## 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 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. The
term was first introduced by James Cornman in a 1968 article entitled
"On the Elimination of 'Sensations' and
Sensations" (Cornman, 1968). However, the basic idea goes back
at least as far as C.D. Broad's classic, *The Mind and its
Place in Nature* (Broad, 1925). Here Broad discusses, and quickly
rejects, a type of "pure materialism" that treats mental
states as attributes that apply to nothing in the world (pp.
607-611). Like many future writers (see section 4.1 below),
Broad argued that such a view is self-contradictory since it
(presumably) presupposes the reality of misjudgments which are
themselves a type of mental state.



Apart from Broad's discussion, the main roots of eliminative
materialism can be found in the writings of a number of mid-20th
century philosophers, most notably
 Wilfred Sellars,
 W.V.O. Quine,
 Paul Feyerabend,
 and
 Richard Rorty.
 In his important 1956 article, "Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind", Sellars introduced the idea that our conception of
mentality may be derived not from direct access to the inner workings
of our own minds, but instead from a primitive theoretical framework
that we inherit from our culture. While Sellars himself regarded this
theoretical framework as empirically correct, his claim that our
conception of the mind is theory-based, and at least in principle
falsifiable, would be influential to later supporters of
eliminativism.



In articles such as "Mental Events and the Brain" (1963),
Paul Feyerabend explicitly endorsed the idea that common-sense
psychology might prove to be radically false. Indeed, Feyerabend held
that practically any version of materialism would severely undermine
common-sense psychology. Like many of his contemporaries, Feyerabend
argued that common-sense mental notions are essentially non-physical
in character. Thus, for him, any form of physicalism would entail that
there are no mental processes or states as understood by common-sense
(1963, p. 295).



Like Feyerabend, Quine also endorsed the idea that mental notions like
belief or sensation could simply be abandoned in favor of a more
accurate physiological account. In a brief passage in *Word and
Object* (1960), Quine suggests that terms denoting the physical
correlates of mental states will be more useful and, as he puts it,
"[t]he bodily states exist anyway; why add the others?"
(p. 264). However, Quine goes on to question just how radical an
eliminativist form of materialism would actually be, implying no
significant difference between explicating mental states as
physiological states, and eliminating mental state terms in favor of
physical state terms. He asks, "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 favor 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)" (p. 265)? Quine answers this question by rejecting it,
suggesting there is no interesting difference between the two cases:
"Some may therefore find comfort in reflecting that the
distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is
unreal" (p. 265).



Here we see a tension that runs throughout the writings of many early
eliminative materialists. The problem involves a vacillation between
two different conditions under which mental concepts and terms are
dropped. The first scenario proposes that certain mental concepts will
turn out to be empty, with mental state terms referring to nothing
that actually exists. Historical analogs for this way of understanding
eliminativism are cases where we (now) say it turned out there are no
such things, such as demons and crystal spheres. The second scenario
suggests that the conceptual framework provided by neurosciences (or
some other physical account) can or should come to replace the
common-sense framework we now use. Unlike the first scenario, the
second allows that mental state terms may actually designate something
real--it's just that what they designate turn out to be
brain states, which will be more accurately described using the
terminology of the relevant sciences. One possible model for this way
of thinking about eliminativism might be the discontinuance of talk
about germs in favor of more precise scientific terminology of
infectious agents. Given these two different conceptions, early
eliminativists would sometimes offer two different characterizations
of their view: (a) *There are no mental states, just brain
states* and, (b) *There really are mental states, but they are
just brain states (and we will come to view them that way)*.



These alternative ways of understanding eliminative materialism
produced considerable confusion about what, exactly, eliminative
materialism entailed. Moreover, since it was difficult to see how the
second version was significantly different from various forms of
reductive materialism (hence, Quine's skepticism about the
difference between elimination and explication) it also raised doubts
about the distinctiveness of eliminative materialism.



Much of this was brought to light in the discussion generated by an
influential 1965 article by Richard Rorty entitled, "Mind-Body
Identity, Privacy, and Categories". Rorty's so-called
"disappearance" theory appeared to openly endorse both
conceptions of eliminative materialism, suggesting that sensations do
not actually exist and that they are nothing but brain processes (p.
28). As one might expect, the ensuing discussion focused on getting
clear on what Rorty's theory actually claimed (for doubts about
Rorty's status as a true eliminative materialist, see Ramsey
(forthcoming)). For example, Cornman's article introducing the
phrase 'eliminative materialism' claimed that Rorty was
arguing that talk about sensations denotes brain states in much the
same way that talk about Zeus's thunderbolts (allegedly) denotes
electrical discharges. Unfortunately, besides suggesting a
questionable perspective on reference, this interpretation raised
further questions about what distinguished eliminativism from
reductionism. In one helpful article by William Lycan and George
Pappas (1972)--entitled, appropriately enough, "What Is
Eliminative Materialism?"--the authors convincingly argued
that you can't have it both ways. You can either claim that
common sense mental notions do not pick out anything real and that
mental terms are empty, in which case you are a true eliminative
materialist; or you can claim that mental notions can be, in some way,
reduced to neurological (or perhaps computational) states of the
brain, in which case you are really just a good-old fashioned
materialist/reductionist. In a follow-up article, Steven Savitt (1974)
introduced the distinction between ontologically conservative
(reductive) and ontologically radical (eliminative) theory change,
which helped to further clarify and distinguish the central claims of
eliminative materialism as it is understood today.



In more recent history, eliminative materialism has received attention
from a broader range of writers, including many concerned not only
with the metaphysics of the mind, but also the process of theory
change, the status of semantic properties, the nature of psychological
explanation and recent developments in
 cognitive science.
 Much of this attention has been fostered by the husband-wife team of
Paul and Patricia Churchland, whose writings have forced many
philosophers and cognitive scientists to take eliminativism more
seriously. In his 1981 article, "Eliminative Materialism and the
Propositional Attitudes", Paul Churchland presents several
arguments in favor of dropping commonsense psychology that have shaped
the modern debate about the status of ordinary notions like belief.
Patricia Churchland's provocative 1986 book,
*Neurophilosophy*, suggests that developments in neuroscience
point to a bleak future for commonsense mental states. Another
influential author has been Stephen Stich. His important 1983 book,
*From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against
Belief*, argues that even conventional
 computational psychology--which
 is often assumed to *vindicate* common-sense
psychology--should reject taxonomies for cognitive states that
correspond with belief-desire psychology. These authors' views
are discussed in more detail in Sections 3 and 4 below.


## 2. Contemporary Eliminative Materialism



Modern versions of eliminative materialism claim that our common-sense
understanding of psychological states and processes is deeply mistaken
and that some or all of our ordinary notions of mental states will
have no home, at any level of analysis, in a sophisticated and
accurate account of the mind. In other words, it is the view that
certain common-sense mental states, such as beliefs and desires, do
not exist. To establish this claim, eliminativists typically endorse
two central and controversial claims which we will examine below. Much
of our discussion will focus upon our notion of belief, since it
figures so prominently in contemporary discussions of eliminative
materialism. However, many of the arguments presented below are
thought to generalize to other mental notions--especially other
propositional attitudes. 


### 2.1 Folk Psychology and the Theory-Theory



The standard argument for eliminative materialism begins with the
Sellarsian thesis that we employ a theoretical framework to explain
and predict intelligent behavior. Because this position claims that we
use a theory when employing mental idiom, it is often referred to as
the "theory-theory" (see the entry on
 folk psychology as a theory),
 and is endorsed not only by eliminative materialists, but by many
realists about mental states as well (like Sellars). Folk psychology
is assumed to consist of both generalizations (or laws) and specific
theoretical posits, denoted by our everyday psychological terms like
'belief' or 'pain'. The generalizations are
assumed to describe the various causal or counterfactual relations and
regularities of the posits. For instance, a typical example of a folk
psychological generalization would be:



> 
> If someone has the desire for *X* and the belief that the best
> way to get *X* is by doing *Y*, then (barring certain
> conditions) that person will tend to do *Y*.
> 



Advocates of the theory-theory claim that generalizations like these
function in folk psychology much like the laws and generalizations of
scientific theories. At the same time, many theory-theorists allow
that the laws of folk psychology are learned more informally than
scientific theories, as part of our normal development (see, for
example, P. M. Churchland, 1981 and Lewis, 1972).



According to theory-theorists, the posits of folk psychology are
simply the mental states that figure in our everyday psychological
explanations. Theory-theorists maintain the (controversial) position
that, as theoretical posits, these states are not directly observed,
though they are thought to account for observable effects like overt
behavior. Theory-theorists also claim that common-sense assigns a
number of properties to these states, such as causal, semantic and
qualitative features. For instance, the theory-theory claims
common-sense assigns two sorts of properties to beliefs. First, there
are various causal properties. Beliefs are the sort of states that are
caused in certain specific circumstances, interact with other
cognitive states in various ways, and come to generate various sorts
of behavior, depending on the agent's other desires and mental
states. As functionalists have claimed, these causal roles appear to
define our ordinary notion of belief and distinguish them from other
types of mental states. Second, beliefs have
 intentionality;
 that is, they each express a proposition or are about a particular
state of affairs. This inherent intentionality (also called
"meaning", "content", and "semantic
character"), is commonly regarded as something special about
beliefs and other propositional attitudes. Moreover, as we will see
below, it is also a popular target of eliminative materialists who
challenge the propriety and explanatory value of beliefs.



Although eliminative materialists have traditionally appealed to
something like the idea that our folk conception of the mind is a
theory, as suggested by the theory-theory, it does not actually *require*  that our commonsense mental notions are embedded in a
theoretical framework used for explaining and predicting. Virtually
any sort of embedding conceptual framework could be proposed in
support of the first step of the eliminativist argument. In fact,
although it is seldom recognized, the only thing eliminative
materialism actually requires is the relatively weak assumption that
we have mental concepts (i.e., concepts of mental states and
processes) and that those concepts assign certain properties to those
mental states and processes. Even opponents of the theory-theory will
typically allow that we possess  *some*  sort of conception of
mental states like beliefs or pains and that such a conception (at
least tacitly) assigns to their corresponding mental entities a
variety of intrinsic, relational, intentional, phenomenal, causal, and
temporal properties. Anyone who denies this would be denying that we
possess notions of mental states - a highly implausible
view.


### 2.2 Eliminative Theory Change



The second component of eliminative materialism is the thesis that
folk psychology is profoundly wrong about the actual nature of the
mind/brain. Eliminative materialists argue that the central tenets of
folk psychology radically misdescribe cognitive processes;
consequently, the posits of folk psychology have no role to play in a
serious scientific theory of the mind because the posits pick out
nothing that is real. Like dualists, eliminative materialists insist
that ordinary mental states cannot be reduced to or identified with
neurological events or processes. However, unlike dualists,
straightforward eliminativists claim there is nothing more to the mind
than what occurs in the brain. The reason mental states are
irreducible is not because they are non-physical; rather, it is
because mental states, as described by common-sense psychology, do not
really exist. 



To see all of this a little better, it will help to return to the
important distinction made by Steven Savitt discussed in Section 1
between ontologically conservative (or retentive) theory change on the
one hand, and ontologically radical (or eliminative) theory change on
the other hand. Ontologically conservative theory change occurs when
the entities and posits of the replaced theory are relocated, often
with some degree of revision, in the replacing theory. For example, as
our theory of light was gradually replaced by our understanding of
electro-magnetic radiation, our conception of light was dramatically
transformed as we recognized ways in which our old conception was
mistaken or incomplete. Nevertheless, at no point did we come to say
that there is really no such thing as light. Rather, light was
eventually identified with a form of electro-magnetic radiation.



By contrast, our notion of demons did not come to find a new home in
contemporary theories of mental disorder. There is nothing in the
theories of schizophrenia, Tourette's Syndrome, neuro-pathology
or any of the other modern explanations for bizarre behavior, that we
can sensibly identify with malevolent spirits with supernatural
powers. The notion of a demon is just too far removed from anything we
now posit to explain behavior that was once explained by demonology.
Consequently, the transition from demonology to modern accounts of
this behavior was ontologically radical. We dropped demons from our
current ontology, and came to realize that the notion is
empty--it refers to nothing real. 



Eliminative materialists claim that an ontologically radical theory
change awaits the theoretical posits of folk psychology in a manner
similar to these cases. With straightforward eliminativism, just as we
came to understand that there are no such things as demons (because
nothing at all like demons appear in modern accounts of strange
behavior), so too, eliminative materialists argue that various folk
psychological concepts--like our concept of belief--will
eventually be recognized as empty posits that fail to correspond with
anything that actually exists. Since there is nothing that has the
causal and semantic properties we attribute to beliefs (and many other
mental states) it will turn out that *there really are no such
things.* 



It should be noted that a somewhat similar framework for understanding
eliminative materialism is provided by David Lewis's discussion
of functional definitions in psychology (1972) (see the entry on
 functionalism).
 In Lewis's account, our commonsense mental notions can be
treated as functionally defined theoretical terms that appear in a
chain of Ramsey-sentences. The Ramsey-sentences are a formal
reconstruction of the platitudes of commonsense psychology. They
provide a set of roles or conditions that more or less must be met for
the instantiation of any given state. If nothing comes close to
actually filling the roles specified by this framework for a certain
state, then we are warranted in saying that the theoretical posit in
question doesn't refer and there is no such thing. Eliminative
materialists claim that this is precisely what will happen with at
least some of our folk mental notions.


### 2.3 Category Elimination



We have been treating eliminative materialism as a metaphysical claim
about the ontological status of the posits of commonsense psychology;
as the claim that there exists nothing that corresponds to the concept
in question -- it picks out nothing real. This is analogous to
what happened in the case of demons and crystal spheres. Because there
are no such things, these concepts have no role to play in a proper
scientific ontology. However, in recent years the term
'eliminativism' has been applied to a very different type
of ontological stance toward the posits of commonsense psychology.
This alternative stance is that although the commonsense concept does
indeed correspond with something real, the kind in question is, for a
host of reasons, ill-suited for serious scientific theorizing. Thus,
dropping the commonsense concept from science is, at least in part,
due to pragmatic considerations about proper scientific practice.
Irvine and Sprevak refer to this as "discourse
eliminativism" (Irvine and Sprevak, forthcoming). With
conventional eliminative materialism, any token invoking of the mental
state concept or term will designate nothing -- the concept or
term has no identifiable intentional object. By contrast, with this
alternative picture, particular uses of a mental state concept or term
may indeed refer to some actual neurological state or condition that
shares many of the features associated with the concept in question.
However, because no legitimate scientific type maps properly onto the
folk psychological type, the latter should be dropped from the
categories of scientific psychology. So with this alternative
interpretation of eliminativism, the alleged problem with folk
psychology has more to do with the classification system it provides
for certain types of mental states or processes; its criteria for
demarcation and categorization are grossly ill-suited for cognitive
science. The unscientific nature of the category may be due to a
variety of considerations (or combination of considerations) including
(but not limited to) demarcation criteria that are overly subjective
or context dependent, cut across more natural kinds, reduce to wildly
disjunctive arrays of real properties, fail to yield useful
generalizations, collapse together useful levels of analysis, and so
on. Thus, this alternative conception of eliminativism is the exact
converse of certain forms of instrumentalism. Whereas an
instrumentalist might claim that there are no X's, but we should
continue invoking or talking about X's in science for pragmatic
reasons, a proponent of this alternative picture of eliminativism says
there really are X's, but we should stop using the category in
science for pragmatic reasons.



To see this a little better, consider our concept of *weed*. It
is used in everyday life to pick out certain actual plants, but the
category is badly ill-suited for science. The category of weeds is
highly subjective and cross-classifies a number of natural floral
kinds. While it would be wrong to say there are no such things as
weeds, the notion does not belong in the science of botany. The
alternative conception of eliminativism is based on the idea that
certain commonsense psychological categories should be regarded as
similar to the category of weeds. Although the folk notion in question
may correspond with something actual, the folk category should be
dropped from the sciences of the mind because it is inappropriate for
serious scientific theorizing and explanation.



An illustration of this alternative picture of eliminativism is
provided by Paul Griffiths' account of our commonsense notion of
emotion (Griffiths, 1997). Griffiths argues that the category of
emotion should be dropped from scientific psychology and replaced with
categories that are better grounded in scientific psychology and
neuroscience. He points out that the folk concept cuts across three
different kinds of affective states: affect programs, higher cognitive
emotions and social constructions. Affect programs are basic and
automatic states such as fear or anger that have an evolutionary basis
and that are triggered by specific conditions. By contrast, higher
cognitive emotions, like jealousy or shame, and social constructions
are much less automatic and more easily influenced by a broader range
of factors like higher-order thoughts or cultural conditioning.
Griffiths argues that these psychological types are almost certainly
subserved by radically different cognitive mechanisms and consequently
should not be lumped together under some superordinate commonsense
category of emotion. Griffiths develops a similar line of argument
against emotion based upon levels of analysis and the difference
between function-based taxonomies as opposed to lineage-based
taxonomies.



A comparable type of outlook is endorsed by Edouard Machery with
regard to our concept of (ironically) *concepts* (Machery,
2008). Machery argues that because our folk notion of concept
corresponds to such a heterogeneous group of scientific kinds of
stored information -- including prototypes, exemplars, and
theories -- then psychologists would be better off just using
these scientific categories and abandoning talk of concepts
altogether. Similar sorts of arguments have been leveled against the
folk categories of belief (Stich, 1983), pain (Hardcastle, 1999),
consciousness (Irvine, 2012), and mental illness (Murphy and Stich,
1999).



One problem with this gloss on eliminativism is that it often depends
upon controversial normative claims about appropriate scientific
taxonomies. Many deny that, say, the highly disjunctive nature of a
commonsense notion is sufficient justification for dropping it. If it
was, we would eliminate the categories of memory and inference from
scientific psychology. While authors like Griffiths and Machery
present very sophisticated arguments involving specific details about
the categories in question, most of these arguments either explicitly
or tacitly make claims about the requirements of proper scientific
categorization that are highly contentious in the philosophy of
science (see, for example, the discussion in Machery, 2010).



A second and more serious problem is that this alternative conception
of eliminative materialism is not, strictly speaking, a type of
eliminative materialism. The claim that some category possesses
members but the category itself is nevertheless ill-suited for science
is *not* just a weaker version of the claim that a category is
ill-suited for science *because* it has no members. Say what
you will about weeds, clothing, pets and other kinds that are not
scientifically respectable, it is clearly wrong to suggest these
things are not real. Thus, to avoid confusion, it would probably help
if a term other than 'eliminativism' was adopted to
designate this alternative conception. Irvine and Sprevak's
'discourse eliminativism' is problematic because, besides
wrongly implying it is a version of eliminativism, there can also be
discourse changes that involve the elimination of a term but where the
relevant relabeled category is fully retained. The term
'consumption' has been dropped from our scientific
nomenclature, but it successfully referred to the legitimately
taxonomized disease we now refer to as 'tuberculosis'.
Perhaps a phrase like 'category dissolution' or
'conceptual fragmentation' would more accurately capture
the sort of thing that people like Griffiths and Machery have in
mind.


## 3. Arguments For Eliminative Materialism



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. These arguments typically fall into one of two major
families. One family involves arguments stemming from a broad range of
considerations that pertain to the assessment of theories in general.
The second family focuses upon deficiencies that are unique to folk
psychology and its central posits. 


### 3.1 General Theoretical Problems With Folk Psychology



Patricia and Paul Churchland have offered a number of arguments based
on general considerations about theory evaluation. For example, they
have argued that any promising and accurate theory should offer a
fertile research program with considerable explanatory power. They
note, however, that common-sense psychology appears to be stagnant,
and there is a broad range of mental phenomena that folk psychology
does not allow us to explain. Questions about why we dream, various
aspects of mental illness, consciousness, memory and learning are
completely ignored by folk psychology. According to the Churchlands,
these considerations indicate that folk psychology may be in much
worse shape than we commonly recognize (P. M. Churchland, 1981; P.S.
Churchland, 1986). Another argument that appeals to general
theoretical considerations offers an inductive inference based on the
past record of folk theories. Folk physics, folk biology, folk
epidemiology and the like all proved to be radically mistaken. Since
folk theories generally turn out to be mistaken, it seems quite
improbable that folk psychology will turn out true. Indeed, since folk
psychology concerns a subject that is far more complex and difficult
than any past folk theory, it seems wildly implausible that this one
time we actually got things right (Churchland, P.M. 1981). 



These general theoretical arguments do not seem to have significantly
undermined the intuitive support that folk psychology enjoys. In
response to the charge that folk psychology is stagnant, many have
argued that this assessment is unfair, and that folk psychology has
actually stimulated a number of fruitful research programs in
scientific psychology (Greenwood, 1991; Horgan and Woodward, 1985).
Moreover, defenders of folk psychology note that it hardly follows
from the observation that a given theory is incomplete, or fails to
explain everything, that it is therefore radically false (Horgan and
Woodward, 1985). Defenders of folk psychology object that these
theoretical considerations cannot outweigh the evidence provided by
everyday, ordinary experience of our own minds, such as our
introspective experience, which seems to vividly support the reality
of mental states like beliefs.



Regarding this last point, eliminativists like the Churchlands warn
that we should be deeply suspicious about the reliability of
introspective "evidence" about the inner workings of the
mind. If inner observation is as theory-laden as many now suppose
outer perception to be, what we introspect may be largely determined
by our folk psychological framework. In other words,
"introspecting" beliefs may be just like people
"seeing" demonic spirits or celestial spheres (Churchland,
P.M., 1988). This skepticism about the reliability of introspection is
bolstered by empirical work that calls into question the reliability
of introspection (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977). As we will see in Section
3.3, the idea that introspection offers an illusory image of the mind
is gaining popularity not just with regard to information bearing
states like beliefs, but also with regard to phenomenal states like
qualia.


### 3.2 Specific Problems With Folk Psychology



The second family of eliminative materialist arguments focuses upon
idiosyncratic features of folk-psychological posits and ultimately
denies that these features will be accommodated by a scientific
account of the mind. The most widely discussed features are two
associated with the apparent linguistic nature of beliefs and other
propositional attitudes. First, as a number of philosophers have
recently noted, propositional attitudes appear to have a form similar
to public language sentences, with a compositional structure and
syntax. For example, a person's belief that, say, the president
dislikes terrorists appears to be composed of the concepts "THE
PRESIDENT", "DISLIKES", and
"TERRORISTS", and differs from the belief that terrorists
dislike the president by virtue of something analogous to syntactic
arrangement. Second, beliefs resemble public sentences in that they
have semantic properties. Beliefs, like public linguistic
representations, are about different states of affairs. Both of these
quasi-linguistic features of propositional attitudes--their
alleged sentential structure and their semantic (or intentional)
properties--have been used by philosophers to mount arguments for
eliminativism.


#### 3.2.1 Challenging The Syntactic Structure Of Beliefs



Some writers have emphasized the apparent mismatch between the
sentential structure of propositional attitudes on the one hand, and
the actual neurological structures of the brain on the other hand.
Whereas the former involves discrete symbols and a combinatorial
syntax, the latter involves action potentials, spiking frequencies and
spreading activation. As Patricia Churchland (1986) has argued, it is
hard to see where in the brain we are going to find anything that even
remotely resembles the sentence-like structure that appears to be
essential to beliefs and other propositional attitudes.



In response to this line of reasoning, many have argued that it is
a mistake to treat folk psychology as committed to a quasi-linguistic
structure to propositional attitudes (Horgan and Graham, 1991;
Dennett, 1991). And even for those who find this reading of folk
psychology plausible, there is a further difficulty regarding the
relevance of neuroscience for determining the status of folk
psychology. Some, such as Zenon Pylyshyn (1984), have insisted that
just as the physical circuitry of a computer is the wrong level of
analysis to look for computational symbol structures, so too, the
detailed neurological wiring of the brain is the wrong level of
organization to look for structures that might qualify as beliefs.
Instead, if we view the mind as the brain's program, as many
advocates of classical AI do, then folk posits exist at a level of
analysis that is more abstract than the neuro-physical details.
Consequently, many realists about the posits of folk psychology
discount the importance of any apparent mis-match between neurological
architecture and the alleged linguistic form of propositional
attitudes (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; McLaughlin & Warfield,
1994).


#### 3.2.2 Challenging the Semantic Properties of Beliefs



The second type of argument against beliefs focuses upon their
semantic properties and concludes that these sorts of properties make
propositional attitudes ill-suited for even a computational theory of
the mind. Stephen Stich (1983) has emphasized that folk psychology
individuates beliefs by virtue of their semantic properties, e.g., we
taxonomize states like beliefs by virtue of what they are about.
However, according to Stich, there are a host of reasons for rejecting
a semantic taxonomy for scientific psychology. Semantic taxonomies
ignore causally salient aspects of cognitive states, involve a high
degree of vagueness, and break down in the case of the mentally ill or
the very young. In place of the semantic individuation method adopted
by folk psychology, Stich argues for a syntactic taxonomy that is
based upon the causally relevant syntactic or physical properties of a
given cognitive state.



Yet, as Stich himself notes, even if it should turn out that folk
posits do not belong in a scientific psychology, more is needed to
establish that they do not actually exist. After all, we do not doubt
the existence of several sorts of things (e.g., chairs, articles of
clothing) that are defined in ways that make them ill-suited for
science. Thus, Stich's account is not truly eliminativist for
the reasons we saw in Section 2.3: his prescription is for a
scientifically superior taxonomy that still involves belief-like
states. Moreover, if our best scientific account posited states that
share many features with beliefs, such as similar causal roles, then
even if the two taxonomies pulled apart in certain cases, we may still
regard folk psychology as, in some sense, vindicated. While the
scientific taxonomy may not list beliefs as basic cognitive states, it
could conceivably still provide the resources for developing a realist
interpretation of these and other folk psychological states.


#### 3.2.3 Eliminativism and Cognitive Science



One way to get a stronger eliminativist conclusion would be to argue
that there is nothing posited in a scientific account of cognition
that shares the central properties we attribute to folk psychological
states, at *any* level of analysis. For example, Ramsey, Stich
and Garon (1990) have argued that if certain
 connectionist
 models of memory and inference prove successful, then this would form
the basis for eliminative materialism regarding states like
propositional memories. Since some connectionist models store
information in a highly distributed manner, there are no causally
discrete, semantically evaluable data structures that represent
specific propositions. It is not just that these models lack the sort
of sentential, compositional representations assumed in more
traditional (or "language of thought") models. Rather, it
is that in these networks there are no causally distinct structures
that stand for specific states of affairs. Consequently, there do not
appear to be any structures in these networks that might serve as
candidates for beliefs and other propositional attitudes. This is
noteworthy since many critics of eliminativism claim it is virtually
impossible to imagine what a psychological theory would look like that
doesn't invoke propositional attitudes to explain cognition
(Hannan, 1993). If Ramsey, Stich and Garon are right, certain
connectionist models may, for the first time, provide us with a
plausible account of cognition that supports the denial of belief-like
states. More recently, Ramsey (2007) has argued that this earlier
argument does not go far enough, insisting that connectionist models
of this sort not only fail to invoke inner representations that are
sufficiently similar to the posits of folk psychology, but that they
don't actually invoke inner representational states at all.



Ramsey, Stich and Garon's argument assumes that in highly
distributed networks, it is impossible to specify the semantic content
of elements of the network that are causally responsible for various
cognitive episodes. Some have responded to their argument by
suggesting that, with highly sophisticated forms of analysis, it
actually is possible to pick out causally relevant pieces of stored
information (Forster and Saidel, 1994). Others have argued that, like
the Churchlands, Ramsey, Stich and Garon have offered a mistaken
interpretation of folk psychology, suggesting it requires far less in
the way of explicit, discrete structures than they suggest (Dennett,
1991; Heil, 1991). This is a common criticism of eliminative
materialism, and we will look at it more closely in Section 4.3.



Another development in cognitive science that has pushed some people
in the direction of eliminativism is the attempt to understand
cognitive systems as neither classical nor connectionist computational
devices, but rather as dynamic systems, described using the
mathematical framework of dynamic systems theory (Beer, 2000; van
Gelder, 1992; Port and van Gelder, 1995). This approach is often
conjoined with some version of embodied cognition, as both place a
strong emphasis on the way cognitive agents move about and interact
with their environment. While neither the dynamic nor the embodied
approaches are inherently anti-representational in nature, at least
some authors have employed them to develop accounts of cognitive
processes that abandon inner representational states altogether. For
example, Anthony Chemero has promoted what he calls "radical
embodied cognitive science" (Chemero, 2009). This theoretical
framework treats the cognitive agent and environment as a complex
coupled system best explained by a mix of dynamics and James
Gibson's ecological theory of perception (Gibson, 1950). Chemero
explicitly endorses eliminativism by rejecting the traditional
assumption that agents solve problems and navigate through the world
by consulting mental representations. He thus joins others in the
cognitive science community, like artificial intelligence researcher
Rodney Brooks (Brooks, 1991), who have tried to account for cognition
without invoking representational entities. Of course, it is too early
to know how successful these non-representational approaches will
ultimately be, and many defenders of representationalism argue that
these efforts are not likely to account for more sophisticated
"representation-hungry" tasks like planning (Clark and
Toribio, 1994).



A related theoretical development in the philosophy of cognitive
science that also pushes a strong anti-representational perspective,
at least for basic cognitive states, and that has its roots in the
embodied, embedded tradition is *radical enactivism*. Authors
like Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin reject the traditional
information-processing outlook and insist that whey they call the
"hard problem of content"-- the problem of providing
a naturalistic account of the semantic properties of representational
content (as opposed to mere co-variation) -- is probably
unsolvable for most inner states commonly thought as mental
representations (Hutto and Myin, 2012). Thus, Hutto and Myin join
other authors who have endorsed eliminativism about mental
representations by focusing upon the problematic nature of
content.


### 3.3 Eliminative Materialism and the Phenomenal



Although most discussions regarding eliminativism focus on the status
of our notion of belief and other propositional attitudes, some
philosophers have endorsed eliminativist claims about the phenomenal
or qualitative states of the mind (see the entry on
 qualia).
 For example, Daniel Dennett (1978) has argued that our concept of
 pain
 is fundamentally flawed because it includes essential properties,
like infallibility and intrinsic awfulness, that cannot co-exist in
light of a well-documented phenomenon know as "reactive
disassociation". In certain conditions, drugs like morphine
cause subjects to report that they are experiencing excruciating pain,
but that it is not unpleasant. It seems we are either wrong to think
that people cannot be mistaken about being in pain (wrong about
infallibility), or pain needn't be inherently awful (wrong about
intrinsic awfulness). Dennett suggests that part of the reason we may
have difficulty replicating pain in computational systems is because
our concept is so defective that it picks out nothing real. A similar
view about pain has been offered by Valerie Hardcastle (1999).
Hardcastle argues that the neurological basis for pain sensations is
so complex that no one thing answers to our folk conception. However,
despite her own characterization of pain as a "myth",
Hardcastle's arguments appear to be aimed not at showing that
pain is unreal, but rather that it is actually a more complicated
phenomenon than suggested by our folk conception.



In another well-known article, "Quining Qualia" (1988),
Dennett challenges not just our conception of pain, but all of our
different notions of qualitative states. His argument focuses on the
apparently essential features of qualia, including their inherent
subjectivity and their private nature. Dennett discusses several
cases--both actual and imaginary--to expose ways in which
these ordinary intuitions about qualia pull apart. In so doing,
Dennett suggests our qualia concepts are fundamentally confused and
fail to correspond with the actual inner workings of our cognitive
system.



Some writers have suggested an eliminativist outlook not just with
regard to particular states of consciousness, but with regard to
phenomenal consciousness itself. For example, Georges Rey (1983, 1988)
has argued that if we look at the various neurological or cognitive
theories of what consciousness might amount to, such as internal
monitoring or the possession of second-order representational states,
it seems easy to imagine all of these features incorporated in a
computational device that lacks anything we intuitively think of as
"real" or robust consciousness. Rey suggests that the
failure of these accounts to capture our ordinary notion of
consciousness may be because the latter corresponds with no actual
process or phenomenon; the "inner light" we associate with
consciousness may be nothing more than a remnant of misguided
Cartesian intuitions (see also Wilkes, 1988; 1995 and Irvine and
Sprevak, forthcoming).



A somewhat similar outlook has been proposed by Keith Frankish and
others, and is commonly referred to as "Illusionism" about
consciousness, a label designed to help indicate why it *seems*
to us that phenomenal consciousness is real (Frankish, 2016, 2017).
Illusionism is motivated in part by broader theoretical
considerations, such as the problematic nature of consciousness from
the standpoint of physicalism and the observation that even reductive
accounts of phenomenal experience typically suggest some sort of
misapprehension of what is really going on. Illusionism claims that
introspection involves something analogous to ordinary sensory
illusions; just as our perceptual systems can yield states that
radically misrepresent the nature of the outer world, so too,
introspection yields representations that substantially misrepresent
the actual nature of our inner experience. In particular,
introspection represents experiential states as having phenomenal
properties--the infamous and deeply problematic
what-it-is-likeness of our qualitative mental states. Illusionists
claim that these phenomenal properties do not exist, making them
eliminativists about phenomenal consciousness. What is real are
quasi-phenomenal properties--the non-phenomenal properties of
inner states that are detected by introspection and *misrepresented
as* phenomenal.



An obvious challenge for such a view is explaining how we can
experience something as having feature *X* without such as
experience actually involving the real experience of *X*. It
could be argued that even if the what-it-is-likeness is a feature of
how we introspectively represent certain mental states, it would
nevertheless be a real aspect of introspection--a feature that is
perhaps relocated, but not removed. Famously, the illusion/reality gap
seems to collapse when it comes to our inner experiences; as Searle
puts it, "*where consciousness is concerned the existence of
the appearance is the reality*" (Searle, 1997, p.122,
italics in original). Frankish insists that we can introspectively
represent ourselves as having a certain type of experience without
actually having that type of experience: "...when we think we
are having a greenish experience we are in fact merely misrepresenting
ourselves as having one" (Frankish, 2016, p. 33). Illusionism
thereby forces us to reconsider the sort of access we have to our own
experiential states.


## 4. Arguments Against Eliminative Materialism



Like any theory that challenges our fundamental understanding of
things, eliminative materialism has been subjected to a variety of
criticisms. Here, I'll discuss four that have received
considerable attention in recent years.


### 4.1 The Self-Refutation Objection



Many writers have argued that eliminative materialism is in some sense
self-refuting (Baker, 1987; Boghossian, 1990, 1991; Reppert, 1992). A
common way this charge is made is to insist that a capacity or
activity that is somehow invoked by the eliminativist is itself
something that requires the existence of beliefs. One popular
candidate for this activity is the making of an assertion. The critic
insists that to assert something one must believe it. Hence, for
eliminative materialism to be asserted as a thesis, the eliminativist
herself must believe that it is true. But if the eliminativist has
such a belief, then there are beliefs and eliminativism is thereby
proven false.



Eliminativists often respond to this objection by first noting that
the bare thesis that there are no beliefs is not itself contradictory
or conceptually incoherent. So properly understood, the complaint is
not that eliminative materialism (qua-proposition) is self-refuting.
Rather, it is that the eliminativist herself is doing something that
disconfirms her own thesis. In the above example, the disconfirming
act is the making of an assertion, as it is alleged by the critic that
we must believe anything we assert with public language. However, this
last claim is precisely the sort of folk-psychological assumption that
the eliminative materialist is suggesting we should abandon. According
to eliminative materialism, all of the various capacities that we now
explain by appealing to beliefs do not actually involve beliefs at
all. So the eliminativist will hold that the self-refutation critics
beg the question against eliminative materialism. To run this sort of
objection, the critic endorses some principle about the necessity of
beliefs which itself presupposes that eliminative materialism must be
false (P. S. Churchland, 1986; Cling, 1989; Devitt, 1990; Ramsey,
1991).



A more sophisticated version of the self-refutation objection has been
offered by Paul Boghossian with regard to eliminativist arguments
based on the content of psychological states. Boghossian maintains
that arguments for irrealism about the content of propositional
attitudes work just as well in support of irrealism about all forms of
content, including the content of ordinary linguistic expressions.
Moreover, he argues that different forms of irrealism about linguistic
content presuppose robust semantic notions, such as realist
conceptions of truth and reference. This leads to the incoherent
position that, for example, there are no truth conditions and yet
certain sentences (or beliefs) about content are false (Boghossian,
1990, 1991). In response, Michael Devitt and Georges Rey argue that
Boghossian's argument, despite its sophistication, nevertheless
begs the question by ascribing to the eliminativist some version of
truth-conditional semantics, whereas many eliminativists would reject
such a view of linguistic expressions. While eliminativists would need
to construct some sort of non-truth-conditional semantics, Devitt and
Rey argue that the challenge of such a project reveals only that
eliminativism is implausible, not that it is, as Boghossian claims,
incoherent (Devitt, 1990; Devitt and Rey, 1991).


### 4.2 Rejecting the Theory-Theory



In section 2, we saw that eliminative materialism typically rests upon
a particular understanding of the nature of folk psychology. The next
criticism of eliminative materialism challenges the various
characterizations of folk psychology provided by its
advocates--in particular the view set forth by advocates of the
theory-theory. This criticism comes from two very distinct traditions.
The first tradition is at least partly due to the writings of
Wittgenstein (1953) and Ryle (1949), and insists that (contra many
eliminativists) common sense psychology is not a quasi-scientific
theory used to explain or predict behavior, nor does it treat mental
states like beliefs as discrete inner causes of behavior (Bogdan,
1991; Haldane, 1988; Hannan, 1993; Wilkes, 1993). What folk psychology
actually does treat beliefs and desires as is much less clear in this
tradition. One perspective (Dennett, 1987) is that propositional
attitudes are actually dispositional states that we use to adopt a
certain heuristic stance toward rational agents. According to this
view, our talk about mental states should be interpreted as talk about
abstracta that, although real, are not candidates for straightforward
reduction or elimination as the result of cognitive science research.
Moreover, since beliefs and other mental states are used for so many
things besides the explanation of human behavior, it is far from clear
that our explanatory theories about inner workings of the mind/brain
have much relevance for their actual status.



Defenders of eliminative materialism often point out that folk
theories typically have many functions beyond explaining and
predicting, but that doesn't alter their theoretical status nor
inoculate their posits from elimination (P.M. Churchland, 1993).
Moreover, as we saw at the end of Section 2.1, while eliminativists
have typically framed the vulnerability of commonsense mental notions
in terms of a false folk psychological theory, it is important to note
that, at least in principle, eliminativism does not require such an
assumption. Indeed, eliminativism only requires two basic claims: 1)
that we share concepts of mental states that include *some*
sort of requirements that any state or structure must meet to qualify
as a mental state of that sort, and 2) the world is such that nothing
comes close to meeting those requirements. The first of these claims
is not terribly controversial and while the requirements for beliefs
might come as part of an explanatory theory, they don't need to.
Hence, one common criticism of eliminativism--that our invoking
of beliefs and desires is not a theoretical or quasi-scientific
endeavor--has very limited force. Cherubs, presumably, are not
part of any sort of quasi-scientific theory, yet this alone is no
reason to think they might exist. Even if it should turn out that we
do not (or do not simply) posit beliefs and other propositional
attitudes as part of some sort of explanatory-predictive framework, it
may still turn out that there are no such things.



The second perspective criticizing the theory-theory is based on
research in contemporary cognitive science, and stems from a different
model of the nature of our explanatory and predictive practices
(Gordon, 1986, 1992; Goldman, 1992). Known as the
 "simulation theory",
 this alternative model holds that we predict and explain behavior not
by using a theory, but by instead running an off-line simulation of
how we would act in a comparable situation. That is, according to this
picture, we disconnect our own decision-making sub-system and then
feed it pretend beliefs and desires (and perhaps other relevant data)
that we assume the agent whose behavior we are trying to predict is
likely to possess. This allows us to generate both predictions and
explanations of others by simply employing cognitive machinery that we
already possess. In effect, the simulation theory claims that our
reasoning about the minds and behavior of others is not significantly
different from putting ourselves in their shoes. Thus, no full-blown
theory of the mind is ever needed. Simulations theorists claim that,
contrary to the assumptions of eliminative materialism, no theory of
the mind exists that could one day prove false.



Both sides of this debate between the theory-theory and the simulation
theory have used empirical work from developmental psychology to
support their case (Stich and Nichols, 1992; Gordon, 1992). For
example, theory-theorists have noted that developmental psychologists
like Henry Wellman and Alison Gopnik have used various findings to
suggest that children go through phases that are analogous to the
phases one would go through when acquiring a theory (Gopnik and
Wellman, 1992). Moreover, children appear to ascribe beliefs to
themselves in the same way they ascribe beliefs to others.
Theory-theorists have used considerations such as these to support
their claim that our notion of belief is employed as the posit of a
folk theory rather than input to a simulation model. At the same time,
simulation theorists have employed the finding that 3-year-olds
struggle with false belief ascriptions to suggest that children are
actually ascribing their own knowledge to others, something that might
be expected on the simulation account (Gordon, 1986).



However the debate between simulation theorists and theory theorists
turns out, or whether some sort of hybrid combination of the two
proves correct, we should once again bear in mind the point made at
the end of Section 2.1. Since even the most ardent simulation theorist
will allow that we have mental concepts, it is doubtful that the
simulation perspective actually poses a significant threat to
eliminativism, and it seems possible for there to be a version of
eliminative materialism that could be reconstructed within the
simulation framework, even for beliefs and desires. For example, it is
at least conceivable that the decision-making machinery that is taken
off-line to simulate the reasoning of another person could take as
input cognitive states other than beliefs and desires, but that we
somehow mistakenly conceptualize *as* beliefs and desires. On
this admittedly speculative scenario, our ability to predict and
explain the behavior of others would be simulation-based, and yet our
conception of how minds work would be so far off that an eliminativist
verdict would be appropriate.


### 4.3 Defending the Virtues of Folk Psychology



Even among theory-theorists there is considerable disagreement about
the plausibility of eliminative materialism. A third criticism of
eliminative materialism is that it ignores the remarkable success of
folk psychology, success that suggests it offers a more accurate
account of mental processes than eliminativists appreciate. Apart from
the strong intuitive evidence that seems to reveal beliefs and
desires, we also enjoy a great deal of success when we use common
sense psychology to predict the actions of other people. Many have
noted that this high degree of success provides us with something like
an inference-to-the-best-explanation argument in favor of common sense
psychology and against eliminativism. The best explanation for the
success we enjoy in explaining and predicting human and animal
behavior is that folk psychology is roughly true, and that there
really are beliefs (Kitcher, 1984; Fodor, 1987; Lahav, 1992).



A common eliminativist response to this argument is to re-emphasize a
lesson from the philosophy of science; namely, that any
theory--especially one that is as near and dear to us as folk
psychology--can often appear successful even when it completely
misrepresents reality. History demonstrates that we often discount
anomalies, ignore failures as insignificant, and generally attribute
more success to a popular theory than it deserves. Like the proponents
of vitalism or phlogiston theory, we may be blind to the failings of
folk psychology until an alternative account is in hand (P. M.
Churchland, 1981; P. S. Churchland, 1986).



While many defenders of folk psychology insist that folk psychology is
explanatorily strong, some defenders have gone in the opposite
direction, arguing that it is committed to far less than
eliminativists have typically assumed (Horgan, 1993; Horgan and
Graham, 1991; Jackson and Pettit, 1990). According to these writers,
folk psychology, while indeed a theory, is a relatively
"austere" (i.e., ontologically non-committal) theory, and
requires very little for vindication. Consequently, these authors
conclude that when properly described, folk psychology can be seen as
compatible with a very wide range of neuroscientific or cognitive
developments, making eliminative materialism possible but
unlikely.



Of course, folk theories are like any theories in that they can be
partly right and partly wrong. Even writers who are sympathetic to
eliminativism, such as John Bickle and Patricia Churchland (Bickle,
1992; P.M. Churchland, 1994) point out that the history of science is
filled with with cases where the conceptual machinery of a flawed
theory is neither smoothly carried over to a new theory, nor fully
eliminated. Instead, it is substantially modified and reworked, with
perhaps only some of its posits being dropped altogether. Thus,
full-blown eliminative materialism and complete reductionism are
end-points on a continuum with many possibilities falling somewhere in
between. The term "revisionary materialism" is often
invoked to denote the view that the theoretical framework of folk
psychology will only be eliminated to a degree, and that various
dimensions of our commonsense conception of the mind will be at least
partly vindicated.


### 4.4 Eliminativism Eliminated?



One final argument against eliminative materialism comes from the
recent writings of a former supporter, Stephen Stich (1991, 1996).
Stich's argument is somewhat complex, but it can be presented in
outline form here. Earlier we saw that eliminative materialism is
committed to the claim that the posits of folk psychology fail to
refer to anything. But as Stich points out, just what this claim
amounts to is far from clear. For example, we might think that
reference failure occurs as the result of some degree of mismatch
between reality and the theory in which the posit is embedded. But
there is no clear consensus on how much of a mismatch is necessary
before we can say a given posit doesn't exist. Stich offers a
variety of reasons for thinking that there are fundamental
difficulties that will plague any attempt to provide principled
criteria for distinguishing cases of reference success from cases of
reference failure. Consequently, the question of whether a theory
change should be ontologically conservative or radical has no clear
answer. Because eliminative materialism rests on the assumption that
folk psychology should be replaced in a way that is ontologically
radical, Stich's account pulls the rug out from under the
eliminativist. Of course, this is a problem for the folk psychology
realist as well as the eliminativist, since Stich's skeptical
argument challenges our grounds for distinguishing the two.


## 5. Concluding Comments



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. As Jerry Fodor puts it, "if
commonsense psychology were to collapse, that would be, beyond
comparison, the greatest intellectual catastrophe in the history of
our species ..." (1987, p. xii). Thus, eliminative
materialism has stimulated various projects partly designed to
vindicate ordinary mental states and establish their respectability in
a sophisticated account of the mind. For example, several projects
pursued by philosophers in recent years have attempted to provide a
reductive account of the semantic content of propositional attitudes
that is entirely naturalistic (i.e., an account that only appeals to
straightforward causal-physical relations and properties). Much of the
impetus for these projects stems in part from the recognition that
eliminative materialism cannot be as easily dismissed as earlier
writers, like C. D. Broad, had originally assumed.



Of course, some claim that these concerns are quite premature, given
the promissory nature of eliminative materialism. After all, a pivotal
component of the eliminativist perspective is the idea that the
correct theory of the mind, once discovered by psychologists, will not
reveal a system or structure that includes anything like common-sense
mental states. Thus, for eliminative materialism to get off the
ground, we need to assume that scientific psychology is going to turn
out a certain way. But why suppose that before scientific psychology
gets there? What is the point of drawing such a drastic conclusion
about the nature of mentality, when a central premise needed for that
conclusion is a long ways from being known?



One response an eliminativist might offer here would be to consider
the broader theoretical roles eliminative materialism can play in our
quest for a successful theory of the mind. Various writers have
stipulated necessary conditions that any theory of the mind must meet,
and on some accounts these conditions include the explication of
various mental states as understood by common sense. According to this
view, if a theory doesn't include states that correspond with
beliefs, or provide us with some sort of account of the nature of
consciousness, then it needn't be taken seriously as a complete
account of "real" mental phenomena. One virtue of
eliminative materialism is that it liberates our theorizing from this
restrictive perspective. Thus, the relationship between eliminative
materialism and science may be more reciprocal than many have assumed.
While it is true that eliminative materialism depends upon the
development of a radical scientific theory of the mind, radical
theorizing about the mind may itself rest upon our taking seriously
the possibility that our common sense perspective may be profoundly
mistaken.