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 and have no role to play in a mature science of the mind.
Descartes
famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part,
we can be confident about the content of our own minds.
Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes
on this point, since they challenge the existence of various mental states that Descartes took for granted.
1. A Brief History
In principle, anyone denying the existence of some type of thing is an eliminativist with regard to that type of thing. Thus, there have been a number of eliminativists about different aspects of human nature in the history of philosophy. For example, hard determinists like Holbach* (1770) are eliminativists with regard to free will because they claim there is no dimension of human psychology to that corresponds to our commonsense notion of freedom.
Similarly, by denying that there is an ego or persisting subject of experience, Hume* (1739) was arguably an eliminativist about the self.
Reductive materialists can be viewed as eliminativists with respect to an immaterial soul. Nevertheless, contemporary eliminative materialism – the sort of eliminativism that denies the existence of specific types of mental states – is a relatively new theory with a very short history.
[cont’d: a brief history]
2. Contemporary Eliminative Materialism
[cont’d]