Eliminativism
Explanation
Paul and Patricia Churchland, together with Stephen Stich, formulated in the 1980s a provocative position: our everyday psychological language (beliefs, desires, pains, hopes) is a primitive theory about how the mind works, a folk psychology, and like any empirical theory it could simply be false. Mature neuroscience might find nothing corresponding to those terms, and we should then eliminate them from serious vocabulary.
The favourite analogy is historical: people once spoke of phlogiston to explain combustion, of humours to explain character, of animal spirits to explain muscular movement. As science advanced, we did not discover that phlogiston was oxygen: we discovered that there was no phlogiston, and we eliminated the term. Likewise, we might discover that there are no beliefs or desires as such, only neural patterns that folk psychology mistakenly groups together.
Eliminativism does not deny that we feel pain or have thoughts: it denies that the descriptions we give of those states (as discrete entities with propositional content) correctly capture the underlying neural reality. What is going on inside the brain would be so different from the folk scheme that it would be a mistake to treat it with those concepts.
This is the most radically naturalist position: rather than trying to reduce the mental to the physical (as identity theory does), it eliminates the mental in favour of an integrally neuroscientific vocabulary. The promise is that we will obtain more precise, predictive and useful descriptions, free from the confusions inherited from common sense and theology.
The objections are substantial. First, folk psychology is an enormously useful tool for predicting behaviour: few physicists could predict whether a colleague will turn up for lunch by appealing only to his neural state. Second, it seems self-refuting: doesn't the eliminativist believe his theory is correct and wish to convince us? If he eliminates beliefs and desires, what is he doing when he defends his thesis?
Today rigorous eliminativism has few wholehearted defenders, but its intuitions live on in moderated versions: many scientists accept that concepts such as memory or attention may require substantial refinement in light of neuroscience, without entirely abandoning psychological language. The question of how much of mental vocabulary will survive scientific maturation remains open.
Strengths
- Honesty about the possibility that our mental categories are mistaken.
- Continuity with the history of science: many folk theories have been eliminated.
- Stimulus to articulate which parts of the mental are 'salvageable'.
- Compatible with findings on the fallibility of introspection.
Main critiques
- Apparent self-refutation: the very claim uses folk categories (believing folk psychology is false).
- Folk psychology predictions are remarkably successful in social interaction.
- Risk of eliminating precisely what was to be explained (the qualia).
- Reliance on a future neuroscience that does not yet exist.