Examples Of Eliminative Materialism

Philosophy Essay Within the realm of philosophy, how creatures operate is a mystery that craves to be solved. Within Paul Churchland’s “Matter and Consciousness”, materialism, functionalism, and eliminative materialism attempt to explain such mystery. Materialism theory expresses everything is related to physical properties. Mental states are numerically identical with a physical state. Physical states would be referred to the brain or nervous system. If this theory were to be proven true, parts of the brain would have a segment for feelings, beliefs, etc. Identity theory is another way of expressing such, due to the direct one-to-one correlation. This futuristic thinking hasn’t been developed from scratch, it is mirroring off of older theories.

This hard deterministic approach is one reason why ones’ argue for eliminative materialism. It attempts to draw inductive lessons from conceptual history. Eliminative materialism will also attempt to point out failures caused by folk psychology. What is central for most still remains a mystery in folk psychology. Some examples of such would be sleep, maturing process from babies to adults, memory process, or even curing mental illness. The mistake here is misleadingly try to solve it though inferior methods, as argued by eliminative materialists. Eliminative materialists will argue that this argument has a more way in of apriori knowledge, knowledge from past events, than the previous two theories mentioned. It also claims that folk psychology will never have vindicating matchups with matured

“One’s introspection reveals directly the existence of pains, beliefs, desires, fears, and so forth.”(Page 33) It is easily argued everyone has introspection; therefore the argument in favor of eliminative materialism seems misleading. “All observation occurs within some system of concepts, and our observation judgements are only as good as the conceptual framework in which they are expressed.”(Page 33) A second contradiction is that the argument believes boldly that there are no such things as mental states. Ironically, it then goes onto say that “only if it is the expression of a certain belief, and an intention to communicate, and a knowledge of the language, and so forth.”(Page 34) “If eliminative materialism is true, then meaningfulness must have some different source.” (Page 34) The argument has also been taken that it makes big exaggerations out of nothing of such worth. It focuses too much on “the defects in folk psychology, and underplays its real success.”(Page 34) Without folk psychology, it maybe that this society have a more advanced society but at what cost would that