Eliminative Materialism

Eliminative materialism is the philosophical thesis that the folk-psychological categories we use to describe mental life — beliefs, desires, qualia, intentions, emotions — do not refer to real features of the brain and will not survive contact with mature neuroscience. Paul and Patricia Churchland are its principal advocates. The position is not that minds do not exist, but that 'mind-talk' is a radically false theory that will eventually be replaced by a vocabulary derived directly from cognitive neuroscience.

The view is frequently misrepresented as denying that experience occurs. It does not. It denies that the conceptual apparatus of folk psychology — including the notion of qualia as private, ineffable, intrinsic properties — accurately carves experience at its joints. In this, eliminative materialism is less a claim about what is absent (experience) than about what is misleading (our inherited concepts for it).

The deepest challenge to eliminativism is self-referential: if beliefs do not exist, what is the ontological status of the belief that beliefs do not exist? The eliminativist must find a way to discharge this circularity without reinstating everything the view eliminates. So far, no one has done so to general satisfaction. See also: Introspection, Functionalism, Consciousness.