Churchland's Eliminativism

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Churchland

Churchland is going to argue that our working notion of intentionality, and in particular of propositional attitudes, is a theory -- and more importantly a bad theory. Many of the kinds of things supposed in this theory (the theory's "ontology") simply don't exist.

Folk psychology as theory

• People predict and explain the actions of others with reference to beliefs, desires, feears, intentions, and so on. Most important of such states are propositional attitudes, Churchland assumes.
• People seem to assume that these are related to each other and to behavior in lawlike ways.
• Together this is tantamount to a statement of natural kinds and their lawlike relations: this is a scientific theory.
• This is a realist theory: introspection has no special status, and there is no special problem of other minds.
• This theory is apparently pretty good at making predictions of behavior. This is its task.
• There is a parallel between propositional attitude claims and scientific numeric claims.
  • ___ has mass x.
  • ___ fears y.
  • There is something that has mass x.
  • There is something that fears y.
  • There is something that has some mass.
  • There is something that fears some event.
  • If something has mass x, then it requires force f to accelerate it at rate a.
  • If something fears some event, then it desires that that event not occur.
• Reduction and other ontological questions are questions about the reduction or translation from one theory (folk psychology) to another (e.g., neuroscience).

Claim: folk psychology has more problems that benefits

Churchland claims this theory, folk psychology, is inadequate.

• Folk psychology cannot explain many phenomena:
  • Mental illness
  • Creativity
  • Intelligence differences
  • PerceptuoMotor control
  • The function of sleep
  • Perceptual illusions
  • Features of memory
  • Learning: you must learn language and how to use it before you can learn things by way of manipulation of propositional attitudes.
• Folk psychology has been in continual retreat or stagnation (which should perhaps make us worried that there is some systematic difficulty here).
  • Animism
  • There has been no progress in thousands of years
  • Lack of fruitful coherence with other (scientific) theories
• Folk psychology is not the only game in town: neural science, evolutionary theory, psychology, and other sciences are improving -- and folk psychology does not cohere or fruitfully interact with them.

An analogy

To read Churchland sympathetically (that is, to take his case as strongly as we can make it, which we should do before we assess it), it is important to recognize that he explicitly grants that folk psychology "does ejoy a substantial amount of explanatory and predictive success." But, "when one centers one's attention not on what [folk psychology] can explain, but on what it cannot explain or fails even to address" see may see its limitations.

I believe one can consider Churchland's position like this. Imagine a time at which the development of medicine was such that it saved more lives than it lost, but that medicine at this time still did much harm compared to medicine today (when, say, they knew to make people rest in isolation when they had a disease, but didn't have the germ theory yet and doctors went from autopsies to deliveries without washing their hands). Then imagine medicine stayed at that point of development for a very long time. One might then say, medicine is stagnant, we have to shake it up and improve it. This would not be to deny it was beneficial in many ways; but rather to say it can be greatly improved.

Churchland specifically says, "Eliminative materialism does not imply the end of our normative concerns. It implies only that they will have to be reconstituted at a more revealing level of understanding, the level that a matured neuroscience will provide." Thus, we must be careful to not indulge in the denial of the antecedent of a conditional. That is, to make the fallacious move from "If P then Q" and "not P" to "not Q." E.g.: if folk psychology is true, then human obey certain norms; folk psychology is false; humans do not obey these norms. That is bad reasoning.

Eliminativism is a viable alternative.

Churchland considers and addresses three objections:

• Folk psychology has a special normative character.
  • Objection: propositional attitudes and their relationships to each other (we are talking here about rationality, not directly about reference) are ideals or otherwise constrained by norms.
  • The interpretationists (Dennett, Davidson) argue like this, and many believe they are correct.
  • Reply: the normative nature of propositional attitude reasoning arises because we value some inferences, not because they are inherently normative. Also, the rationality that arises in folk psychology is limited and weak.
• Folk psychological states are abstract entities
  • Objection: On a functionalist theory, to describe functional states is to give a high-level relationship that is not the kind of thing that should be criticized for not fitting scientific theory -- it is pitched at a different level.
  • Examples include Fodor, Putnam.
  • Answer: functionalism is fundamentally flawed. It allows us to conserve bad theory. Churchland's story of functionalist alchemy illustrates this claim.
  • Note: eliminativism regarding folk psychology is consistent with some forms of functionalism.
• Eliminativism is susceptible to a reductio ad absurdum
  • Objection: Churchland is asking us to believe in eliminativism about, among other things, belief. He is contradicting himself.
  • Reply: this begs the question, by assuming that grasping a theory is belief as posited by folk psychology.
  • An analogy: the modern biologist denies that vitalism [the view that biological processes cannot be explained with chemistry alone, and we need to add to our ontology a vital force] is true; but the modern biologist is contradicting herself, because she is alive and so there must be a vital force.

Successor theory?

What might the successor to folk psychology look like? We can only speculate, but here are some options, and how they might change our everyday discourse about minds:

1. Connectionism. Common discourse might remain quite like it is today.
2. Innate perceptual processing units. Understanding these, we might talk in terms of their basic structure.
3. Modularity. Notions of single mind begin to break down.