About this topic
Summary Eliminative materialism is a revisionary view in the philosophy of mind and of cognitive science, according to which our ordinary, folk psychological notions and categories of mental states are empty, that is, they do not stand for anything in objective reality. Ordinary categories of mental states include propositional attitudes (such as belief, desire, fear) and phenomenal states (such as the subjective aspect of pain, pleasure, colour perception, etc.). The main point of eliminative materialism is that categorization of mental states according to our ordinary, everyday understanding is illegitimate, because it is not supported by the best scientific taxonomies that deal with mental life, such as neuroscience. Some eliminative materialist authors add the further claim that future neuroscience will in fact eliminate all non-scientific vocabulary related to the domain of mental states. 
Key works Early formulations of the view are due to Quine 1960 and Feyerabend 1963. Rorty 1965 was the first influential and elaborate statement and endorsement of the view, later dubbed as "eliminative materialism" by Cornman 1968. Its version that attacks propositional attitudes have been elaborated by Churchland 1981, Churchland 1984, Churchland 1986, and Stich 1983. The literature that is critical of the view is considerable. Some works include Kitcher 1984, Horgan & Woodward 1985, Baker 1987, and Jackson & Pettit 1990.
Introductions Edited collections containing articles for and against the view are Bogdan 1991 and Christensen & Turner 1993. Introductions include Heil 2004, Braddon-Mitchell & Jackson 1996, and Mandik 2013.
Related

Contents
150 found
Order:
1 — 50 / 150
  1. Ontology after Folk Psychology; or, Why Eliminativists should be Mental Fictionalists.T. Parent - manuscript
    Mental fictionalism holds that folk psychology should be regarded as a kind of fiction. The present version gives a Lewisian prefix semantics for mentalistic discourse, where roughly, a mentalistic sentence “p” is true iff “p” is deducible from the folk psychological fiction. An eliminativist version of the view can seem self-refuting, but this charge is neutralized. Yet a different kind of “self-effacing” emerges: Mental fictionalism appears to be a mere “parasite” on a future science of cognition, without contributing anything substantial. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Eliminativism and Reading One's Own Mind.T. Parent - manuscript
    Some contemporary philosophers suggest that we know just by introspection that folk psychological states exist. However, such an "armchair refutation" of eliminativism seems too easy. I first attack two strategems, inspired by Descartes, on how such a refutation might proceed. However, I concede that the Cartesian intuition that we have direct knowledge of representational states is very powerful. The rest of this paper then offers an error theory of how that intuition might really be mistaken. The idea is that introspection (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. On IQ and other sciencey descriptions of minds.Devin Sanchez Curry - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    Philosophers of mind (from eliminative materialists to psychofunctionalists to interpretivists) generally assume that a normative ideal delimits which mental phenomena exist (though they disagree about how to characterize the ideal in question). This assumption is dubious. A comprehensive ontology of mind includes some mental phenomena that are neither (a) explanatorily fecund posits in any branch of cognitive science that aims to unveil the mechanistic structure of cognitive systems nor (b) ideal (nor even progressively closer to ideal) posits in any given (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4. Unreal Beliefs: An Anti-Realist Approach in the Metaphysics of Mind.Poslajko Krzysztof - forthcoming - London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
    The main idea behind this book is that beliefs are, in an interesting philosophical sense, unreal. There are three main aims of the book. The first is to provide a novel characterization of the debate about the reality of beliefs that focuses not on the question of whether beliefs exist, but rather on the question of whether they can be treated as natural properties. The second aim is to propose and justify a novel version of anti-realism, called “minimal non-realism”. It (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. Mental Fictionalism: the costly combination of magic and the mind.Amber Ross - forthcoming - In T. Parent & Adam Toon Tamas Demeter (ed.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations.
    Mental fictionalism is not the benign view that we may better understand the mind if we think of mental states as something like useful fictions, but the more radical view that mental states just are useful fictions. This paper argues that, if one were to treat mental states as a kind of fiction, the genre of fiction best suited to this purpose would be fantasy make-believe, in which magic is a central feature. After defending a promising fictionalist account of mental (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  6. The Abolition of Phenomena: a Voyage among the Zombies.Katalin Balog - 2023 - Klesis 55.
    Illusionism claims that we are not conscious, that there is nothing it is like, in the usual sense of the word, to feel sad, or to smell lavender. According to Illusionists, we are, in a technical sense, zombies. Instead of arguing for the falsity of Illusionism directly, I will explain why the main philosophical motivations for it are mistaken – and I trust the rest will be taken care of by the extreme implausibility of the view. I want to spread (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. Mind as Metaphor: A Defence of Mental Fictionalism.Adam Toon - 2023 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    This book develops a new approach to the mind called mental fictionalism. The key idea behind this approach is that the mind is a useful fiction. The book begins with our ordinary conception of the mind (known as folk psychology). At present, the dominant interpretation of folk psychology sees it as an attempt to describe our inner machinery (a view the author calls Cartesianism). The representational theory of mind (or representationalism) argues that our folk theory is true, and that our (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  8. Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations.Tamás Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.) - 2022 - New York & London: Routledge.
    What are mental states? When we talk about people’s beliefs or desires, are we talking about what is happening inside their heads? If so, might cognitive science show that we are wrong? Might it turn out that mental states do not exist? Mental fictionalism offers a new approach to these longstanding questions about the mind. Its core idea is that mental states are useful fictions. When we talk about mental states, we are not formulating hypotheses about people’s inner machinery. Instead, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  9. What is Mental Fictionalism?Tamas Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon - 2022 - In Tamas Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. New York: Routledge. pp. 1-24.
    This chapter introduces several versions of mental fictionalism, along with the main lines of objection and reply. It begins by considering the debate between eliminative materialism (“eliminativism”) versus realism about mental states as conceived in “folk psychology” (i.e., beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.). Mental fictionalism offers a way to transcend the debate by allowing talk of mental states without a commitment to realism. The idea is to treat folk psychology as a “story” and three different elaborations of this are reviewed. First, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. What we talk about when we talk about mental states.Zoe Drayson - 2022 - In Tamas Demeter, T. Parent & Adam Toon (eds.), Mental Fictionalism: Philosophical Explorations. Routledge. pp. 147-159.
    Fictionalists propose that some apparently fact-stating discourses do not aim to convey factual information about the world, but rather allow us to engage in a fiction or pretense without incurring ontological commitments. Some philosophers have suggested that using mathematical, modal, or moral discourse, for example, need not commit us to the existence of mathematical objects, possible worlds, or moral facts. The mental fictionalist applies this reasoning to our mental discourse, suggesting that we can use ‘belief’ and ‘desire’ talk without committing (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  11. The Lycan–Stich Argument and the Plasticity of “Belief”.Krzysztof Poslajko - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1257-1273.
    The aim of this paper is to argue against the claim that the term “belief”, as it functions in philosophical psychology, has natural-kind term semantics; this thesis is central to the famous Lycan–Stich argument against eliminative materialism. I will argue that the current debate concerning the discrepancy between the professed opinions and actions, especially the debate concerning the idea of aliefs, shows that the concept of belief is plastic and amenable to conceptual engineering. The plasticity and amenability to conceptual engineering (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  12. Disillusioned.Katalin Balog - 2020 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 27 (5-6):38-53.
    In “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness”, David Chalmers draws a new framework in which to consider the mind-body problem. In addition to trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness – the problem of why and how brain processes give rise to conscious experience –, he thinks that philosophy, psychology, neuro-science and the other cognitive sciences should also pursue a solution to what he calls the “meta-problem” of consciousness – i.e., the problem of why we think there is a problem with (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  13. Won’t Get Fooled Again: Wittgensteinian Philosophy and the Rhetoric of Empiricism.Russell P. Johnson - 2020 - Sophia 59 (2):345-363.
    The debate surrounding eliminative materialism, and the role of empiricism more broadly, has been one of the more prominent philosophical debates of the last half-century. But too often what is at stake in this debate has been left implicit. This essay surveys the rhetoric of two participants in this debate, Paul Churchland and Thomas Nagel, on the question of whether or not scientific explanations will do away with the need for nonscientific descriptions. Both philosophers talk about this possibility in language (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14. Denialism: What Do the so-called Consciousness Deniers Deny?Orly Shenker - 2020 - Iyyun 68:307-337.
    Some philosophers consider that some of their colleagues deny that consciousness exists. We shall call the latter ‘deniers’, adopting a term that was initially meant pejoratively. What do the deniers deny? In order to answer this question, we shall examine arguments, both of some deniers and of their critics, and present denialism as a systematic highly non-trivial position that has had some interesting achievements. We will show that the denialist project concerns the epistemology of the mind and specifically of consciousness: (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15. Quine's Monism and Modal Eliminativism in the Realm of Supervenience.Atilla Akalın - 2019 - International Journal of Social Humanities Sciences Research (JSHRS) 6 (34):795-800.
    This study asserts that W.V.O. Quine’s eliminative philosophical gaze into mereological composition affects inevitably his interpretations of composition theories of ontology. To investigate Quine’s property monism from the account of modal eliminativism, I applied to his solution for the paradoxes of de re modalities’ . Because of its vital role to figure out how dispositions are encountered by Quine, it was significantly noted that the realm of de re modalities doesn’t include contingent and impossible inferences about things. Therefore, for him, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  16. Welcome to Strong Illusionism.Daniel C. Dennett - 2019 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (9-10):48-58.
    David Chalmers underestimates the possibility that actually answering the 'hard question' will make both the hard problem and the meta-problem of consciousness evaporate.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  17. Eliminative Materialism and Ordinary Language.Daniel Lorca & Eric LaRock - 2019 - Philosophia Christi 21 (2):419-426.
    Advocates of eliminative materialism (EM) assure us that our current, ordinary approach to describing the mind will eventually be eliminated, instead of reduced, by a matured neuroscience. However, once we take into account the flexibility, explanatory power, and overall sophistication of ordinary language, then the promissory note offered by eliminative materialism loses all credibility. To bolster the preceding claim, we present three original problems for EM: the accountability problem, the substitution problem, and the discourse dependence problem.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  18. Elimination, not Reduction: Lessons from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) and Multiple Realisation.Tuomas K. Pernu - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42:e22.
    The thesis of multiple realisation that Borsboom et al. are relying on should not be taken for granted. In dissolving the apparent multiple realisation, the reductionist research strategies in psychopathology research (the Research Domain Criteria [RDoC] framework, in particular) are bound to lead to eliminativism rather than reductionism. Therefore, Borsboom et al. seem to be aiming at a wrong target.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  19. Eliminativism: the Problem of Representation and Carnapian Metametaphysics.Krzysztof Poslajko - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (2):181-195.
    The aim of this paper is to propose a new reading of eliminative materialism concerning propositional attitudes, along the lines of broadly understood Carnapian metametaphysics. According to the proposed reading, eliminativism should be seen as a normative metalinguistic claim that we should dispose of terms like “beliefs” and associated linguistic rules. It will be argued that such reading allows a significant philosophical problem which besets eliminativism to be solved: the problem of representation. The general idea of the problem of representation, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. Rorty avant Rorty. A propos de la distinction entre corps et esprit.Pierre Steiner - 2019 - Archives de Philosophie 82 (3):489-504.
  21. Extending the Debate on the Argument from Reason.Victor Reppert - 2018 - Philosophia Christi 20 (2):517-539.
    In our exchange in the book, C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: Pro and Con, edited by Gregory Bassham, David Kyle Johnson argued that four naturalistic views, property dualism, the identity theory, epiphenomenalism, and eliminative materialism, can all meet the challenge posed by a C. S. Lewis–style argument from reason. I maintain that his response fails to take into account what a consistent naturalism is committed to, and that his defenses of these positions fail to put those positions in the clear.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  22. The Explication Defence of Arguments from Reference.Mark Pinder - 2017 - Erkenntnis 82 (6):1253-1276.
    In a number of influential papers, Machery, Mallon, Nichols and Stich have presented a powerful critique of so-called arguments from reference, arguments that assume that a particular theory of reference is correct in order to establish a substantive conclusion. The critique is that, due to cross-cultural variation in semantic intuitions supposedly undermining the standard methodology for theorising about reference, the assumption that a theory of reference is correct is unjustified. I argue that the many extant responses to Machery et al.’s (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  23. Review of Physical Realization by Shoemaker (2009).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks 3rd Ed. (2017).
    Over 40 years ago I read a small grey book with metaphysics in the title which began with the words “Metaphysics is dead. Wittgenstein has killed it.” I am one of many who agree but sadly the rest of the world has not gotten the message. Shoemaker’s work is nonsense on stilts but is unusual only in that it never deviates into sense from the first paragraph to the last. At least with Dennett, Carruthers, Churchland etc one gets a breath (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. Illusionism's discontent.Katalin Balog - 2016 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 23 (11-12):40-51.
    Frankish positions his view, illusionism about qualia (a.k.a. eliminativist physicalism), in opposition to what he calls radical realism (dualism and neutral monism) and conservative realism (a.k.a. non-eliminativist physicalism). Against radical realism, he upholds physicalism. But he goes along with key premises of the Gap Arguments for radical realism, namely, 1) that epistemic/explanatory gaps exist between the physical and the phenomenal, and 2) that every truth should be perspicuously explicable from the fundamental truth about the world; and he concludes that because (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  25. Eliminating Eliminativism.Jason Harlan - 2016 - The Oxford Philosophical Society (OUDCE) Annual Review 38 (Autumn/Winter 2016):8-10.
    This article challenges a particular form of Eliminative Materialism as presented in the work, "Quining Qualia" where Dr. Daniel Dennett argues that qualia, as he defines it, does not exist. The paper underscores the contradictory nature of Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" and shows how he assumes the very notion he proports to defeat namely, that first-person (or subjective) conscious experience, commonly termed "qualia," exists.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  26. Kant’s Perspectival Solution to the Mind-Body Problem—Or, Why Eliminative Materialists Must Be Kantians.Stephen R. Palmquist - 2016 - Culture and Dialogue 4 (1):194-213.
    Kant’s pre-1770 philosophy responded to the mind-body problem by applying a theory of “physical influx”. His encounter with Swedenborg’s mysticism, however, left him disillusioned with any dualist solution to Descartes’ problem. One of the major goals of the Critical philosophy was to provide a completely new solution to the mind-body problem. Kant’s new solution is “perspectival” in the sense that all Critical theories are perspectival: it acknowledges a deep truth in both of the controversy’s extremes (i.e., what we might nowadays (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. From epiphenomenalism to eliminativism?Krzysztof Poslajko - 2016 - In Uncovering Facts and Values: Studies in Contemporary Epistemology and Political Philosophy. Brill. pp. 192–203.
    Jaegwon Kim used the causal exclusion argument as a weapon against non-reductive physicalism in the philosophy of mind. The aim of this paper is to inquire into the consequences of this argument in order to check whether they are devastating to the initial position. The main focus will be the question of whether type epiphenomenalism, the alleged consequence of the causal exclusion argument, really leads to eliminativism about the mental. In order to cast some doubt on this claim I use (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. El problema mente-cuerpo y el materialismo eliminativo.David Villena Saldaña - 2016 - Metanoia 1 (2):19-35.
    This paper is divided into three sections. It aims to give some resources for making possible a straightforward debate on the mind-body problem as well as some serious researches in it. Having these goals into account, the first section offers an introduction to the mind-body problem and the second section explains briefly some of the most influential answers to this problem. The third section is devoted to eliminative materialism.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29. Why Materialism Is False, and Why It Has Nothing To Do with the Mind.Jaworski William - 2016 - Philosophy 91 (2):183-213.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30. New Arguments for 'Intelligent Design'? Review Article on William A. Dembski, Being as Communion: A Metaphysics of Information. [REVIEW]Philippe Gagnon - 2015 - ESSSAT News and Reviews 25 (1):17-24.
    Critical notice assessing the use of information theory in the attempt to build a design inference, and to re-establish some aspects of the program of natural theology, as carried out in this third major monograph devoted to the subject of intelligent design theory by mathematician and philosopher William A. Dembski, after The Design Inference (1998) and No Free Lunch (2002).
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31. A Critique of Rorty’s Conception of Pragmatism.Paul Giladi - 2015 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 7 (2):168-185.
    The aim of this paper is to argue that Richard Rorty’s claim that pragmatism is opposed to all varieties of metaphysics is fundamentally mistaken. After detailing pragmatist reasons for thinking Rorty’s proposal is justified, I argue that there are more compelling pragmatist reasons to think Rorty’s metaphilosophical interpretation of pragmatism is rather problematic: firstly, Rorty has a narrow understanding of ‘metaphysics’ and he does not take into account Peirce’s argument that it is impossible to eliminate metaphysical concepts from ordinary language (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  32. The Wax and the Mechanical Mind: Reexamining Hobbes's Objections to Descartes's Meditations.Marcus P. Adams - 2014 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (3):403-424.
    Many critics, Descartes himself included, have seen Hobbes as uncharitable or even incoherent in his Objections to the Meditations on First Philosophy. I argue that when understood within the wider context of his views of the late 1630s and early 1640s, Hobbes's Objections are coherent and reflect his goal of providing an epistemology consistent with a mechanical philosophy. I demonstrate the importance of this epistemology for understanding his Fourth Objection concerning the nature of the wax and contend that Hobbes's brief (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  33. Liberal Naturalism: The Curious Case of Hegel.Paul Giladi - 2014 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (2):248-270.
    My aim in this paper is to defend the claim that the absolute idealism of Hegel is a liberal naturalist position against Sebastian Gardner’s claim that it is not genuinely naturalistic, and also to defend the position of ‘liberal naturalism’ from Ram Neta’s charge that there is no logical space for it to occupy. By ‘liberal naturalism’, I mean a doctrine which is a non-reductive form of philosophical naturalism. Like Fred Beiser, I take the thesis of liberal naturalism to find (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   18 citations  
  34. The Relationship Between Empirical Knowledge and Experiences.Mika Suojanen - 2014 - AL-Mukhatabat 1 (10):102-112.
    Experience has been described as a mental state with properties that it represents and possesses. Nevertheless, the existence of experience as a mental entity has been questioned by eliminative materialism, which states that everything that goes on in the world is physical, and thus there are no mental states. Experience can be analysed as a dependent entity known introspectively by living subjects. However, when experience is necessary in order to be connected with the environment and informed of its facts, it (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  35. Pain is Mechanism.Simon van Rysewyk - 2013 - Dissertation, University of Tasmania
    What is the relationship between pain and the body? I claim that pain is best explained as a type of personal experience and the bodily response during pain is best explained in terms of a type of mechanical neurophysiologic operation. I apply the radical philosophy of identity theory from philosophy of mind to the relationship between the personal experience of pain and specific neurophysiologic mechanism and argue that the relationship between them is best explained as one of type identity. Specifically, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  36. Critique of an Argument for the Reality of Purpose.Danny Frederick - 2012 - Prolegomena 11 (1):25-34.
    Schueler has argued, against the eliminativist, that human purposive action cannot be an illusion because the concept of purpose is not theoretical. He argues that the concept is known directly to be instantiated, through self-awareness; and that to maintain that the concept is theoretical involves an infinite regress. I show that Schueler’s argument fails because all our concepts are theoretical in the sense that we may be mistaken in applying them to our experience. As a consequence, it is conceivable that (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  37. Psychophysical Reductionism without Type Identities.Justin Tiehen - 2012 - American Philosophical Quarterly 49 (3):223-236.
    Nonreductive physicalists have a causal exclusion problem. Given certain theses all physicalists accept, including psychophysical supervenience and the causal closure of the physical realm, it is difficult to see how irreducible mental phenomena could make a causal difference to the world. The upshot, according to those who push the problem, is that we must embrace reductive physicalism. Only then is mental causation saved. -/- Grant the argument, at least provisionally. Here our focus is the conditional question: What form should one's (...)
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  38. Eliminative materialism.Charlotte Blease - 2011 - In Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy. Wiley-Blackwell.
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  39. Reconceiving Eliminative Inference.Patrick Forber - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (2):185-208.
    Eliminative reasoning seems to play an important role in the sciences, but should it be part of our best theory of science? Statistical evidence, prevalent across the sciences, causes problems for eliminative inference, supporting the view that probabilistic theories of confirmation provide a better framework for reasoning about evidence. Here I argue that deductive elimination has an important inferential role to play in science, one that is compatible with probabilistic approaches to evidence. Eliminative inferences help frame testing problems, an essential (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  40. The Problem with Metzinger.Graham Harman - 2011 - Cosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 7 (1):7-36.
    This article provides a critical treatment of the ontology underlying Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One. Metzinger asserts that interdisciplinary empirical work must replace ‘armchair’ a priori intuitions into the nature of reality; nonetheless, his own position is riddled with unquestioned a priori assumptions. His central claim that ‘no one has or has ever had a self’ is meant to have an ominous and futuristic ring, but merely repeats a familiar philosophical approach to individuals, which are undermined by reducing them downward (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  41. Beyond Eliminative Materialism: Some Unnoticed Implications of Churchland’s Pragmatic Pluralism.Teed Rockwell - 2011 - Contemporary Pragmatism 8 (1):173-189.
    Paul Churchland's epistemology contains a tension between two positions, which I will call pragmatic pluralism and eliminative materialism. Pragmatic pluralism became predominant as his epistemology became more neurocomputationally inspired, which saved him from the skepticism implicit in certain passages of the theory of reduction he outlined in Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. However, once he replaces eliminativism with a neurologically inspired pragmatic pluralism, Churchland cannot claim that folk psychology might be a false theory, in any significant sense; cannot (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  42. The revisability of commonsense psychology.Nada Gligorov - 2010 - Theoria: Beograd 53 (2):53-61.
  43. Ein Gedankenbogen. Rortys Weg vom eliminativen Materialismus zum Pragmatismus.Robert Brandom - 2009 - Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57 (1):5-11.
    The paper explores the unity of Richard Rorty's philosophy. It interprets his „eliminative materialism“ as stemming from the insight that the language games we use in talking about ourselves and each other are the result of our own choice, they are not forced on us from the „outside“. It interprets Rorty's later development as an application of this thought to the field of the objective: Can „brute facts“ prescribe how we speak about them? The paper argues that in this field (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  44. Eliminativism and the theory of reference.Frank Jackson - 2009 - In Dominic Murphy & Michael A. Bishop (eds.), Stich and His Critics. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 14--62.
  45. Content and Justification: Philosophical Papers.Paul A. Boghossian - 2008 - Oxford University Press.
    This volume presents a series of influential essays by Paul Boghossian on the theory of content and on its relation to the phenomenon of a priori knowledge. The essays are organized under four headings: the nature of content; content and self-knowledge; knowledge, content, and the a priori; and colour concepts.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   52 citations  
  46. The Churchlands' war on qualia.Mark Crooks - 2008 - In Edmond Wright (ed.), The Case For Qualia. The MIT Press. pp. 203.
    The systematic phenomenology-denial within the works of Paul and Patricia Churchland is critiqued as to its coherence with the known elelmentary physics and physiology of perception. Paul Churchland misidentifies "qualia" with psychology's sensorimotor schemas, while Patricia Churchland illicitly propounds the intertheoretic identities of logical empiricism while rejecting the premises upon which those identities are based. Their analogies from such arguments to an identity of mind and brain thus have no inductive probability.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  47. Eliminative materialism.William Ramsey - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist. Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they challenge of the existence of various (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  48. Nihil unbound: enlightenment and extinction.Ray Brassier - 2007 - New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
    Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the "threat" of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning--characterized as the defining feature of human existence--from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging "post-analytic" consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  49. Nihil unbound: enlightenment and extinction.Ray Brassier - 2007 - New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
    Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the "threat" of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning--characterized as the defining feature of human existence--from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging "post-analytic" consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   43 citations  
  50. The evolving fortunes of eliminative materialism.Paul M. Churchland - 2007 - In Brian P. McLaughlin & Jonathan D. Cohen (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind. Blackwell.
1 — 50 / 150