Examples Of Eliminative Materialism

In principle, anyone denying the existence of some type of thing is an eliminativist regarding that type of thing. Thus, there have been several eliminativists about different aspects of human nature in the history of philosophy. Hard determinists deny free will and so they are eliminativists regarding free will. Nevertheless, contemporary eliminative materialism consists of two main ideas. The first is that folk psychology is a theory, and the second is there is a difference between elimination and reduction. When a new theory in science is adopted, the entities posited by the old theory—the theory’s theoretical posits—are regarded as not existing. The posits are thus eliminated. Contemporary eliminative materialists regard propositional …show more content…
To illustrate this, we will consider the propositional attitude of thinking that the sun is round. Here, there is an attitude of thinking and the propositional content of the moon being round. According to the language of thought hypothesis, thinking that the sun is round involves utilizing two distinct mental representations, one is a mental representation of the moon and the other is a mental representation of roundness. In contrast, connectionists, inspired by neuroscience hold that there is no reason to think that there are two distinct mental representations, but rather both are represented in a holistic …show more content…
The general idea here is based on the supposition that science doesn’t have room for posits that don’t do anything. This combined with the explanatory exclusion argument gives us another argument supporting eliminative materialism. If every bodily motion is caused by a brain state that no mental state is identical to, then whatever mental states are posited by folk theory are non-efficacious to behaviour, only the brain states are causally efficacious. So, the eliminative materialist suggests eliminating any mention on mental states altogether.

Now we turn to some criticisms of this view; the first is that eliminative materialism is self-refuting. Eliminative materialists assert that beliefs do not exist, it is necessary for them to believe what they assert. However, this requires the existence of at least one belief, which contradicts their only