A reader inquired about eliminative materialism. In this post I will explain what eliminative materialism is. In later posts, I will indicate why I consider it to be not only false, but irremediably incoherent.
2. Example. Right now I am thinking about a can of beer chilling in the reefer. I desire to drink it. Desire is a mental state, indeed an intentional (object-directed) mental state. Beer is a physical stuff, and drinking a physical act; but wanting or desiring a beer is mental in nature. This prima facie distinction between the mental and the physical cannot be allowed to stand on a materialist scheme. For a materialist, nothing concrete in ultimate reality is mental; all concreta are physical. Let's not worry about abstracta.
3. The materialist has two main options. One is eliminativist, the other identitarian. Given the notorious difficulties involved in fitting mental items into the materialist world-picture, the eliminativist simply denies their existence in the way people deny the existence of witches and goblins. It is a bit like cutting the Gordian knot, only more extreme. Can't untie it? Then cut it. Or consign it to the flames! Simply deny the 'problematic'entities. Do unto them what Dennett does unto qualia: 'quine' them.
'Belief,' 'desire' and other mental terms on this approach do notrefer to anything; they are terms of 'folk psychology,' which, according to the eliminativist, is a false theory. Thus 'belief' and 'desire' are theoretical terms; it is just that the theory to which they belong is false and slated for replacement, in the fullness of time, by a mature cognitive science.
The identitarian approach is less extreme. One concedes the existence and datanic status of mental items — as one would think that any sane person must — but then goes on to identify them with physical items. Thus my present occurrent desiring of a beer is said to be numerically identical to a certain complex state of my brain or central nervous system. Every identity theorist in the philosophy of mind is a token-token identity theorist, but some adopt the stronger type-type identity theory which entails, but is not entailed by, the token-token theory. But we needn't enter into this complexity for present purposes.
The eliminativist is an ontological radical: he flatly denies the existence of mental states, or what what comes to the same thing, he denies that mental terms have referents: they are like 'phlogiston' or 'caloric,' obsolete theoretical terms belonging to obsolete theories. The identity theorist, whose aim is not to deny the mental but to reduce it to the physical, is by contrast an ontological conservative: he want to hold onto the mental but render it respectable by reducing it to the physical.
4. On the face of it, there is a difference between saying that X does not exist and saying that X = Y. For the latter claim seems to presuppose that X does exist. But when X and Y belong to disparate categories, the difference appears to vanish. For example, is there any difference between saying that God does not exist and taking the Feuerbachian line that God is identical to a unconscious anthropomorphic projection? Suppose someone says, "God exists all right — it is just that God is an anthropomorphic projection." The proper response to such a person is to dismiss such obfuscatory rhetoric as tantamount to the claim that God does not exist. For God is not the sort of thing that could be a projection. Whether or not God exists, the concept of God is the concept of something that is a se, from itself, whence it follows that God cannot have the status of an anthropomorphic projection. So a claim that God does have this status is a claim that God does not exist.
Similarly, is there any difference between saying that mental state M is token-identical to physical state P, and saying that M does not exist? If M reduces to P, and M has all and only the properties possessed by P, then all there is is P, and the reduction is tantamount to an elimination.
Or if a Humean reduces causation to regular succession, then that arguably boils down to a denial of causation.
At this point I would argue:
The token-token identity theory collapses into eliminativism
Eliminativism is false
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The token-token identity theory is false.
5. But why is eliminativism false? I will give one quick argument now, and others later.
Mental terms are not theoretical. It strains credulity to claim that terms like 'pain,' 'desire,' 'belief,' recollection,' etc. are theoretical terms belonging to a supposed theory called 'folk psychology,' a theory that is supposed to be analogous to astrology or alchemy. When I am in pain, I know with certainty that I am in pain: the pain is immediately given. As such, the pain is a datum, not a theory or a theoretical posit. I am not theorizing about anything when I am in pain but reporting an immediate phenomenologically evident datum. 'Pain' refers directly to that immediate datum, a datum that is indubitable. So not only is 'pain' not theoretical, it obviously has a referent and is known with certainty to have a referent. The same goes for desire and other states of mind. Our direct acquaintance with them shows that they exist and that words referring to them are nonvacuous.
The fundamental error of the eliminative materialist, then, is to imagine that belief, desire, and other mental states are theoretical posits of a false theory he calls 'folk psychology.' This is just nonsense: pain, desire, and the like are immediately given. There is nothing theoretical about them. It is the eliminative materialist who is in the grip of a false theory, namely, the theory that nothing can be real except what the physical sciences posit as real.
The eliminative materialist is engaged in a sensless enterprise: he attemts to prosecute the philosophy of mind while denying the very data of the philosophy of mind. What could be more absurd? Blinded by his scientism, he cannot admit what we all know to be the case: that we believe, know, desire, recollect, expect, fear, etc.