Eliminative materialism

It is often thought that consciousness has a qualitative dimension that cannot be tracked by science. Recently, however, some philosophers have argued that this worry stems not from an elusive feature of the mind, but from the special nature of the concepts used to describe conscious states. Marc Champagne draws on the neglected branch of philosophy of signs or semiotics to develop a new take on this strategy. 

The term “semiotics” was introduced by John Locke in the modern period – its etymology is ancient Greek, and its theoretical underpinnings are medieval. Charles Sanders Peirce made major advances in semiotics, so he can act as a pipeline for these forgotten ideas. Most philosophers know Peirce as the founder of American pragmatism, but few know that he also coined the term “qualia,” which is meant to capture the intrinsic feel of an experience. Since pragmatic verification and qualia are now seen as conflicting commitments, Champagne endeavors to understand how Peirce could (or thought he could) have it both ways. The key, he suggests, is to understand how humans can insert distinctions between features that are always bound.

Recent attempts to take qualities seriously have resulted in versions of panpsychism, but Champagne outlines a more plausible way to achieve this. So, while semiotics has until now been the least known branch of philosophy ending in –ics, his book shows how a better understanding of that branch can move one of the liveliest debates in philosophy forward.

Panpsychism, the view that phenomenal perception is a fundamental property of the universe, is one of the oldest theories in philosophy of mind. While it may seem counter-intuitive at first glance, panpsychism deftly avoids many of the glaring problems in the various forms of dualism and materialism. The central challenge to panpsychism is the combination problem: How to integrate fundamental units of conscious experience, which is usually considered an indivisible property, into one larger individual subject; in other words, how to form a macro-subject from micro-subjects. Several authors consider the combination problem to be insurmountable, and to require a retreat from a strong panphsychist view to a neutral monism. I argue that a reappraisal of the work of Leibniz in this area gives an informative perspective on this problem, and moves us further toward its dissolution.

Advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience claim to have begun to undermine the assumptions of the arts and educational theory community by explaining consciousness through either a reduction to mathematical functionalism or an excrescence of brain biology.  I suggest that the worldview behind such reductionism is opposed to the worldview assumed by many educational practitioners and theorists.  I then go on to outline a few common positions taken in the burgeoning field of consciousness studies that suggest that—though many attributes of consciousness have been identified and explained—individual consciousness itself remains as much of an enigma to scientists as to the rest of us who experience it.  However, I do suggest the necessity of intersubjectivity for conscious evolution.

This paper aims to provide a rational reconstruction of the claim of eliminative materialism (EM), espoused by Paul and Patricia Churchland. It will identify and clarify alternative understandings of that view, and assess which version is the most plausible interpretation in the light of the Churchlands' writings and contemporary discussions. The result of the analysis is that eliminativism is best understood as a methodological thesis regarding the scope and depth of the possible revision of (scientific and folk) usage of FP terms and principles. The problem is important not only, and nor primarily, for exegetical purposes. EM functions in contemporary metaphysics of mind mainly as a point of negative reference: for this reason it is important to carefully formulate the main claim of EM so that the theorists taking part in the debate know what they actually disagree with. The careful formulation provided by this paper could show other philosophers that their position is not, in fact, as far from EM as they might have thought.

A critical outline is given of Rorty's early, 'eliminativist' attempt to formulate a materialist version of the mind-body identity theory that does not fall foul of the 'irreducible properties objection' (the thought that if mental states are brain states then the latter must exhibit the same properties as the former). An explanation is offered of why Rorty continued to describe himself as a materialist/physicalist despite having come to reject any version of mind-body identity.

This is a review of neuroscientist Peter Ulric Tse’s book “The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation” (2013) and his later book chapter “Two Types of Libertarian Free Will Are Realized in the Human Brain” (2018). See also the section on Tse in Chapter 2 of my book "Free Will and Human Life" (Pittsburgh: Philosophia, 2021), 68-73 (https://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Human-Life-Johnson/dp/0970105533/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=).

Nörofelsefe denilen akım felsefeciler tarafından bazen indirgemeci, bazen eleyici ama çoğunlukla hem indirgemeci hem eleyici olarak nitelenir. Bunun kuvvetle muhtemel gerekçesi eleştirmenlerin itirazlarının altında yatan şu varsayımdır: Bir kuram veya ona içkin varlık kategorisi indirgeniyorsa, artık o varlık yok sayılmaktadır ve bilimsel terminolojimizden elenmektedir. Halbuki bir şeyin indirgenmesi hiçbir şekilde onun varlığının inkarı değil aksine ilanıdır. İşte bu nedenle, bu çalışmada ben, nörofelsefenin indirgemeci ve eleyici materyalizm olarak adlandırılmasının son derece yanıltıcı sonuçlar yarattığını ve bu olumsuz sonuçlardan kurtulmanın yolunun, birkaç defa kendilerinin önerdiği gibi, Churchland tipi nörofelsefeyi nitelemek için birleştirici ve yenileyici materyalizm ifadesinin kullanılması gerektiğini savunacağım.

In this paper, I attempt to show that Thomas Nagel and Patricia Churchland, two seemingly very different philosophers of mind, in fact resemble each other quite closely in their severe critique of folk psychology. Due to folk psychology’s deep inadequacies, both Nagel and Churchland have suggested important revisions to it, which, strikingly, have led both of them to call their positions “revisionist”. This paper makes a significant contribution to the philosophy of mind literature, since almost all philosophers, including the Churchlands and Nagel themselves, understand the Churchlands and Nagel to espouse completely different philosophical views on these matters.

Does consciousness exist?  In “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness” (MPC) David Chalmers sketches an argument for illusionism, i.e., the view that it does not.  The key premise is that it would be a coincidence if our beliefs about consciousness were true, given that the explanation of those beliefs is independent of their truth.  In this article, I clarify and assess this argument.  I argue that our beliefs about consciousness are peculiarly invulnerable to undermining, whether or not their contents are indubitable or even obvious.  However, the reason that they are peculiarly invulnerable to undermining points to a fundamental flaw in modal arguments for dualism.

Este trabajo tiene tres partes. Su objeto es ofrecer insumos para la discusión y motivar investigaciones sobre el tema. En la primera sección se brinda una introducción al problema mente-cuerpo, dando cuenta de su origen y naturaleza. La segunda parte consiste en una breve explicación de ciertas respuestas a este problema. La sección final intenta articular la matriz teórica del materialismo eliminativo, así como mostrar argumentos a su favor y algunas objeciones.

Jim Slagle claims that eliminative materialism (EM) denies some of the mind's self-evident properties, such as intentionality, qualia and the view that beliefs are real or veridical. I, herein, will argue that what EM denies is actually the folk psychological notion of belief, not belief as such. The Churchlands construe propositional belief as merely one kind of representation in the larger representational scheme. The point here is not to deny belief, but to construe it as one of the, and possibly a very recent, sorts of representations that the brain uses, not the general or fundamental form thereof.

An analysis of arguments for pain eliminativism reveals two significant points of divergence between assumptions underlying biomedical research on pain and assumptions typically endorsed by eliminativist accounts. The first concerns the status of the term 'pain,' which is a description of a phenomenon, rather than an explanatory construct. The second concerns reductive explanation: pain is explained causally, in terms of mechanisms or factors that produce or determine it, rather than by identifying it with a physical structure, process or mechanism. These discrepancies undermine several arguments for pain eliminativism.

The antireductionist arguments of many philosophers  for example, Fodor and Davidson,  are motivated by a worry that successful reduction (whatever that would be) would eliminate rather than conserve or explain the mental. This worry derives from an misunderstanding of the classic deductive-nomological empiricist account of reduction. Although this account does not, in fact, underwrite "cognitive suicide," it should be rejected as positivist baggage. Philosophy of psychology and mind needs to have more detailed attention to issues of reduction on philosophy of sciences and natural scientific analogies that serve as models for reduction. I consider a range of central cases often considered, such was water and H2O, genes and DNA, and common sense versus scientific solidity. The last case is illuminated by Sir Arthur Eddington's Two Tables Paradox, a solution that suggests the plasticity of the mental under reduction. To be quite clear, I do not argue for reduction of the mental, but discuss what it would involve if it were to occur. If the reduction of the mental was like any of the cases considered, it would be neither empiricist nor eliminative.

ABSTRACT: This chapter argues that appeals to actual scientific practice show that higher-level psychological explanations are not precluded by reductive explanation, much less rendered extinct. To exemplify this conclusion, the case of mesocorticolimbic dopamine is discussed at length.

I argue that S knows that p implies that S is properly committed to the truth of p, not that S believes that p.  Belief is not required for knowledge because it is possible that one could know that there are no beliefs.  Being ‘properly committed’ to the truth of a proposition is a matter of having a certain normative status, not occupying a particular psychological state.  After arguing that knowledge requires commitment instead of belief, I go on to demonstrate the theoretical utility of this hypothesis.

In passing remarks, some commentators have noted that for Nagel, physicalism is true. It has even been argued that Nagel seeks to find the best path to follow to achieve future physicalism. I advance these observations by adding that for Nagel, we should discuss the consciousness problem not in terms of physical and mental issues but in terms of our desire to include consciousness in an objective/scientific account, and we can achieve this only by revising our self-conception, i.e., folk psychology, to develop a more detached view of experience. Through the project of objective phenomenology, Nagel aims to achieve some sort of objective, detached, and scientific explanation of the subjective nature of experience. This project seeks to make the truth of physicalism intelligible and consciousness more amenable to scientific study, potentially raising an even broader concept than the one physicalism originally proposes.

An appropriate description for the Buddha's philosophy of persons within the frame of materialist philosophy of mind, prima facie, would understandably be a kind of reductionism. Seeing as the Buddha reduced the self to nothing but a collection of impersonal and impermanent psycho-physical elements. In this paper, I argue that this view is only appropriate for understanding the self within conventional reality, as is the term used by Buddhists, and does not tackle the other half, namely, ultimate reality. I claim that eliminative materialism provides a more accurate description of the Buddha's prescriptive practice,  and although falling prey to the same problems that reductionism faces, creates a good basis for an alternative position of the Buddha as a Hard Eliminitavist.

According to Gold and Stoljar, one cannot both consistently be reductionist about psychoneural relations and invoke concepts developed in the psychological sciences. I deny the utility of their distinction between biological and cognitive neuroscience, suggesting that they construe biological neuroscience too rigidly and cognitive neuroscience too liberally. Then I reject their characterization of reductionism: reductions need not go down past neurobiology straight to physics, and cases of partial, local reduction are not neatly distinguishable from cases of mere implementation. Modifying the argument from unification-as-reduction, I defend a position weaker than the radical, but stronger than the trivial neuron doctrine.

This paper argues that the recent politicizing of science in the United States coincides with a necessary turn toward social epistemology and historicist conceptions of science and rationality. It is shown how history, philosophy, and sociology of science (HPSS) make important contributions to interdisciplinary research in the public understanding of science (PUS). It is argued (in agreement with Kuhn’s finding) that while critical HPSS is not necessary to traditional, pre-professional education for scientific practitioners, it is necessary to any general or liberal science education program. The latter is needed to foster critical ability among citizens to judge increasingly complex issues of science and technology where they bear on public concerns. With a view to informing such an approach, fundamental problems at the intersection of science and society are analyzed, concerning the relationship between science and the state, implications of the new life sciences for politics, and ultimately whether modern science is to remain in contradictory tension with modern political self-conceptions.

ABSTRACT: 'New wave' reductionism aims at advancing a kind of reduction that is stronger than unilateral dependency of the mental on the physical. It revolves around the idea that reduction between theoretical levels is a matter of degree, and can be laid out on a continuum between a 'smooth' pole (theoretical identity) and a 'bumpy' pole (extremely revisionary). It also entails that both higher and lower levels of the reductive relationship sustain some degree of explanatory autonomy. The new wave predicts that reductions of folk psychology to neuroscience will be located in the middle of this continuum; as neuroscientific evidence about mental states checks in, theoretical folk psychology will therefore be moderately revised. However, the model has conceptual problems which preclude its success in reviving reductionism, and its commitment to a syntactic approach wrecks its attempt to rescue folk psychology. Moreover, the architecture of the continuum operates on a category mistake that sneaks in an eliminativist conclusion. I argue that new wave reductionism therefore tends to be eliminativism in disguise.

[This is an edited and improved version of "You Are Not Your Brain: Against 'Teaching to the Brain'" previously published in *Review of Higher Education and Self-Learning* 5(15), Summer 2012.]

Since educators are always looking for ways to improve their practice, and since empirical science is now accepted in our worldview as the final arbiter of truth, it is no surprise they have been lured toward cognitive neuroscience in hopes that discovering how the brain learns will provide a nutshell explanation for student learning in general. I argue that identifying the person with the brain is scientism (not science), that the brain is not the person, and that it is the person who learns. In fact the brain only responds to the learning of embodied experience within the extra-neural network of intersubjective communications. Learning is a dynamic, cultural activity, not a neural program. Brain-based learning is unnecessary for educators and may be dangerous in that a culturally narrow ontology is taken for granted, thus restricting our creativity and imagination, and narrowing the human community.

Majority of the philosophers regard neurophilosophy as a highly marginal philosophical school of thought and reject it based on either principled reasons or alleged facts about the human brain. Principled objections typically include categorical rejections based on assumptions about the nature of philosophical problems and their solutions. Another objection is based on the extremely complex structure of the nervous systems, the idea that if neurophilosophical hypotheses are correct, it would mean the death of philosophy as a separate discipline and the perceived exclusion of human psychological, sociological, and historical existence and meaning by neurophilosophers. Here, I argue that these rejections are largely the result of either textual misreading of Churchlands’ publications or possibly of the farfetched interpretations by Churchlands’ critics stating that “wherever Churchlands do talk about necessary conditions of understanding the mind, these conditions should be read as expressions of the sufficient conditions.” Once I show that these various objections are mistaken, I propose an objection about a serious defect in neurophilosophical practice and offer a positive suggestion for removing the defect. 

Keywords
Churchland, neurophilosophy, common objections to neurophilosophy, cultural neurophilosophy, macro-social sciences.


Özet.
Nörofelsefe felsefe dünyasında halen çok uçta bir görüş olarak değerlendirilmekte ve ezici bir çoğunluk tarafından ya ilkesel olarak veya beyne ilişkin bazı olgular gerekçe gösterilerek sert şekilde reddedilmektedir. İlkesel itirazlar genelde felsefi problemlerin ve çözümlerin doğasına ilişkin kategorik itirazlardır. İkinci tipte iddialarsa daha çok sinir sisteminin aşırı karmaşık yapısı, nörofelsefi hipotezin doğru çıkması ihtimalinin doğal bir sonucunun felsefenin tarihten silinmesi olduğu veya nörofelsefenin beynin ötesine geçmeye gerek görmeyerek insanın psikolojik, tarihsel ve sosyal varoluşunu bir kenara iterek insanı açıklama şansını elinden kaçırması şeklindedir. Bu sonuncu itiraz, nörofelsefenin zihnin veya davranışın doğasını anlayabilmek için " fizik veya beyin bilimden başka bir bilime ihtiyaç olmadığını savunduğu " şeklindeki iddialar olarak da kendini göstermektedir. Bu çalışmamda ben bu eleştirilerin ya Churchland çiftinin metinlerinin düpedüz yanlış okunması veya nörofelsefecinin gerekli koşullardan bahsettiği yerlerde eleştirmenlerin zoraki bir akıl yürütmeyle onun cümlesini yeterli koşulların ifadesi olarak görmeleridir. Bu eleştirilerin hatalı olduğunu gösterdikten sonra benim bakış açımdan nörofelsefenin en ciddi eksiğini tartışıyor ve o eksiği gidermek için kendi kültürel nörofelsefe önerimi sunuyorum. Anahtar Sözcükler Churchland, nörofelsefe, nörofelsefeye dönük yaygın eleştiriler, kültürel nörofelsefe, makro-sosyal bilimler.

Paul Churchland's epistemology contains a tension between two positions, which I will call pragmatic pluralism and eliminative materialism. Pragmatic pluralism became predominant as Churchland's 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 1) cannot claim that folk psychology might be a false theory, in any significant sense 2) cannot claim that the concepts of Folk psychology might be empty of extension and lack reference. 3) cannot sustain Churchland's criticism of Dennett's "intentional stance" . 4) cannot claim to be a form of scientific realism, in the sense of believing that what science describes is somehow realer that what other conceptual systems describe.

A wide range of theories, starting from American naturalism and pragmatism (Dewey, 1935), Sellars’ views on the myth of the given (1956), epistemological behaviorism and Rorty’s anti-representationalism (1965, 1979) etc. have directly or indirectly lead to the formation of various “classical” positions of hard or soft eliminativism (Churchland - 1981, Churchland - 1986, Stich - 1983, Dennett - 1988).

These theories, by eliminating mental phenomena, also eliminate their basic criterion, intentionality, which based on “classical” views (Brentano, 1874) constitutes the main distinctive feature between the mental and the physical. The problem of intentionality within a materialistic framework, is the inability to explain how a material-biological structure such as the brain, is related to something out of itself and furthermore represents this something in the form of mental content, or, as Searle (1983) has formulated the question: How can “atoms and void” possibly refer to or be directed to or in the end understand something that is outside themselves?

Modern answers “rescuing” intentionality, either resort to mental realism (ontological or functional) and the retention of mental representations of the world within the subject (Fodor, 1981), or they extend the notion of intentionality in positions of flow of information (Dretske, 1980 et al.), or they limit intentionality to the referentiality of language (Quine, 1975). Of particular importance in eliminative materialism is Dennett’s argument (1987), in which he defends the instrumental quality of intentionality in a functional framework, while ruling out its reduction, eliminating in the end any of its potentially natural character.

Today, the problem of intentionality is becoming again relevant in the realm of cognitive science, as during the past decade, important views on embodied cognition attract interest, eliminating mental phenomena and internal representations (Dreyfus - 2002, Chemero - 2009, Rowlands - 2012 et al.), broadening the horizon of eliminative theories at the same time. However, the philosophical tradition of these positions on embodied cognition, situated largely on phenomenology, gives intentionality a key role.

Following recent work by Don Ross (Ross, 2000; Ross & Spurrett, 2004), I contrast the influential theories of Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland in information-theoretic terms. Dennett makes much of the fact that the morphological shorthand which emerges before a witness as she looks upon cohesive aggregates of matter commands some measure of predictive power. This, for him, speaks against eliminating recourse to an intentional vocabulary. By contrast, the eliminative materialism defended by Churchland does not gloss such informational compressibility as an explanatory desideratum, and thus regards the informational noise which accrues at higher levels of description as patently unacceptable. Yet, since it is unlikely, as Ross et al. (2007) have recently suggested, that anything remains once we subtract the appeal to patterns, I argue that the ubiquity of informational compression in scientific explanation seriously undermines the claim that talk of the mental could be eliminated.

Jacobs, Isenhower and Hayes (2016) advocate for the use of recent theoretical and methodological proposals in the field of ecological psychology to overcome long-standing problems in the conceptualization of private events in radical behaviorism, and in the experimental and applied analysis of behavior. They conclude that the notion of patterns of tensegrity at the level of the cell, tissue, or muscle, spreading to higher levels according to the principles of multifractal geometry allows for a better answer to the Skinnerian question " What is inside the skin? " Unfortunately, it is not in the understanding of such bodily events that the problem with privacy lies, but in the abundant conceptual difficulties it brings about, an issue that will not be solved by appealing to (mostly) hypothetical physiological mechanisms. Furthermore, Jacobs et al., overestimate the implications of such analysis for the issue of privacy, and in so doing, have failed in demonstrating how their multiscale approach provides an advantage over other approaches to privacy, particularly the Skinnerian approach.

An appropriate description for the Buddha's philosophy of persons within the frame of materialist philosophy of mind, prima facie, would understandably be a kind of reductionism, given that the Buddha reduced the self to nothing but a collection of impersonal and impermanent psychophysical elements. In this article, I argue that this view is only appropriate for understanding the self within conventional reality, as is the term used by Buddhists, and does not tackle the other half, namely, ultimate reality. I claim that eliminative materialism provides a more accurate description of the Buddha's prescriptive practice, and although falling prey to the same problems that reductionism faces, creates a good basis for an alternative position of the Buddha as a Hard Eliminativist.

Este artigo procura argumentar contra o eliminacionismo e o dualismo de substância ou de propriedade, visando mais especificamente os argumentos reducionistas oferecidos pelo casal Churchland e por versões de dualismo propostas por Swinburne, na medida em que põem em causa as crenças morais enquanto relatos de primeira pessoa, desconsiderados como psicologia popular pelos primeiros e como supervenientes pelo segundo (como eventos naturais que se estendem necessariamente, em ambos os sentidos do bicondicional ligando substâncias mentais e físicas: para toda substância-A x existe uma substância-B y, de modo que necessariamente se y existe, x existe).

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, which is taken to be one of the aspects of the celebrated cognitive suicide issue, is that an eliminativist has a
problem with maintaining that her position represents reality. It will be argued that on the Carnapian reading an eliminativist might put forward a negative ontological claim without the need to invoke any representationalistic notions.

In this essay, the author challenges both the eliminative idealist’s contention that physical objects do not exist and the phenomenalist idealist’s view that statements about physical objects are translatable into statements about private mental experiences. After advancing eight lethal objections to a phenomenalist analysis of ‘physical object’ talk, the author details how phenomenalist translations are parasitic on the realist assumption that physical objects exist independently of the experience of them. In the final section, the author confronts eliminative idealism head on by exposing its heuristic sterility in contrast with realism’s stunning predictive success and long history of growing our knowledge base.

That the concept of eliminative materialism is not even wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism "Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind (or folk psychology) is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist. Some eliminativists argue that no coherent neural basis will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. Rather, they argue that psychological concepts of behaviour and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level.[1] Other versions entail the non-existence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.[2]" This is all nonsense because:

In his essay titled: Are Mental States a Useful Concept? Neurophilosophical Influences on Phenomenology and Psychopathology, Paul Harrison (1991) considers whether the recently emerging field of neurophilosophy, and in particular its "eliminative materialist" branch, will eventually undermine the clinical psychiatric disciplines of descriptive psychopathology and phenomenology. Eliminative materialists classify common sense assumptions and explanations concerning mental life as "folk psychology"; additionally, they consider phenomenological descriptions of normal mental life as a merely more complex version of folk psychology.  Moreover, "the eliminative materialists not only see [folk psychology] theories as largely false, but believe the whole level of explanation to be unnecessary and a hindrance to progress  in understanding the basis of mental processes" (Harrison, 1991). Harrison goes on to clarify that descriptive psychopathology and abnormal phenomenology also qualify as folk psychology. As a result, if eliminative materialists are correct, psychiatrists and psychopathologists must at the very least "reconfigure" (radically alter?) their approaches to abnormal mental events.

Patricia Smith Churchland, philosopher (b Oliver, BC 16 July 1943). Patricia Churchland earned a BA at the University of British Columbia and completed graduate degrees at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Oxford. In 1969 she was hired by the University of Manitoba, where she taught for 15 years. Churchland became the President's Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at San Diego in 1984, and subsequently adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and associate of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory at the Salk Institute. Churchland's groundbreaking work in neurophilosophy has secured her a position among Canada's most influential philosophers.

To read more, please find this entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia