about minds are old-fashioned and need to be eliminated.
		Critics of eliminative materialism point out, however, that pain does not seem to be limited to particular language games or theories; so eliminative materialism seems to be unable to fulfill its aim of eliminating all mental expressions.
		The world of changing, material objects is merely a fleeting image of Intelligibility or Mentality itself--what Plato calls the realm of the Forms.
	www-phil.tamu.edu /~sdaniel/Notes/mindbrai.html (1342 words)

	Wikinfo \| Materialism
		Materialism expresses the view that the only thing that exists is matter; if anything else, such as mental events, exists, then it is reducible to matter.
		"Materialism" has also frequently been understood to designate an entire scientific, "rationalistic" world view, particularly by religious thinkers opposed to it and also by Marxists.
		Materialism has also developed as a pejorative label for a lifestyle pursuing wealth, money, and objects rather than spiritual or mental development.
	www.wikinfo.org /wiki.php?title=Materialism (308 words)

	SELLARS' EPISTEMOLOGY AND MATERIALISM
		Following the lead of Sellars, Emergent Materialism can be characterized as a Materialism which recognizes, in addition to the physical properties (of inanimate "matter") studied by physics, a hierarchy of "emergent" properties {41} to correspond to the sentient aspects of living organisms.
		Sellars' variety of Emergent Materialism, when applied to the study of human beings, can then be seen as requiring the emergence of physical entities, sensa, to correspond to human sense impressions ("raw feels").
		Materialism must be interpreted as the claim that mentalistic concepts can be defined in terms of physicalistic concepts together with concepts of sense qualities, neither of these latter two types being definable in terms of the other.
	www.ditext.com /chrucky/chru-1.html (4922 words)

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