Dualists cannot explain the mechanisms by which souls generate meaning, truth, intentionality or self-awareness. Thus, dualism creates no explanatory advantage.
If the only reasons for supposing that non-physical minds exist are the phenomena of intentionality, privacy and the like, then dualism unnecessarily complicates the metaphysics of personhood. We can ask how much the brain weighs, but not how much the mind weighs.
We can ask how many miles per hour my body is moving, but not how many miles per hour my mind is moving. Minds are just not the sorts of things that can have size, shape, weight, location, motion, and the other attributes that Descartes ascribes to extended reality. We literally could not understand someone who informed us that the memories of his last holiday are two inches behind the bridge of his nose or that his perception of the color red is straight back from his left eye.
Another argument for dualism claims that dualism is required for free will. If dualism is false, then presumably materialism, the thesis that humans are entirely physical beings, is true.
We set aside consideration of idealism —the thesis that only minds and ideas exist. If materialism were true, then every motion of bodies should be determined by the laws of physics, which govern the actions and reactions of everything in the universe. But a robust sense of freedom presupposes that we are free, not merely to do as we please, but that we are free to do otherwise than as we do. This, in turn, requires that the cause of our actions not be fixed by natural laws.
Since, according to the dualist, the mind is non-physical, there is no need to suppose it bound by the physical laws that govern the body. So, a strong sense of free will is compatible with dualism but incompatible with materialism. Since freedom in just this sense is required for moral appraisal, the dualist can also argue that materialism, but not dualism, is incompatible with ethics. Taylor, , p. Rey, , pp. This, the dualist may claim, creates a strong presumption in favor of their metaphysics.
This argument is sometimes countered by arguing that free will is actually compatible with materialism or that even if the dualistic account of the will is correct, it is irrelevant because no volition on the part of a non-physical substance could alter the course of nature anyway. Man would be free only if there was nothing he could do. Property dualists are not committed to the existence of non-physical substances, but are committed to the irreducibility of mental phenomena to physical phenomena.
An argument for property dualism, derived from Thomas Nagel and Saul Kripke, is as follows: We can assert that warmth is identical to mean kinetic molecular energy, despite appearances, by claiming that warmth is how molecular energy is perceived or manifested in consciousness.
Similarly, color is identical to electromagnetic reflectance efficiencies, inasmuch as color is how electromagnetic wavelengths are processed by human consciousness. In these cases, the appearance can be distinguished from the reality. Heat is molecular motion, though it appears to us as warmth. Other beings, for example, Martians, might well apprehend molecular motion in another fashion.
They would grasp the same objective reality, but by correlating it with different experiences. We move toward a more objective understanding of heat when we understand it as molecular energy rather than as warmth. Consciousness itself, however, cannot be reduced to brain activity along analogous lines because we should then need to say that consciousness is how brain activity is perceived in consciousness, leaving consciousness unreduced. Put differently, when it comes to consciousness, the appearance is the reality.
Therefore, no reduction is possible. Nagel writes:. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here.
What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favor of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us.
Nagel ; reprinted in Block et. Consciousness is thus sui generis of its own kind , and successful reductions elsewhere should give us little confidence when it comes to experience. Mentality is a broad and complex property. Some things—in particular, persons and certain biological organisms—can also instantiate mental properties, like being in pain and liking the taste of avocado.
Once we admit the existence of mental properties, we can inquire into the nature of the relationship between mental and physical properties.
According to the supervenience thesis , there can be no mental differences without corresponding physical differences.
If, for example, I feel a headache, there must be some change not only in my mental state, but also in my body presumably, in my brain. If Mary is in pain, but Erin is not, then, according to the supervenience thesis, there must be a physical difference between Mary and Erin. Kim, p. Why deny supervenience?
If it is possible to have mental differences without physical differences, then mental properties cannot be identical to or reducible to physical properties. They would exist as facts about the world over and above the purely physical facts. Kim, and following. Without the actual existence of such a world, the argument that mental properties do not supervene on physical properties fails.
A second rebuttal avers that absent qualia thought experiments and inverted spectra though experiments only support property dualism if we can imagine these possibilities obtaining. We may think we can conceive of such a world but attempts to do so do not actually achieve such a conception. If it is, its truth is necessary. If, then, someone thought that they imagined a proof that the thesis is false, they would be conceiving the falsity of what is in reality a necessary truth.
This is implausible. But perhaps the physicalist can come up with independent reasons for supposing that the dualist has failed to imagine what she claims. The physicalist can point, for example, to successful reductions in other areas of science. On the basis of these cases she can argue the implausibility of supposing that, uniquely, mental phenomena resist reduction to the causal properties of matter.
That is, an inductive argument for reduction outweighs a conceivability argument against reduction. And in that case, the dualist must do more than merely insist that she has correctly imagined inverted spectra in isomorphic individuals.
For useful discussions of some of these issues, see Tye and Horgan It is often alleged, more broadly, that dualism is unscientific and renders impossible any genuine science of mind or truly empirical psychology. Those eager to defend the relevance of science to the study of mind, such as Paul Churchland, have argued that dualism is inconsistent with the facts of human evolution and fetal development. According to this view, we began as wholly physical beings. This is true of the species and the individual human.
No one seriously supposes that newly fertilized ova are imbued with minds or that the original cell in the primordial sea was conscious. But from those entirely physical origins, nothing non-physical was later added. We can explain the evolution from the unicellular stage to present complexities by means of random mutations and natural selection in the species case and through the accretion of matter through nutritional intake in the individual case.
But if we, as species or individuals, began as wholly physical beings and nothing nonphysical was later added, then we are still wholly physical creatures. Thus, dualism is false. The above arguments are only as strong as our reasons for thinking that we began as wholly material beings and that nothing non-physical was later added. Some people, particularly the religious, will object that macro-evolution of a species is problematic or that God might well have infused the developing fetus with a soul at some point in the developmental process traditionally at quickening.
Most contemporary philosophers of mind put little value in these rejoinders. Others argue that dualism is scientifically unacceptable because it violates the well-established principle of the conservation of energy. Interactionists argue that mind and matter causally interact. But if the spiritual realm is continually impinging on the universe and effecting changes, the total level of energy in the cosmos must be increasing or at least fluctuating.
This is because it takes physical energy to do physical work. If the will alters states of affairs in the world such as the state of my brain , then mental energy is somehow converted into physical energy. At the point of conversion, one would anticipate a physically inexplicable increase in the energy present within the system. First, they could deny the sacredness of the principle of the conservation of energy. This would be a desperate measure.
The principle is too well established and its denial too ad hoc. Second, the dualist might offer that mind does contribute energy to our world, but that this addition is so slight, in relation to our means of detection, as to be negligible. This is really a re-statement of the first reply above, except that here the principle is valid in so far as it is capable of verification.
Science can continue as usual, but it would be unreasonable to extend the law beyond our ability to confirm it experimentally. That would be to step from the empirical to the speculative—the very thing that the materialist objects to in dualism.
The third option sidesteps the issue by appealing to another, perhaps equally valid, principle of physics. Keith Campbell writes:. The indeterminacy of quantum laws means that any one of a range of outcomes of atomic events in the brain is equally compatible with known physical laws.
And differences on the quantum scale can accumulate into very great differences in overall brain condition. So there is some room for spiritual activity even within the limits set by physical law. There could be, without violation of physical law, a general spiritual constraint upon what occurs inside the head. Further, it should be remembered that the conservation of energy is designed around material interaction; it is mute on how mind might interact with matter.
The conservation of energy argument points to a more general complaint often made against dualism: that interaction between mental and physical substances would involve a causal impossibility. Since the mind is, on the Cartesian model, immaterial and unextended, it can have no size, shape, location, mass, motion or solidity.
How then can minds act on bodies? What sort of mechanism could convey information of the sort bodily movement requires, between ontologically autonomous realms? To suppose that non-physical minds can move bodies is like supposing that imaginary locomotives can pull real boxcars.
Unfortunately, this expedient proved a dead-end, since it is as incomprehensible how the mind could initiate motion in the animal spirits as in matter itself. These problems involved in mind-body causality are commonly considered decisive refutations of interactionism.
However, many interesting questions arise in this area. Where does the interaction occur? What is the nature of the interface between mind and matter? How are volitions translated into states of affairs? It is useful to be reminded, however, that to be bewildered by something is not in itself to present an argument against, or even evidence against, the possibility of that thing being a matter of fact. Nothing much. It only follows that dualists do not know everything about metaphysics.
But so what? Why should the dualist be any different? In short, dualists can argue that they should not be put on the defensive by the request for clarification about the nature and possibility of interaction or by the criticism that they have no research strategy for producing this clarification. The objection that minds and bodies cannot interact can be the expression of two different sorts of view. On the one hand, the detractor may insist that it is physically impossible that minds act on bodies.
If this means that minds, being non-physical, cannot physically act on bodies, the claim is true but trivial. If it means that mind-body interaction violates the laws of physics such as the first law of thermodynamics, discussed above , the dualist can reply that minds clearly do act on bodies and so the violation is only apparent and not real.
After all, if we do things for reasons, our beliefs and desires cause some of our actions. If the materialist insists that we are able to act on our beliefs, desires and perceptions only because they are material and not spiritual, the dualist can turn the tables on his naturalistic opponents and ask how matter, regardless of its organization, can produce conscious thoughts, feelings and perceptions. How, the dualist might ask, by adding complexity to the structure of the brain, do we manage to leap beyond the quantitative into the realm of experience?
The relationship between consciousness and brain processes leaves the materialist with a causal mystery perhaps as puzzling as that confronting the dualist. On the other hand, the materialist may argue that it is a conceptual truth that mind and matter cannot interact. This, however, requires that we embrace the rationalist thesis that causes can be known a priori. Many prefer to assert that causation is a matter for empirical investigation.
Otherwise, anything can be the cause of anything else. If volitions are constantly conjoined with bodily movements and regularly precede them, they are Humean causes. In short, if Hume is correct, we cannot refute dualism a priori by asserting that transactions between minds and bodies involve links where, by definition, none can occur. Some, such as Ducasse , 88; cf. Dicker pp. While it makes sense to ask how depressing the accelerator causes the automobile to speed up, it makes no sense to ask how pressing the accelerator pedal causes the pedal to move.
We can sensibly ask how to spell a word in sign language, but not how to move a finger. One final note: epiphenomenalism, like occasionalism and parallelism, is a dualistic theory of mind designed, in part, to avoid the difficulties involved in mental-physical causation although occasionalism was also offered by Malebranche as an account of seemingly purely physical causation.
According to epiphenomenalism, bodies are able to act on minds, but not the reverse. The causes of behavior are wholly physical. As such, we need not worry about how objects without mass or physical force can alter behavior. Nor need we be concerned with violations of the conservation of energy principle since there is little reason to suppose that physical energy is required to do non-physical work. If bodies affect modifications in the mental medium, that need not be thought to involve a siphoning of energy from the world to the psychic realm.
On this view, the mind may be likened to the steam from a train engine; the steam does not affect the workings of the engine but is caused by it. Unfortunately, epiphenomenalism avoids the problem of interaction only at the expense of denying the common-sense view that our states of mind have some bearing on our conduct. For many, epiphenomenalism is therefore not a viable theory of mind. For a defense of the common-sense claim that beliefs and attitudes and reasons cause behavior, see Donald Davidson.
The correlation and dependence argument against dualism begins by noting that there are clear correlations between certain mental events and neural events say, between pain and a-fiber or c-fiber stimulation.
Moreover, as demonstrated in such phenomena as memory loss due to head trauma or wasting disease, the mind and its capacities seem dependent upon neural function. The simplest and best explanation of this dependence and correlation is that mental states and events are neural states and events and that pain just is c-fiber stimulation. Because of the proposed identification of sensations with states of the central nervous system, this limited version of Mind-Brain Type Identity also became known as Central-State Materialism.
Where Smart diverged from Place was in the explanation he gave for adopting the thesis that sensations are processes in the brain. On the epiphenomenalist picture, in addition to the normal physical laws of cause and effect there are psychophysical laws positing mental effects which do not by themselves function as causes for any observable behavior. In a number of early papers, and then at length in his book, A Materialist Theory of the Mind , Armstrong worked out a version of Mind-Brain Type Identity which starts from a somewhat different place than the others.
Adopting straight away the scientific view that humans are nothing more than physico-chemical mechanisms, he declared that the task for philosophy is to work out an account of the mind which is compatible with this view. Already the seeds were sown for an Identity Theory which covers all of our mental concepts, not merely those which fit but awkwardly on the Behaviorist picture.
Armstrong actually gave credit to the Behaviorists for logically connecting internal mental states with external behavior; where they went wrong, he argued, was in identifying the two realms. His own suggestion was that it makes a lot more sense to define the mental not as behavior, but rather as the inner causes of behavior.
As initially outlined by Paul Feyerabend , this kind of Identity Theory actually favors doing away with our present mental concepts. Different philosophers took this proposal to imply different things. This begs the question, of course, what such a new-and-improved vocabulary would look like. Responding to Feyerabend, a number of philosophers expressed concern about the appropriateness of classifying disappearance versions as theories of Mind-Brain Type Identity.
Perhaps the weakest were those of the epistemological variety. It has been claimed, for example, that because people have had and still do have knowledge of specific mental states while remaining ignorant as to the physical states with which they are correlated, the former could not possibly be identical with the latter. The obvious response to this type of objection is to call attention to the contingent nature of the proposed identities—of course we have different conceptions of mental states and their correlated brain states, or no conception of the latter at all, but that is just because as Feigl made perfectly clear the language we use to describe them have different meanings.
The contingency of mind-brain identity relations also serves to answer the objection that since presently accepted correlations may very well be empirically invalidated in the future, mental states and brain states should not be viewed as identical.
A more serious objection to Mind-Brain Type Identity, one that to this day has not been satisfactorily resolved, concerns various non-intensional properties of mental states on the one hand , and physical states on the other.
After-images, for example, may be green or purple in color, but nobody could reasonably claim that states of the brain are green or purple. And conversely, while brain states may be spatially located with a fair degree of accuracy, it has traditionally been assumed that mental states are non-spatial.
As for apparent discrepancies going in the other direction e. If I report the occurrence of a pain in my leg, then the story goes I must have a pain in my leg. But the real import of this discrepancy concerns the purported correlations between mental states and brain states.
What are we to make of cases in which the report of a brain scientist contradicts the introspective report, say, of someone claiming to be in pain? Is the brain scientist always wrong? Something here needs to be said about the difference between Type Identity and Token Identity, as this difference gets manifested in the ontological commitments implicit in various Mind-Brain Identity theses.
Token Identity theories hold that every concrete particular falling under a mental kind can be identified with some physical perhaps neurophysiological happening or other: instances of pain, for example, are taken to be not only instances of a mental state e. Token Identity is weaker than Type Identity, which goes so far as to claim that mental kinds themselves are physical kinds. The former is entailed by the latter because if mental kinds themselves are physical kinds, then each individual instance of a mental kind will also be an individual instance of a physical kind.
So the Identity Theory, taken as a theory of types rather than tokens, must make some claim to the effect that mental states such as pain and not just individual instances of pain are contingently identical with—and therefore theoretically reducible to—physical states such as c-fiber excitation.
Depending on the desired strength and scope of mind-brain identity, however, there are various ways of refining this claim. It is important to note, however, that Token Identity theories are fully consistent with the multiple realizability of mental states. Consequently, there do not appear to be any structures in these networks that might serve as candidates for beliefs and other propositional attitudes.
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. 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, 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, ; Heil, This is a common criticism of eliminative materialism, and we will look at it more closely in Section 4.
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, ; van Gelder, ; Port and van Gelder, 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.
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, , who have tried to account for cognition without invoking representational entities.
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. Thus, Hutto and Myin join other authors who have endorsed eliminativism about mental representations by focusing upon the problematic nature of content. 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.
In certain conditions, drugs like morphine cause subjects to report that they are experiencing excruciating pain, but that it is not unpleasant. 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 Hardcastle argues that the neurological basis for pain sensations is so complex that no one thing answers to our folk conception. 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. 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.
Illusionism thereby forces us to reconsider the sort of access we have to our own experiential states. Like any theory that challenges our fundamental understanding of things, eliminative materialism has been subjected to a variety of criticisms. Many writers have argued that eliminative materialism is in some sense self-refuting Baker, ; Boghossian, , ; Reppert, 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. Churchland, ; Cling, ; Devitt, ; Ramsey, A more sophisticated version of the self-refutation ojection 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, , 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, ; Devitt and Rey, 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 and Ryle , 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, ; Haldane, ; Hannan, ; Wilkes, What folk psychology actually does treat beliefs and desires as is much less clear in this tradition.
One perspective Dennett, 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, as we saw at the end of Section 2. 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.
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, , ; Goldman, 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, ; Gordon, 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, 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, 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.
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.
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, ; Fodor, ; Lahav, 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. 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, ; Horgan and Graham, ; Jackson and Pettit, 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. Churchland, 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. One final argument against eliminative materialism comes from the recent writings of a former supporter, Stephen Stich , 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. A Brief History 2. Contemporary Eliminative Materialism 2.
Arguments For Eliminative Materialism 3. Arguments Against Eliminative Materialism 4. A Brief History In principle, anyone denying the existence of some type of thing is an eliminativist with regard to that type of thing.
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.
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. 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.
Arguments Against Eliminative Materialism Like any theory that challenges our fundamental understanding of things, eliminative materialism has been subjected to a variety of criticisms.
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