Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Introduction

• Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist and have no role to play in a mature science of the mind.
• Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they challenge the existence of various mental states that Descartes took for granted.
• Sections
  1. A Brief History
  2. Contemporary Eliminative Materialism
     → 2.1 Folk Psychology and the Theory-Theory
     → 2.2 Eliminative Theory Change
     → 2.3 Category Elimination
  3. Arguments For Eliminative Materialism
     → 3.1 General Theoretical Problems With Folk Psychology
     → 3.2 Specific Problems With Folk Psychology
     → 3.3 Eliminative Materialism and the Phenomenal
  4. Arguments Against Eliminative Materialism
     → 4.1 The Self-Refutation Objection
     → 4.2 Rejecting the Theory-Theory
     → 4.3 Defending the Virtues of Folk Psychology
     → 4.4 Eliminativism Eliminated?
  5. Concluding Comments