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Mind-body materialism is at its most inviting in the context of trying to give a unified treatment of the natural world. And the principle challenge it faces is to do justice to the distinguishing features of mental phenomena, which set them off from nonmental, physical reality. This challenge it not easy to meet. In 1971 I suggested that the difficulty in meeting it makes especially appealing the eliminative materialism of Feyerabend and Rorty. If adopting the materialist view that mental phenomena are physical in nature prevents us from giving a satisfactory account of what is distinctive about the mental, perhaps the trouble is not with materialism but with the mental. If we can describe and explain everything about the world in physical terms but cannot give a satisfactory account of the distinctively mental, why not conclude that there simply are no mental states and events? Physical terms would then suffice to describe and explain the phenomena we now classify as mental. Even if describing and explaining these things physically is not a practical option, the possibility of doing so would underwrite the eliminative materialist position.

The 1960s saw heated discussion of Eliminative Materialism in regard to sensations and their phenomenal features. Thus directed, Eliminative Materialism is materialism or physicalism plus the distinctive and truly radical thesis that there have never occurred any sensations; no one has ever experienced a sensation. This view attracted few adherents(!), though to this day some philosophers are Eliminativists with respect to various alleged phenomenal features of sensations.

Richard Rorty's eliminative materialism is an attack on dualism that has frequently been misrepresented and incorrectly criticized. By taking account of the mistakes that philosophers have made concerning eliminative materialism, a proper definition of the doctrine and a clarification of its relation to traditional materialism will emerge, as well as an understanding of its true strengths and weaknesses. The discussion centers around the original manner in which Rorty defended eliminative materialism by means of analogies to the elimination of talk about demons and talk about macroscopic physical objects.

Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist. Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they challenge of the existence of various mental states that Descartes took for granted.