CONCEPT
Eliminative Materialism
Paul Churchland’s thesis that folk psychology—the everyday framework of beliefs, desires, and intentions—is a radically false theory whose central posits refer to nothing real and which will eventually be displaced, not reduced, by a mature neuroscience.
Eliminative materialism is not the comfortable claim that mental states are brain states or that thinking is information processing. It is the confrontational claim that mental states as folk psychology describes them—beliefs, desires, propositional attitudes with sentence-like logical structure—may simply not exist, the way phlogiston does not exist and caloric fluid does not exist.
Paul Churchland, who developed the thesis across five decades of philosophical work, drew the central distinction with care: an old theory can relate to its successor by
reduction (its concepts survive in translated form, as temperature was reduced to mean molecular kinetic energy) or by
elimination (its central posits turn out to refer to nothing, as phlogiston was not reduced to anything but simply abandoned). Churchland’s wager is that folk psychology is headed for the second fate—that belief and desire will turn out to carve the mind at no real joints, the way the four humors carved the body at no real joints. His case