Eliminative Materialsim

Question 1

What is eliminative materialism in 6 points?

Answer 1

• Our mental concepts are so mistaken, in fact, that we should abandon all talk of the mental, and stick to talking about brain processes instead.
• Churchlands laws: If someone is thirsty, they will, under normal circumstances, go and get a drink. Churchland calls this body of knowledge folk psychology. Churchland then goes and says 3 reasons why folk psychology is false!
• The first premise: The psychological laws we use aren’t a matter of conceptual truth. Instead, folk psychology is an empirical theory about human behaviour.
• The second premise: If it were shown that our common-sense laws are actually not very good at explaining and predicting people’s behaviour, then folk psychology should be rejected.
• The third premise: Scientific research indicates a strong connection between the mind and brain processes, arguably folk psychology doesn’t show this link.
• Churchlands 3 reasons why folk psychology will be proven wrong: 1) There are many aspects of mental life that folk psychology cannot explain e.g. sleeping.
  2) No growth of folk psychology since Greeks, neuroscience grows all the time.
  3) We cannot make folk psychology coherent with other successful scientific theories. Central idea of intentionality is problematic.

Question 2

What does churchland mean by laws?

Answer 2

-What is going on that we tacitly know and use a rich network of common sense (perhaps rather loose) laws.

• Churchland calls this folk psychology:
• A body of knowledge or theory regarding the prediction and explanation and prediction of people’s behaviour constituted by the platitudes about the mind ordinary people are inclined to endorse.

Question 3

What is the objection to eliminative materialism that it is counter-intuitive?

Answer 3

• What could be more immediately and directly obvious than that we have thoughts, desires, emotions, beliefs etc.
• Descartes took ‘i think’ to be his first certainty and for good reason.
• Nothing, it seems, could be more certain to me than the fact that I have mental states.
• So it would appear no argument could be strong enough to justify giving up such a belief.

Question 4

How can we respond to the challenge that it’s counter-intuitive?

Answer 4

• It’s problematic and misunderstands Churchland’s claim.
• First it appeal to what is obvious and problematic. For instance, isn’t it just obvious that the sun moves around the earth? Just look!
• More significantly it misunderstands Churchland’s claim.
• Biologists who argues against vital force did not deny that things are alive and so to churchland does not deny the existence of psychological phenomena as such.
• He accepts that the phenomena that we conceptualise as ‘thinking’ occur; he denies that FP is the correct theory of its nature.

Question 5

What is the challenge that EM is self-refuting?

Answer 5

• Churchlands Argument starts from the premise that FP is an empirical theory.
• This is why we can think about proving that it is false and eliminating its concepts.
• But there is good reason to suppose that this is a misunderstanding.
• EM presents arguments, which are expressions of beliefs and rely on beliefs about what words mean and how reasoning works, in order to change our beliefs about FP.
• Yet EM claims that there are no beliefs!

-It concludes that there are no beliefs, but it presupposes that there are beliefs!

Question 6

What are Churchland’s 3 reasons why folk psychology will be proven wrong?

Answer 6

Churchlands 3 reasons why folk psychology will be proven wrong: 1) There are many aspects of mental life that folk psychology cannot explain e.g. sleeping.

2) No growth of folk psychology since Greeks, neuroscience grows all the time.
3) We cannot make folk psychology coherent with other successful scientific theories. Central idea of intentionality is problematic.

Question 7

What is Churchland’s first premise why FP is false?

Answer 7

• We understand what beliefs, desires etc., are in terms of their place in this network of laws- in terms of how they relate to other mental states and behaviour.
• For example: desires motivate behaviour, beliefs represent the world etc.
• For Churchland, the psychological laws we use aren’t a matter of conceptual truth. Instead, folk psychology is an empirical theory about human behaviour.

Question 8

What is Churchlands second premise that FP will be proven wrong?

Answer 8

• Empirical theories can be tested, and if they turn out to not be accurate, then they are abandoned for more accurate theories.
• If it were shown that our commons-sense laws are actually not very good at explaining and predicting people’s behaviour, then FP should be rejected.
• This has an important implication:
• The concepts of FP gain their meaning from the network of laws. If we reject the laws, then we should abandon our common sense concepts as well.
• Why should we take this approach?
• Churchland tackles this by approaching them as theoretical concepts:
• Theories hypothersise that certain things exist in order to explain what we observe. E.g. atoms, germs, vital force etc.
• If The theory is unsuccessful we shouldn’t think that the hypothesised thing still exists.
• If FP is false, we shouldn’t believe that beliefs, desires etc still exist.

Question 9

What is Churchlands 3rd premise that FP will be proven wrong?

Answer 9

• Scientific research indicates a strong relationship between our behaviour and the mental states/ processes in the brain.
• Therefore our common sense approach of the mind needs to be related to neuroscientific theory.
• This is the question of reduction. Will the common-sense ontology of states and processes reduce to the ontology of neuroscience?
• EM thinks not!
• EM argues that our common sense ontology will not reduce, but this is because FP is false.
• It should be replaced by a neuroscientific theory.
• As a result, Churchland argues that there are no such things as beliefs (as we understand them now).