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Topic: Eliminativism

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	Eliminative materialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		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.
		Proponents of this view often make parallels to previous scientific theories (such as that of the the four humours, the theory of medicine, 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.
		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.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Eliminativism (2525 words)

	Eliminative Materialism: eliminativism
		By responding to reductive materialist theories of the mind, eliminativism can also be said to respond to the problems of dualism, idealist monism, etc although it should be noted that it does this by default as all materialist theories respond to these theories.
		Eliminativism solves this by simply doing away with consciousness - declaring it an error and attempting to consign it to the linguistic dustbin along with other superseded terms.
		This is because eliminativism does not simply explain mental states in terms of physical states, but denies that mental states exist at all and seeks to remove all talk of them from our language.
	www.arrod.co.uk /essays/eliminative-materialism.php (1620 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.
		Yet the sort of eliminativism associated with eliminative materialism -- the sort that denies the existence of specific types of mental states like beliefs -- is a relatively new theory with a very short history.
		Despite the important role these philosophers played in the development of eliminativism, it is far from clear that they all would subscribe to modern formulations of the doctrine.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/materialism-eliminative (6778 words)

	Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind - eliminativism (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		Like its predecessor, the mind-brain identity theory, eliminativism claims that it is an empirical fact, rather than a conceptual necessity, that mental states are identical with brain states, and that this fact is justified only by scientific evidence.
		Most criticisms of eliminativism center around the claim that folk psychology is somehow different in kind from the theories that the eliminativists are advocating as replacements.
		Stich also claims eliminativism is inevitable only if we accept a descriptive or conceptual role semantics, which determines the reference of a term by the place it occupies (or fails to occupy) in a network of concepts.
	www.artsci.wustl.edu /~philos/MindDict/eliminativism.html (9937 words)

	Introduction
		Eliminativism is firmly embedded in the belief that "mind is matter" which, of itself, is not a point of contention in cognitive philosophy.
		Fourthly, and lastly, and by contrast, it is humbly proposed that eliminativism of the 2nd and 3rd degrees is highly implausible.
		Eliminativism strives to show that, at least for the most part, mental phenomena such as consciousness are illusory projections on the physical processes of brains.
	home.cfl.rr.com /jessehenson/THESISMLS.html (19250 words)

	Eliminativism
		I think it is fair to say that "eliminativism" is philosophical jargon, really just short-hand for saying something like, "the natural tendency for people to strategically decide to stop trying to defend and explain a previously held but now defunct idea or belief".
		If the term "eliminativism" is to be used by scientists, it must become attached to a replicating meme within the culture of science.
		But I also think that in coining the technical term "eliminativism", philosophers have identified and named a key component of the memosphere, a component that is so well embedded in our human way of life, that most people have a hard time even being aware of it.
	geocities.com /ResearchTriangle/System/8870/books/eliminativism.html (4224 words)

	Untitled Document
		Eliminativism like Functionalism in that it doubts that there will be one-to- one identities between mental and physical types.
		Eliminativism unlike all other theories in that it denies that there are any mental states to be reduced.
		Much of the argument for eliminativism is based on the assumption that psychological terms are theoretical.
	www.yorku.ca /hjackman/Teaching/2160/eliminativism.html (618 words)

	Objectivist metaphysics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Though this doctrine may entail the rejection of eliminativism, Objectivism does not offer any particular metaphysical or scientific explanation of the relationship between mind and body in the philosophy of mind.
		However, Harry Binswanger, a prominent Objectivist philosopher, argues in his lecture course, "The Metaphysics of Consciousness," in favor of substance dualism.
		He rejects not only eliminativism and materialism, but even the property dualism of David Chalmers and the emergentism of John Searle.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Objectivist_metaphysics (1015 words)

	[No title]
		Eliminativism is pragmatically incoherent, as it implies that language isn't meaningful and that the thesis isn't formulable.
		If connectionism is true, then eliminativism is true, as you can't isolate the causal role of individual beliefs in a connectionist system.
		Eliminativism may have no determinate truth-conditions, as if folk psychology is a poor theory, the question of whether or not "belief" refers may be empty.
	www.cogsci.indiana.edu /pub/chalmers.bib.2 (7519 words)

	Does metaphysics need a theory of content?
		At its starkest, it seems that eliminativism becomes a trivial issue in the sense that it is impossible to see why we should care one way or the other about it.
		At one time Stich was prepared to accept this consequence, at least to the extent of defending it in the spirit of a challenge to fellow philosophers to show where the argument to triviality went wrong.
		Stich then argues there is no way to provide the missing premise: on the one hand, no existing theory of reference does the job; on the other hand, considerations drawn from the foundations of the theory reference suggest it is unlikely that any theory will do the job.
	homepages.ed.ac.uk /hprice/23march3.html (1746 words)

	Oxford Scholarship Online: Deconstructing the Mind
		Abstract: Eliminativism (or eliminative materialism) has been an important and provocative view in the philosophy of mind since the 1970s.
		Eliminativism claims that the mental states alluded to in our ordinary talk about the mind – particularly intentional states like beliefs, desires, and thoughts – are the posits of a badly mistaken “folk” theory, and thus, like phlogiston, witches and other posits of badly mistaken theories, they do not exist.
		Though many writers rely on the theory of reference to fill the gap between premises and conclusion, it is argued that appeals to the theory of reference cannot do the ontological work required by the eliminativist argument.
	www.oxfordscholarship.com /oso/public/content/philosophy/0195126661/toc.html (304 words)

	Mental Help Net (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		Unfortunately neither the nature of this eliminativism nor its grounds are particularly perspicuous.
		Eliminativism about Xs is normally taken to be the claim that there are no Xs, but Hardcastle seems to think that there are pains.
		I was unconvinced by Hardcastle's arguments for eliminativism about pain-talk, nor did I have a clear grasp of what exactly it amounts to.
	mentalhelp.net /poc/view_doc.php?id=348&type=book&cn=77 (1536 words)

	SNCC.html
		In the background, however, is Paul Churchland's more general and dramatic version of Eliminativism, according to which virtually all of mind as traditionally conceived is either being shown not to exist, or is being radically reconceived, by the advance of Connectionism and cognitive neuroscience (Churchland 1988).
		Connectionism can therefor be taken as implying, not Eliminativism, but rather that the Mind as Cognition doctrine itself is mistaken, a position which is philosophically attractive for a variety of other reasons.
		Computational Functionalism and Eliminativism are the contemporary representatives of two of the basic strategies for accounting for the status of manifest entities in light of the scientific image.
	www.eou.edu /~jjohnson/Connectionism.htm (6603 words)

	Foucault and Folk Psychology
		Before I look explicitly at this relation with respect to folk psychology and eliminativism, consider the case of the relation between the quantum-relativistic and classical physical theories, and their relations, in turn, to our socio-political institutional practices.
		The prosecutor is at first thrown off balance, but then retorts that even quantum physicists concede, in the main, that the traditional ontology of guns, people, etc. is still approximately captured by the aggregate activity of quantum particles, on average, anyway, so the charges should stand.
		Suppose that eliminativism becomes the dominant theoretical position in psychology at some point in the relatively near future.
	www.yorku.ca /christo/papers/foucfolk.htm (2082 words)

	"Deconstructing the Mind" (Chapter 1) by Stephen Stich
		In its strongest form, what eliminativism claims is that beliefs, desires and many of the other mental states that we allude to in predicting, explaining and describing each other do not exist.
		But, of course, in the context of arguments for and against eliminativism, the boundary is of enormous significance, since if we accept Lewis's account, it is the boundary that separates those false theories whose theoretical posits exist from those whose posits do not exist.
		So Lycan and other opponents of eliminativism can't simply assume that some version of the causal-historical theory of reference is correct, and thus that terms like `belief' and `desire' refer no matter how wrong we ultimately discover folk psychology to be.
	www.nyu.edu /gsas/dept/philo/courses/consciousness97/papers/stich.html (20390 words)

	On the Temporal Boundaries of Experience
		At bottom I think it must be admitted that the entire affair is extraordinarily confusing, and so it would seem most prudent to remain open to the possibility that eliminativism is true, along with the possibility that we might come to understand more clearly how it could be true.
		Finally, if eliminativism is true, the mere power of the illusion alone, I think, should suffice for our treating seriously the possibility that we may be incapable of escaping it or fully understanding its nature.
		Fortunately, however, as was mentioned at the start of this section, if eliminativism is true and CC is generating the illusion that consciousness exists, the methodology needs no defense, since studying CC would seem to be the only possible way of making progress.
	research.haifa.ac.il /~antony/papers/Methodology.htm (6334 words)

	KIRK.HPR
		He asserts that "the choices we face concerning the mind-body problem are rather stark: there are three – antiphysicalist dualism, reductionism, and eliminativism".
		Kim's last move in his attempt to force physicalists to choose between eliminativism and reductionism is a general argument dealing in relations between physical and mental causes.
		Given mental realism, given that some mental events cause physical events `in virtue of' their mental properties, and given that every physical event has a physical cause ("the causal closure of the physical domain"), there is a question about the relation between mental properties and physical ones.
	www.institutnicod.org /Reduction/KIRK_HPR.htm (5708 words)

	A PARTICULARLY COMPELLING
		Eliminativism in regard to those is materialism plus the claim that no creature has ever had a belief, desire, intention, hope, wish or the like.
		Moore would not deny that arguments for Eliminativism contain premises that are endorsed, perhaps simply established, by science.
		I pause to deal with a trenchant objection offered by Ann Wilbur MacKenzie, who reminded me that according to one school of linguistic theory, lexical semantics is an empirical science--in particular, it is claimed, there can be purely empirical evidence for propositions to the effect that a predicate F1 analytically implies another predicate F2.
	www.unc.edu /~ujanel/ElimWeb.htm (3120 words)

	3255H5
		Eliminativism regarding propositional attitudes is the outrageous thesis that there have never been any: No one has ever believed anything or desired anything or hoped or feared anything, etc., period.
		First, that mental concepts are explanatory concepts; their job is to figure as they do in explanations and predictions of people’s behavior.
		Churchland believes we know right now that folk psychology is a terrible theory, and he thinks it’s also pretty clear that cognitive psychology and neuroscience will soon be a better one.
	www.unc.edu /~ujanel/3255H5.htm (906 words)

	Psyche 9(03): 'Eliminativism, First-Person Knowledge and Phenomenal Intentionality' by Charles Siewert
		But in that case, I do not even make the judgments that were our most recent candidates for the data to be explained by the postulation of consciousness.
		In that case, eliminativism winds up doing away with the data to be explained as well as the "posits" to explain them.
		I ask that one take care not to confuse my claims about thought with certain others, however much they might be suggested by famous philosophers of the past.
	psyche.cs.monash.edu.au /v9/psyche-9-03-siewert.html (5561 words)

	Occam\'s Razor (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		Dale Jacquette (1994) claims that Occam's Razor is the rationale behind eliminativism and reductionism in the philosophy of mind.
		Eliminativism is the thesis that the ontology of folk psychology including such Entities as "pain", "joy", "desire", "fear", etc., are eliminable in favor of an ontology of a completed neuroscience.
		In the philosophy of religion Occam's Razor is sometimes used to challenge arguments for the existence of God.
	occams-razor.iqnaut.net (3985 words)

	MATERIALISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
		The hardest is eliminativism, according to which there are no 'raw feels', no intentionality and, in general, no mental states: the mind and all its furniture are part of an outdated science that we now see to be false.
		Next is reductionism, which seeks to give an account of our experience and of intentionality in terms which are acceptable to a physical science: this means, in practice, analysing the mind in terms of its role in producing behaviour.
		The problem for eliminativism is that we find it difficult to credit that any belief that we think and feel is a theoretical speculation.
	members.aol.com /NeoNoetics/MATERIALISM_MIND.html (3173 words)

	PHL471: Churchland's elminativism
		Note: eliminativism regarding folk psychology is consistent with some forms of functionalism.
		Objection: Churchland is asking us to believe in eliminativism about, among other things, belief.
		Reply: this begs the question, by assuming that grasping a theory is belief as posited by folk psychology.
	www.oswego.edu /~delancey/471_DIR/471_LECTURES/11_rep3.html (584 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-31)
		what makes certain kinds of connectionist models genuinely revolutionary is the support they lend to a thorough-going eliminativism about some of the central posits of common-sense (or "folk") psychology.
		352 we should emphasize that the thesis we propose to defend is a conditional claim: If connectionist hypotheses of the sort we will sketch turn out to be right, so too will eliminativism about propositional attitudes.
		355 the crucial folk psychological tenets in forging the link between connectionism and eliminativism are the claims that propositional attitudes are functionally discrete, semantically interpretable states that play a causal role in the production of other propositional attitudes, and ultimately in the production of behavior.
	grimpeur.tamu.edu /~colin/Phil289/ramseystichgaron (582 words)

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