ABSTRACT

The eliminative materialist does not look forward, as a mind-brain identity theorist might, to a tit-for-tat substitution of brain-process terms for mental terms. According to Paul Churchland, such a substitution would presuppose that mental concepts are already doing a good job of identifying certain phenomena, that a nice match-up could in principle take place between the concepts of folk psychology and the concepts of theoretical neuroscience. Churchland's eliminative materialism depends largely on his two-edged claim that the mentalistic terms of ordinary language constitute a folk theory, and that the mentalistic terms of ordinary language constitute a folk theory. Eliminativists talk as if mental concepts were used mainly to explain human behaviour but this seriously misrepresents their usage. Human behaviour, understood as the behaviour of individuals in normal circumstances, is not theoretically problematic. Searle's first thesis towards providing a non-dualist, yet non-reductionist, answer to the mind-body problem is that all mental phenomena are caused by processes going on in the brain.