eliminative materialism

Question 1

what is eliminative materialism

Answer 1

is a materialist position. primary claim is that peoples common sense understanding of the mind (folk psychology) is false. challenges the existence of various mental states

Question 2

what is folk psychology

Answer 2

the mental states that figure in our everyday psychological explanations.

Question 3

argument for -“folk psychology is an inadequate part of nature”

Answer 3

folk psychology is an inadequate part of nature
it is unable to explain why we need sleep, why we dream, how we learn. Our neuroscientific understanding of mind will later explain these

Question 4

folk psychology vs neuroscience

Answer 4

when talking in philosophical terms, we should not uses terms such as belief or pain, as these don’t exist and we shouldn’t take them literally.

Question 5

direct certainty of folk psychology

and response

Answer 5

eliminating folk psychology goes against many intuitions that we have.
direct introspective certainty we have about mental states should be held with higher priority than physicalist considerations

misunderstands the point of Churchland’s eliminative materialism. We do not deny the existence of the mental states, but we say folk psychology isnt the technically correct theory as to their nature