1. Quick Recap – Whiteboards!
Define folk psychology. What are the three arguments Churchland gives for folk psychology being false? Extension: Do you agree with his ideas? Can you give a reason why or why not?

2. In summary - All together
Folk psychology is the term for the language we use when describing, explaining and predicting other peoples behaviour. It is the language of mental states.
Churchland wants to argue that folk psychology does not fit with empirically robust theories (things that have been demonstrated to be true and are supported with evidence) and so we have reason to abandon it.
We have good reason to support this view that folk psychology is false:
It does not explain many mental phenomena.
It hasn’t advanced in 2500 years.
It cannot be made consistent with many other scientific theories.
In short, if Churchland is right, all talk of emotions, beliefs and desires should be eliminated from our language and replaced with the much more accurate, clear and detailed language of neuroscience.

3. Strengths – Why might someone support Eliminative Materialism?
What reasons might people have for supporting Eliminative Materialism? What issues does it deal with?

4. Criticisms
Can you think of any reasons someone might reject the idea of Eliminative Materialism?

5. A moment to think…
Try some introspection for a moment (look inside your head) does it seem to you that beliefs, thoughts, desires exist as something separate to the workings of your brain?

6. Criticism 1: Intuitive Certainty
Descartes took ‘I think’ to be his first certainty, and for good reason. Nothing, it seems, could be more certain to me than the fact that I have mental states. So no argument could be strong enough to justify giving up such a belief. Surely you might say, I am directly aware of the existence of these mental states and therefore any theory that denies their existence must be false. This conviction should be enough to trump any other consideration.

7. Intuitive Certainty: Response
Would a believer in caloric have an issue with modern theories of heat? (Is it not just obvious that there is some liquid-like thing that moves over my hands when I put them near the flame?) Would a believer in the idea that the heavens move and earth is static have a problem with modern astrology? (After all, we STILL use terms like the sun “sets” and “rises” despite them not being at all accurate)

8. Intuitive Certainty: Response
We could respond to the idea that our mental states are intuitively obvious by pointing out numerous cases in the past of things we thought were just obvious but later turned out to be untrue. We’ve already seen numerous arguments that our mental states are actually just our brain states (see MBTIT), modern science makes this difficult to deny, is it not just time for us to call them what they are? Churchland expresses this by saying that judgements about your own mind don’t have any “privileged status” - (you’re not always correct just because it’s your mind). In actual fact the concepts we have about our mind are based on a specific framework we’ve been brought up to believe, one that could change easily if we were to examine things more closely.

9. Important Point
The objection also misunderstands Churchland’s claim. Churchland does not deny the existence of psychological phenomena as such, just as people who argued against Phlogiston didn’t deny that things burn.
He accepts that the phenomena that we conceptualize as ‘thinking’ occur; he just denies that folk psychology is the correct theory of its nature.
He argues that neuroscience will provide the correct account of what these mental events are, and that explanation will have no place for concepts like ‘belief’, ‘desire’ or ‘Intentional content’.

10. Criticism 2: Folk Psychology has Power
Churchland criticizes folk psychology for its explanatory failures concerning mental illness, sleep, learning, etc. But we can object that this is unfair. Folk psychology is not intended to be a theory that fully explains these aspects of mental life, so it is no criticism that it does not explain them. However, if we focus on the idea that folk psychology is first and foremost a theory of human behaviour used to predict our actions, it performs quite well.

11. For each of the pictures below:
What mental state would you describe the person as being in?
What behaviour would you associate with it?
How would you describe their feelings?

12. Criticism 2: Folk Psychology has Power
As we can see from these examples, folk psychology seems to do well when it comes to identifying and predicting human behaviour. On the other hand, neuroscience is almost useless when it comes to predicting things like how much you’ll study for your exams or why you went to the cinema last night. It can tell us the brain states associated with these things, but not necessarily the causal relationship behind them.

13. Criticism 2: Folk Psychology has Power and uses
Furthermore, folk psychology is the basis of much of scientific psychology. Ideas about subconscious beliefs and desires are an essential part of the science of our behaviour and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many such findings and theories that use folk psychological concepts and ideas as a basis for a scientific understanding.

14. Criticism 2: Folk Psychology has Power and uses
If we use one of Churchlands own examples, that of mental illness, we can easily outline an example of this issue: Cognitive behavioural therapy is one of many successful treatments for conditions such as anxiety and depression, yet it is based on folk psychological concepts (i.e. based around changing unhelpful / damaging thoughts, beliefs and ideas). Despite this, it is significantly more successful at dealing with these issues than drug treatments that concern themselves primarily with the neurological goings on.

15. Folk Psychology has Power and uses: Response
Eliminativism could reply that these points are not very strong. First, we absolutely need to know how human action or behaviour relates to the rest of mental life, and indeed the workings of our brain. To have very different sorts of theories explaining different aspects of the mind (folk psychology – mind, neuroscience – brain) is unsatisfactory and messy. Second, the developments in folk psychology are relatively superficial. Our folk psychological explanations of behaviour are still far less powerful than the kinds of explanations we find elsewhere in the sciences. The only way to address this problem is to look to neuroscience. The argument here is that neuroscience will eventually be able to solve the issues that folk psychology can.

16. Quick Recap
Outline the 2 criticisms on your whiteboards. How might eliminative materialists respond to these criticisms?

17. Quick Recap
It just seems intuitively obvious that mental states as we understand them exist. Surely my memories, my desires, my will are exactly as I perceive them?
It seemed obvious to people in the middle ages that the sky was moving and the earth was still, or that phlogiston caused objects to burn. They turned out to be wrong. Why can we not say the same here?
Whilst mental states might struggle when explaining some phenomenon, they’re very good in other areas. They help us to successfully predict human behaviour and thus form social bonds, they help us to a greater understanding of our subconscious and they help us to deal with mental illnesses (CBT)
The advancements made through folk psychology are fairly superficial when compared to those made through neuroscience. Presumably once we advance the field enough all these issues will be solved scientifically.

18. Patricia Churchland
(Skip ) What example does Churchland use of a theory that is no longer supported in science? What examples of mental states does she give that are not as we understand them? Why does she use light as an example towards the end of the video?

19. Criticism 3: The theory is self-refuting
“The statement of eliminative materialism is just a meaningless string of remarks or noises, unless that string is the expression of a certain belief, and a certain intention to communicate, and a knowledge of grammar of the language, and so forth. But if the statement of eliminative materialism is true, then there are no such states to express. The statement at issue would then be a meaningless string of marks or noises. It would therefore not be true.” – Churchland What criticism of his own theory is he articulating here?

20. Criticism 3: The theory is self-refuting (reductio)
Eliminativism presents arguments, which are expressions of beliefs and rely on beliefs about what words mean and how reasoning works, in order to change our beliefs about folk psychology. Yet eliminativism claims that there are no beliefs. So what does eliminativism express, what is it trying to change? If there are no beliefs, including no beliefs about meaning, no beliefs linked by reasoning, then arguments for eliminativism are meaningless. An argument for eliminativism refutes itself – it concludes that there are no beliefs but it uses and presupposes there are beliefs in order to argue for this fact.

21. The theory is self-refuting (reductio): Response
Eliminativists reply that this objection begs the question. It presupposes that the correct theory of meaning is the one that folk psychology gives. Compare the nineteenth-century argument between people who thought that to be alive required some special energy, a ‘vital force’ (something to distinguish us from inanimate objects), and those who said there was no such force. The vitalists could argue that if what their opponents said was true, they would all be dead! Since we are not all dead, we know vitalism must be true! Yet now we know there is no special ‘vital force’, that life arises from ordinary chemical reactions. Eliminativism simply claims that we need a new / alternative theory of what it means to assert a claim or argument.

22. Objection to Response
But we can press the objection – eliminativism is denying the very idea of intentional content (afterall, how could anything physical be ‘about’ something?). But claims and arguments are all intentional content – they are all about something. So when the eliminative materialist makes the claim “folk psychology is false” they are using intentional content to do so (their claim is about folk psychology) – to make sense of this would require that either:
Folk psychology is true.
There is some alternative account of meaning that would allow for claims to be true without using intentionality.
Since the eliminativist has not effectively offered b) then we must go back to a). As a result the EM standpoint undermines itself. It requires intentionality to make the claim that EM is true, but then denies that intentionality exists as part of it.

23. Interesting Point
On this view folk psychology turns out to not be an empirical theory (which may be wrong) but a condition of saying anything meaningful at all – we require intentional content to make any statement meaningful (i.e. we need to understand a statement to be ‘about’ something). As a result, stating that we can’t reduce intentionality to the physical isn’t an argument against intentionality (we know it exists) but an argument in favour of mental states being irreducible.

24. Tasks
Create a spider diagram showing in short the criticisms levelled at Eliminative Materialism and the responses to these criticisms. Use page 333 onwards to help you. Have these discussions changed your view on the theory at all? If not, have they advanced your view on the theory? Extension: If you complete this, use the checklist to go through your notes and assess your understanding of the POM topic.