Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it displaces, and more substantially (...) integrated within physical science generally. My purpose in this paper is to explore these projections, especially as they bear on (1) the principal elements of common-sense psychology: the propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.), and (2) the conception of rationality in which these elements figure. (shrink)

In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our ...

Lynne Rudder Baker, Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, xii + 177 pp. Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987, xi + 388 pp. Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness Cambridge: MIT Press, revised edition, 1988, xii + 184 pp.

Hilary Putnam, who may have been the first philosopher to advance the notion that the computer is an apt model for the mind, takes a radically new view of his...

Preface 1 Introduction: The Persistence of the Attitudes 2 Individualism and Supervenience 3 Meaning Holism 4 Meaning and the World Order Epilogue Creation Myth Appendix Why There Still Has to be a Language of Thought Notes References Author Index.

Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, Daniel Dennett asserts in this first full scale presentation of...

Completely revised and updated in its Second Edition, Language and Reality provides students, philosophers and cognitive scientists with a lucid and provocative introduction to the philosophy of language.

The Mind-Body Problem Questions: What is the mind? What is its connection to the body? Most basic division of answers: Dualist and Materialist (or Physicalist) responses.

Replies to an earlier article ("mind-Body identity, Privacy, And categories") by cornman and bernstein depend upon a tacit adoption of what sellars has called "the myth of the given." both critics assume that what appears to us, Or what we experience, Is what it is independently of the language we use. But there is no criterion for the adequacy of a bit of language to a bit of non-Linguistic awareness, And thus no way to show that a materialistic vocabulary would (...) be "inadequate" to our experience. (shrink)

The crudest form of materialism will be taken as the basis of argument. If it can successfully evade the objections of some philosophers, then a more refined doctrine will be even less troubled.