Eliminative Materialim Essays - Materialism, Ontology,

Eliminative Materialim Eliminative Materialism Eliminativists believe that there is something fundamentally mistaken about the common-sense conception of the mind. Elimin-ativists suggest that for man to move forward in his understanding of the mind he must drop part or all of this common sense conception in favor of one which does not use notions such as belief, experience, sensations and the like. The rationale for this suggestion is that these notions are fraught with conceptual difficulties as well as being recalcitrant to any reduction to natural science. Eliminativist propose to replace common sense conception with a materialist or physicalist conception and for this reason they are referred to as eliminative materialists. W.V. Quine can be considered Eliminativist. Many believe Quine is an Eliminativist since his remarks about materialism and the mind often seem to occur when his interest is in understanding and linguistic representation. Such Eliminativist remarks are found throughout his writings in ?States of Mind?. One example would be ?A mental state is not always manifested in behavior. Physically construed, it is a state of nerves?. In ?States of Mind? Quine disagrees with the concept of dualisim which submits that the mind and body are two separate entities that interact and influence each other . Quine says we are all one substance and our mental state is also our physical state. This means that our mental states are equal to our neural states/physical states. He clearly states his meaning here: ?The only change is that we reckon mental states as states of the body rather than as states of another substance, the mind,? (pg. 287, The Nature of Mind). Where as dualists see that the physical and mental states as separate states or entities. Eliminativists use terms one associates with mental states to refer to bodily state. Thus they are also physicalists. They believe that observed behavior of the body results in the naming of our mental states. Quine reflects on how we learn the mentalistic terms to give reinforcement to his beliefs. He tells us that when one is young and one is learning about one's mental states, one associates names with those mental states because one is told to. This means that when one is hit on the head as a young child and gets a sensation or rather, mental state, someone else comes a long, observes this behavior and says that because they were hit on the head the mental state that they are sensing must be ?pain?. So naming our mental states is something learned. As Quine says, ?Mental states, construed as states of nerves, are like diseases. A disease may be diagnosed in the light of observable signs though the guilty germ be still unknown to science.? We may not know if we diagnosed the word pain as the correct mind state but the symptoms of hitting one's head would allow us to believe that as true. He is not telling us to just hand off what we have learned. He is only asking us to use more neural talk when we are discussing our minds so we aren't miss labeling anything. Quine consistently denies that a distinction can be drawn between naming the mental states and identifying nervous sensations he reputes naming mental states in example pain etc. in favor of states of nerves(pg. 288, The Nature of Mind). Hence he is content to talk states of nerves' identification but again in everyday life he thinks it is all right to use are normal linguistics structure to discuss what is happening to us or has happened to us. In ?Persons Without Minds?, by Richard Rorty, another Elimin-ativist, looks at eliminative materialism from the point of view that we have traveled to the other side of the universe and found these aliens that are almost identical to us except for the fact that they don't understand the notion of a ?mind?, (pg. 268, The Nature of Mind). Instead of feeling pain these aliens, known as Antipodeans, have neural state, such as C-fiber 692. We as humans try to analyze if Antipodeans really do have a mind or not. Rorty approaches these Antipodeans very carefully, first analyzing them with Phenomenal Properties, coming up with questions like ?`When they report that their C-fibers seem to be