Eliminative Materialism

Question 1

What is eliminative materialism?

Answer 1

Eliminative Materialism argues that future scientific developments in the field of neuroscience will show that how we discuss the mind is fundamentally flawed.

Question 2

What is Folk psychology?

Answer 2

Folk psychology refers to the common-sense understanding and explanation of human behavior. It involves the use of mental states like beliefs, desires, and intentions to explain why people act in certain ways

Question 3

Why dies Eliminative Materialism reject Folk psychology?

Answer 3

Eliminating materialism rejects folk psychology because it argues that mental states like beliefs and desires (central to folk psychology) don’t exist as real entities.
Instead, it claims that everything can be explained in purely physical or neurological terms.

Question 4

What ‘elimination’ means in terms of scientific theory?

Answer 4

Elimination refers to the process of completely rejecting or discarding a theory because it is found to be incorrect or replaced by a better explanation, meaning that the theory is no longer considered a valid explanation for the phenomena it aimed to describe.

Question 5

What does Eliminative materialism say about Folk Psychology?

Answer 5

Most physicalist theories reduce mental states to something else: type identity theory (pain to c-fibres) etc.
Eliminative Materialism argues that ‘folk’ psychology concepts do not reduce to anything and should therefore be ELIMINATED.

Question 6

What are 4 Paul Churchland’s observations on Folk psychology?

Answer 6

1. Folk psychology does not always make accurate predictions.
2. Folk psychology cannot explain several aspects of mental life.
3. Folk psychology hasn’t changed or improved in thousands of years.
4. The mental property of intentionality is inconsistent with other accurate scientific theories