Eliminative Materialism—a Reply to Everitt

Abstract

Suppose that we accept the following two claims: (a) Our common-sense psychology, which gives content to the everyday notions of 'belief', 'desire', 'pain' and so forth, embodies quite unacceptable dualist preconceptions, (b) the theoretic terms of a substantially misguided theory fail to refer. Then, we shall be inclined to conclude, there are strictly speaking no such states as the 'beliefs', 'desires' and such-like of common parlance. These things are to be eliminated from our ontology in favour of purely material states of the brain. Now, I take it that neither (a) nor (b) is self-evidently true: but equally, neither is patently absurd. And so, pending a detailed investigation of the ramifying issues underlying these two claims, we would expect the eliminative materialism to which they give rise to remain a genuine option in the philosophy of mind. It would be surprising indeed if we were to be absolved from the complex task of disentangling the issues underlying (a) and (b) by the production of an easy knock-down argument against the eliminative materialist. However, Nicholas Everitt has recently tried to produce just such an argument:1 perhaps not surprisingly, as I hope to show in this reply, his argument fails. Everitt characterizes the position he opposes as holding that 'in a literal and straightforward way there are no mental items, just as there are no unicorns'. But this is potentially misleading. Unicorns are entirely mythological, which is just to say that there is nothing in the world which answers in any way to talk of such beasts. Contrast, say, states of demoniacal possession: these again do not exist-but talk of such states, we may suppose, does misidentify a genuine class of states, namely forms of hallucinatory psychosis. On the eliminative materialist's view, talk of mental states is more akin to talk of possession than talk of unicornsinvolving the mishandling of genuine distinctions rather than pure mythology. Thus mental states are to be eliminated in favour of the brain states whose presence or absence is the reality which underlies whatever there is of value in the distinctions of our everyday psychology, just as states of possession are to be eliminated in favour of the psychoses whose presence or absence is the reality which underlies the miscategorizations of the demon theory. It would indeed be absurd to treat mental states on a par with unicorns-things to be unceremoniously eliminated, leaving no residuary legatees. In so far as our common-sense psychology is (within its limitations) a reasonably successful theory, those who favour its elimination owe us at least the ceremony of an explanation of its successes, an account of what real distinctions our folk theory has fumblingly grasped.