Paul Churchland\'s Eliminative Materialism HW Response PDF

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reading response - Prof. Kaleena Stoddard...

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Zoe Green PHIL1010-01 10/01/19 Paul Churchland: Eliminative Materialism

Churchland’s position of eliminative materialism is “eliminative” in that it is eliminating or questioning people’s beliefs of the mind and mental capacities. His position is to be distinguished from the identity theory of philosophy in that they are branching off their ideas from different sources. Eliminative materialism is the claim that people's understanding of the mind and mental capacities are false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist. Identity theory discusses mind and mental capacities, while understandably distinguishable, are actually very closely related. Churchland thinks our common-sense psychological conceptions are fundamentally misguided because he believes there is a wide array of explanative, predictive, and manipulative failures within folk psychology. Folk psychology’s main issue is that we aren’t completely sure about the majority of what it revolves around, which makes it technically unreliable and to live by these beliefs would make us misguided people. According to Churchland, despite it being such a theoretical failure, folk psychology is still around because it is not intended to be a theory of aspects of one’s mentality, such as mental illness, sleeping, learning, etc., meaning it isn’t a criticism to explain them. Instead, folk psychology is only meant to explain human behavior and human actions. Folk psychology is successful in that it is the basis of psychological developments along with ideas about unconscious belief. To eliminate concepts of beliefs, desire, etc. from psychology would do away with much scientific psychology as well as folk psychology. I do believe that

introspection can directly reveal the existence of mental states like beliefs and desires. By having the ability to successfully analyze and go into depth on how we think, we can gain a better understanding of our own personal beliefs, morals, and ideas that distinguish us from that of another person to the fullest extent. This may be a problem for eliminative materialism because eliminative materialism focuses a lot on disproving people’s beliefs that certain mental processes are not real so the introspection of understanding and viewing these mental processes contradicts that....