Eliminativism

Eliminativism (also eliminative materialism) — A position in philosophy of mind according to which the central concepts of folk psychology — belief, desire, intention, pain, memory as ordinarily understood — are false theoretical entities that will be eliminated when a mature neuroscience provides an adequate explanation of behaviour. Folk psychology is not, for the eliminativist, a surface description of deeper realities to be revealed by neuroscience; it is an incorrect theory about what occurs in the brain — destined for the same fate as phlogiston, the ether, and vital spirits.

Paul Churchland and the Central Argument

The most rigorous philosophical formulation of eliminativism belongs to Paul Churchland (b. 1942) in the article “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes” (Journal of Philosophy, 1981) and in the book Matter and Consciousness (1984). Churchland’s argument begins from a methodological observation: folk psychology is an empirical theory — a set of general principles and posited entities designed to explain and predict human behaviour. It uses concepts such as belief, desire, and intention in the same way that physics uses mass, force, and field: as theoretical terms that posit entities to explain observable phenomena.

Like any empirical theory, folk psychology can be evaluated: is it accurate? Successful in its predictions? Integrable with the other sciences? Churchland argues that, on these dimensions, folk psychology performs poorly. It fails to explain severe mental disorders, the nature of sleep and dreams, learning, creativity, and individual personality differences. It integrates poorly with evolutionary biology and neuroscience. Its development has been remarkably stagnant over millennia: we use the same concepts of belief and desire that the ancient Greeks used, without theoretical progress comparable to any other science.

Churchland’s conclusion is that folk psychology is so defective a theory that the best prospect is not to reduce its terms to neuroscience (as the reductionist would), but to eliminate those terms in favour of a mature neuroscientific vocabulary. Just as alchemy was not reduced to chemistry but eliminated by it, the “propositional attitudes” (beliefs, desires) will be abandoned.

Patricia Churchland and Neurophilosophy

Patricia Churchland (b. 1943), in Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (1986), developed the eliminativist programme at the level of the neurocognitive sciences. Her project is to show that psychology and neuroscience can be integrated into a unified theory — and that in this process of integration, folk psychological concepts will be revised, reformulated, or eliminated as their referents prove artificial or non-existent.

Patricia Churchland’s distinction between elimination and reduction is important: the point is not to deny that there are internal states that cause behaviour, but to affirm that the correct description of those states will be neuroscientific, not folk-psychological. The difference between reduction and elimination is the difference between “heat is molecular motion” (successful reduction: the old term is preserved with a new referent) and “there is no phlogiston” (elimination: the term is abandoned because it has no real referent).

Objections to Eliminativism

Eliminativism faces strong objections:

1. Self-refutation: If there are no beliefs, how can Churchland believe that eliminativism is true and desire that the reader accept it? The very statement of eliminativism seems to presuppose the concepts it rejects.

2. Predictive success of folk psychology: Despite its limitations, folk psychology is extremely effective in predicting and explaining everyday behaviour. That someone hungry and without money will go to the bank before going to the restaurant is predictable by folk psychology with a precision that current neuroscience cannot match.

3. Irreducibility of subjective experience: Even if neuroscience describes in detail the neural correlates of experiences, the phenomenological dimension — what it is like to have that experience — seems to resist elimination.

Paul Churchland acknowledged the self-refutation objection and attempted to answer it: he asserts that eliminativism does not refute itself because it does not presuppose that beliefs as folk psychology conceives of them are real, but only that there is some type of causally efficacious internal state — the exact character of which neuroscience will reveal.

Eliminativism, Reductionism, and the Hard Problem

Eliminativism is often contrasted with reductionism (which identifies mental states with physical states while preserving mental terms) and with instrumentalism (which treats folk psychology as useful but not literally true). Eliminativism is the most radical position: it asserts the falsity, not merely the insufficiency, of folk psychology.

From the perspective of the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers), eliminativism might appear to be a solution: if there are no qualia in the robust sense — if phenomenological states are defective theoretical constructs — then the hard problem dissolves. But this “solution” is rejected by most philosophers of mind as implausible: subjective experience seems to be the most immediate and indubitable datum we possess.

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