Eliminative Materialism and the Rejection of Folk Psychology

Eliminative materialism holds that many or all of the mental states posited by our ordinary, commonsense understanding of the mind — what philosophers call "folk psychology," the everyday framework of beliefs, desires, hopes, and fears that ordinary people use to predict and explain one another's behavior — do not, in fact, exist, or at least do not correspond to any real internal states that a mature, completed neuroscience will eventually vindicate, in much the same way that a completed physics and chemistry did not vindicate the existence of phlogiston, caloric fluid, or the four humors of ancient and medieval medical theory but instead eliminated them from serious scientific ontology once. Paul Churchland, in "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes" (Journal of Philosophy, 1981), and Patricia Churchland, in Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (1986), are the position's most prominent and systematic defenders, arguing that folk psychology should be understood not as an immutable, self-evidently correct framework but as an empirical theory of human behavior — one that, like any theory, is in principle open to radical revision or outright replacement should a better, more explanatorily powerful theory become available.