ABSTRACT
Eliminativism was a controversial practice by scientifically oriented 20th-century analytic philosophers. The basic idea is that concepts that play roles in explaining the natural world ought to refer to real things, and if they do not, then the concept should no longer be employed. The current work claims that proponents of “e-cognition” (e.g., embodied cognition) regularly make eliminativist moves in their work, even if they have not referred to them as such. This is particularly the case with regard to core concepts held by more mainstream approaches like cognitivism, such as the concept of representation. This chapter begins by providing an overview of eliminativism and e-cognition. Next, examples of explicit and implicit eliminativist moves made in the e-cognition literature are presented. Last, it is argued that proponents of e-cognition ought to be eliminativists and should continue to be so explicitly, especially regarding contemporary work in artificial intelligence and neuroscience.
