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Quine’s Eliminativism and the Crystal Spheres

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Abstract

Quine’s eliminativist theory has largely been ignored by the philosophical community. This is highly regrettable because Quine’s theory is probably close to correct. Now, the probable correctness of Quine’s theory has an important consequence since, according to the theory, there are no mental entities (events, states, phenomena, properties, etc.) nor do such entities play any role in a scientific account of the relevant phenomena. But the hundreds or probably thousands of publications that deal with issues such as mental causation, the nature of qualia, supervenience of the mental, or multiple realizability, presume the existence of, or at least attribute a positive role to, mental entities. The probable correctness of Quine’s theory therefore suggests that all these publications are worthless and reading them is a waste of time just as reading studies about how crystal spheres can move planets is considered nowadays a waste of time.

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Notes

  1. Although Chomsky (1959) has shown that there are problems with Skinner’s (1957) account of verbal behavior, his arguments do not affects Quine’s experimentally supported account of ostensive learning. As to the acquisition of syntactic competence, Quine accounts for the acquisition of this competence by acknowledging the role of acquired functional similarities (see Quine 1974, pp. 20–24; Stemmer 1987).

  2. See Quine’s discussion of the role of our standards of salience in inductive generalizations (1974, pp. 25–28).

  3. Although Tom applies the same word ‘wants’ to Fido’s as well as to Betty’s behavior, it is unlikely that there is a significant physical similarity between the neural processes that occur in Fido and Betty. As I explained in Stemmer (2001), this phenomenon is an instance of Davidson’s anomalous monism (Davidson 1980).

  4. Strawson (1994) claims that “personalized ostensive definitions [such as] ‘You know what it is like from your own case as you burn your finger’ (p. 83), show the reality of experiential, i.e., mental, phenomena. But the argument fails once we acknowledge that, as in the case of Tom’s utterance of ‘pain’, the personalized definitions are merely verbal utterances which, via the activation and enlivening of relevant neural traces, elicit physiological and behavioral effects in us. Consequently, the effects of personalized ostensive definitions do not require the introduction of mental entities. (Strawson’s argument is discussed in more detail in Stemmer 2001).

  5. See also Calvo Garzón (2001) and Marras (2005) for further criticisms of Lycan’s position.

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Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Max Hocutt and the late U. T. Place for many helpful suggestions.

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Correspondence to Nathan Stemmer.

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Editor’s note: Since Nathan Stemmer died in the beginning of 2007 we have provided his son’s address Shlomo M. Stemmer. Due to this, the proofreading was only done by the editors.

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Stemmer, N. Quine’s Eliminativism and the Crystal Spheres. J Gen Philos Sci 38, 315–327 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-007-9051-8

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