ABSTRACT
Eliminativism and reductionism are very close friends. Indeed, it may be even hard to distinguish them. One issue concerning eliminativism can be formulated as the objection that the eliminativist postulates the existence of something (simples arranged treewise) but not of something that is identical to it (the tree). If this is true, the eliminativist is guilty of endorsing a contradiction, since on the one hand she claims that trees do not exist, but on the other hand she has to say that they do, since simples arranged treewise exist, and trees are nothing else than simples arranged treewise. But this objection backfires. Not only there is no problem for eliminativism, but once we consider the idea behind this objection carefully, we actually find reasons in favour of eliminativism. In order to see this, we need to compare eliminativism to various versions of reductionism and to strong realism about tables, and we need to consider what the difference between eliminativism and reductionism is. We also need to consider issues about “composition as identity” and the notion of an “ontological free lunch”.
