Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

This attempt at a cheap version of the identity of minds and brains will work well enough if we refrain from pressing questions about criteria of identity of reference, just as topic-neutral analyses will work well enough if we refrain from pressing questions about identity of meaning. I do not, however, think that there are criteria for the identity of either which are useful in philosophically controversial cases. So I do not think that “eliminative materialism” is a more plausible version of the thesis of mind-brain identity than “reductive materialism.” When we try to make sense of any claim of the form “There aren’t really any X’s; what you have been talking about are nothing but Y’s,” it is always possible to object that (a) “X” refers to X’s, and (b) we cannot refer to what does not exist. So to get around this standard criticism the eliminative materialist would have to say either that “sensation” does not refer to sensations, but to nothing at all, or that “refer” in the sense of “talk about” is not subject to (b). Either line is defensible, and I defend the second in discussing the notion of reference in connection with the so-called problem of conceptual change in chapter six below. But since I think that the reductive and eliminative versions of the identity theory are both merely awkward attempts to throw into current philosophical jargon our natural reaction to an encounter with the Antipodeans, I do not think that the difference between the two should be pre...

September 19, 2020. Page 119. Eliminative materialism.