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Eliminative materialism (also called eliminativism) is a materialism position in the philosophy of mind that expresses the idea that the majority of in folk psychology do not exist. Some supporters of eliminativism argue that no coherent Neural correlate will be found for many everyday psychological concepts such as belief or desire, since they are poorly defined. The argument is that psychological concepts of behavior and experience should be judged by how well they reduce to the biological level.Lycan, W. G. & Pappas, G. (1972) "What is eliminative materialism?" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 149-59. Other versions entail the nonexistence of conscious mental states such as pain and visual perceptions.Rey, G. (1983). "A Reason for Doubting the Existence of Consciousness", in R. Davidson, G. Schwartz and D. Shapiro (eds.), Consciousness and Self-Regulation Vol 3. New York, Plenum: 1-39.
Eliminativism about a class of entities is the view that the class of entities does not exist. For example, materialism tends to be eliminativist about the soul; modern chemists are eliminativist about phlogiston; modern biologists are eliminativist about élan vital; and modern physicists are eliminativist about luminiferous ether. Eliminative materialism is the relatively new (1960s–70s) idea that certain classes of mental entities that common sense takes for granted, such as beliefs, desires, and the subjective sensation of pain, do not exist.Rorty, Richard (1970). "In Defence of Eliminative Materialism" in The Review of Metaphysics XXIV. Reprinted Rosenthal, D.M. (ed.) (1971).Feyerabend, P. (1963) "Mental Events and the Brain" in Journal of Philosophy 40: 295-6. The most common versions are eliminativism about propositional attitudes, as expressed by Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland, (1998). 9780262531658, MIT Press. ISBN 9780262531658 and eliminativism about qualia (subjective interpretations about particular instances of subjective experience), as expressed by Daniel Dennett, Georges Rey, and Jacy Reese Anthis. (2025). 9783030969929 ISBN 9783030969929
In the context of materialism understandings of psychology, eliminativism is the opposite of reductive materialism, arguing that mental states as conventionally understood do exist, and Neural correlate. An intermediate position, revisionary materialism, often argues the mental state in question will prove to be somewhat reducible to physical phenomena—with some changes needed to the commonsense concept.
Since eliminative materialism arguably claims that future research will fail to find a neuronal basis for various mental phenomena, it may need to wait for science to progress further. One might question the position on these grounds, but philosophers like Churchland argue that eliminativism is often necessary in order to open the minds of thinkers to new evidence and better explanations. Views closely related to eliminativism include illusionism and quietism.
Philosophers who argue against eliminativism may take several approaches. Simulation theorists, like Robert GordonGordon, R. (1986). Folk psychology as Simulation, Mind and Language 1: 158-171. and Alvin Goldman,Goldman, A. (1992). In Defense of the Simulation Theory, Mind and Language 7: 104-119. argue that folk psychology is not a theory, but depends on internal simulation of others, and therefore is not subject to falsification in the same way that theories are. Jerry Fodor, among others, argues that folk psychology is, in fact, a successful (even indispensable) theory. Another view is that eliminativism assumes the existence of the beliefs and other entities it seeks to "eliminate" and is thus self-refuting.Boghossian, P. (1990). "The Status of Content" Philosophical Review 99: 157-84.
Eliminativism maintains that the commonsense understanding of the mind is mistaken, and that neuroscience will one day reveal that mental states talked about in everyday discourse, using words such as "intend", "believe", "desire", and "love", do not refer to anything real. Because of the inadequacy of natural languages, people mistakenly think that they have such beliefs and desires. Some eliminativists, such as Frank Jackson, claim that consciousness does not exist except as an epiphenomenon of brain function; others, such as Georges Rey, claim that the concept will eventually be eliminated as neuroscience progresses.Jackson, Frank (1982) "Epiphenomenal Qualia", The Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127-136. Consciousness and folk psychology are separate issues, and it is possible to take an eliminative stance on one but not the other. The roots of eliminativism go back to the writings of Wilfred Sellars, W.V.O. Quine, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty.Sellars W. (1956). "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" in: Feigl H. and Scriven M. (eds.) The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis: Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 253-329. Online. The term "eliminative materialism" was first introduced by James Cornman in 1968 while describing a version of physicalism endorsed by Rorty. The later Ludwig Wittgenstein was also an important inspiration for eliminativism, particularly with his attack on "private objects" as "grammatical fictions".
Early eliminativists such as Rorty and Feyerabend often confused two different notions of the sort of elimination that the term "eliminative materialism" entailed. On the one hand, they claimed, the cognitive sciences that will ultimately give people a correct account of the mind's workings will not employ terms that refer to commonsense mental states like beliefs and desires; these states will not be part of the ontology of a mature cognitive science. But critics immediately countered that this view was indistinguishable from the identity theory of mind.Savitt, S. (1974). Rorty's Disappearance Theory, Philosophical Studies 28: 433-36. Quine himself wondered what exactly was so eliminative about eliminative materialism:
On the other hand, the same philosophers claimed that commonsense mental states simply do not exist. But critics pointed out that eliminativists could not have it both ways: either mental states exist and will ultimately be explained in terms of lower-level neurophysiological processes, or they do not. Modern eliminativists have much more clearly expressed the view that mental phenomena simply do not exist and will eventually be eliminated from people's thinking about the brain in the same way that demons have been eliminated from people's thinking about mental illness and psychopathology.
While it was a minority view in the 1960s, eliminative materialism gained prominence and acceptance during the 1980s.Niiniluoto, Ilkka. Critical Scientific Realism. Page 156. Oxford University Press (2002). . Proponents of this view, such as B.F. Skinner, often made parallels to previous superseded scientific theories (such as that of the four humours, the phlogiston theory of combustion, and the vitalism theory of life) that have all been successfully eliminated in attempting to establish their thesis about the nature of the mental. In these cases, science has not produced more detailed versions or reductions of these theories, but rejected them altogether as obsolete. Radical behaviorists, such as Skinner, argued that folk psychology is already obsolete and should be replaced by descriptions of histories of reinforcement and punishment.Skinner, B.F. (1971). Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Alfred Knopf. Such views were eventually abandoned. Patricia and Paul Churchland argued that folk psychology will be gradually replaced as neuroscience matures.
Eliminativism is not only motivated by philosophical considerations, but is also a prediction about what form future scientific theories will take. Eliminativist philosophers therefore tend to be concerned with data from the relevant neuroscience and cognitive sciences.Churchland, P.S. (1986) Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. In addition, because eliminativism is essentially predictive in nature, different theorists can and often do predict which aspects of folk psychology will be eliminated from folk psychological vocabulary. None of these philosophers are eliminativists tout court.Churchland, P.M. and Churcland, P. S. (1998). Intertheoretic Reduction: A Neuroscientist's Field Guide. On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987-1997. Cambridge, Massachusetts, The MIT Press: 65-79.Dennett, D. (1978) The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.Dennett, D. (1988) "Quining Qualia" in: Marcel, A. and Bisiach, E. (eds.), Consciousness in Contemporary Science, pp. 42-77, New York, Oxford University Press.
Today, the eliminativist view is most closely associated with the Churchlands, who deny the existence of propositional attitudes (a subclass of intentionality), and with Daniel Dennett, who is generally considered an eliminativist about qualia and phenomenal aspects of consciousness. One way to summarize the difference between the Churchlands' view and Dennett's is that the Churchlands are eliminativists about propositional attitudes, but reductionism about qualia, while Dennett is an anti-reductionist about propositional attitudes and an eliminativist about qualia.Churchland, P.M. (1985). "Reduction, Qualia and the Direct Inspection of Brain States," in Journal of Philosophy, 82, p. 8-28.Churchland, P.M. (1992). A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. . Chapt. 3
More recently, Brian Tomasik and Jacy Reese Anthis have made various arguments for eliminativism. Elizabeth Irvine has argued that both science and folk psychology do not treat as having phenomenal properties so the hard problem "may not be a genuine problem for non-philosophers (despite its overwhelming obviousness to philosophers), and questions about consciousness may well 'shatter' into more specific questions about particular capacities." In 2022, Anthis published Consciousness Semanticism: A Precise Eliminativist Theory of Consciousness, which asserts that "formal argumentation from precise semantics" dissolves the hard problem because of the contradiction between precision implied in philosophical theory and the vagueness in its definition, which implies there is no fact of the matter for phenomenological consciousness.
Such eliminativists have developed different arguments to show that folk psychology is a seriously mistaken theory and should be abolished. They argue that folk psychology excludes from its purview or has traditionally been mistaken about many important mental phenomena that can and are being examined and explained by modern neuroscience. Some examples are , consciousness, , learning processes, and memory abilities. Furthermore, they argue, folk psychology's development in the last 2,500 years has not been significant and it is therefore stagnant. The Ancient Greece already had a folk psychology comparable to modern views. But in contrast to this lack of development, neuroscience is rapidly progressing and, in their view, can explain many cognitive processes that folk psychology cannot.Churchland, P.M. (1981) Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78(2): 67-90.
Folk psychology retains characteristics of now obsolete theories or legends from the past. Ancient societies tried to explain the physical mysteries of nature by ascribing mental conditions to them in such statements as "the sea is angry". Gradually, these everyday folk psychological explanations were replaced by more efficient scientific descriptions. Today, eliminativists argue, there is no reason not to accept an effective scientific account of cognition. If such an explanation existed, then there would be no need for folk-psychological explanations of behavior, and the latter would be eliminated the same way as the mythological explanations the ancients used.Jackson, F. & Pettit, P. (1990). "In Defense of Folk Psychology". Philosophical Studies 59: 31-54.
Another line of argument is the meta-induction based on what eliminativists view as the disastrous historical record of folk theories in general. Ancient pre-scientific "theories" of folk biology, folk physics, and folk cosmology have all proven radically wrong. Eliminativists argue the same in the case of folk psychology. There seems no logical basis, to the eliminativist, to make an exception just because folk psychology has lasted longer and is more intuitive or instinctively plausible than other folk theories. Indeed, the eliminativists warn, considerations of intuitive plausibility may be precisely the result of the deeply entrenched nature in society of folk psychology itself. It may be that people's beliefs and other such states are as theory-laden as external perceptions and hence that intuitions will tend to be biased in their favor.
It has also been argued against folk psychology that the intentionality of mental states like belief implies that they have semantic qualities. Specifically, their meaning is determined by the things they are about in the external world. This makes it difficult to explain how they can play the causal roles they are supposed to in cognitive processes.Stephen Stich (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
In recent years, this latter argument has been fortified by the theory of connectionism. Many connectionist models of the brain have been developed in which the processes of language learning and other forms of representation are highly distributed and parallel. This tends to indicate that such discrete and semantically endowed entities as beliefs and desires are unnecessary.Ramsey, W., Stich, S. and Garon, J. (1990). Connectionism, Eliminativism and the Future of Folk Psychology, Philosophical Perspectives 4: 499-533.
Traditional analogies fail to explain this phenomenon. Unlike a photograph, neurons do not physically resemble Paris. Nor can we appeal to conventional symbolism, as we might with a stop sign representing the action of stopping. Such symbols derive their meaning from social agreement and interpretation, which are not applicable to a brain's workings. Attempts to posit a separate neural process that assigns meaning to the "Paris neurons" merely shift the problem without resolving it, as we then need to explain how this secondary process can assign meaning, initiating an infinite regress.
The only way to break this regress is to postulate matter with intrinsic meaning, independent of external interpretation. But our current understanding of physics precludes the existence of such matter. The fundamental particles and forces physics describes have no inherent semantic properties that could ground intentionality. This physical limitation presents a formidable obstacle to materialist theories of mind that rely on neural representations. It suggests that intentionality, as commonly understood, may be incompatible with a purely physicalist worldview. This suggests that our folk psychological concepts of intentional states will be eliminated in light of scientific understanding.
The disjunction problem arises from the fact that natural selection cannot discriminate between coextensive properties. For example, consider two genes close together on a chromosome. One gene might code for a beneficial trait, while the other codes for a neutral or even harmful trait. Due to their proximity, these genes are often inherited together, a phenomenon known as genetic linkage. Natural selection cannot distinguish between these linked traits; it can only act on their combined effect on the organism's fitness. Only random processes like genetic crossover—where chromosomes exchange genetic material during reproduction—can break these linkages. Until such a break occurs, natural selection remains "blind" to the linked genes' individual effects.
Eliminativists argue that if natural selection—the process responsible for shaping our neural architecture—cannot solve the disjunction problem, then our brains cannot store unique, non-disjunctive propositions, as required by folk psychology. Instead, they suggest that neural states contain inherently disjunctive or indeterminate content. This argument leads eliminativists to reject the notion that neural states have specific, determinate informational content corresponding to the discrete, non-disjunctive propositions of folk psychology. This evolutionary argument adds to the eliminativist case that our commonsense understanding of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes is flawed and should be replaced by a neuroscientific account that acknowledges the indeterminate nature of neural representations.
But even if one accepts the susceptibility to error of people's intuitions, the objection can be reformulated: if the existence of mental conditions seems perfectly obvious and is central to our conception of the world, then enormously strong arguments are needed to deny their existence. Furthermore, these arguments, to be consistent, must be formulated in a way that does not presuppose the existence of entities like "mental states", "logical arguments", and "ideas", lest they be self-contradictory.John Polkinghorne points out that such philosophers expect more attention to their works that "we would give to the scribblings of a mere automaton". Those who accept this objection say that the arguments for eliminativism are far too weak to establish such a radical claim and that there is thus no reason to accept eliminativism.
Georges Rey and Michael Devitt reply to this objection by invoking deflationary semantic theories that avoid analyzing predicates like "x is true" as expressing a real property. They are instead construed as logical devices, so that asserting that a sentence is true is just a quoted way of asserting the sentence itself. To say "'God exists' is true" is just to say "God exists". This way, Rey and Devitt argue, insofar as dispositional replacements of "claims" and deflationary accounts of "true" are coherent, eliminativism is not self-refuting.Devitt, M. & Rey, G. (1991). Transcending Transcendentalism, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 72: 87-100.
Experiments in the 1980s with Macaque isolated the structural resemblance between input vibrations the finger feels, measured in cycles per second, and representations of them in neural circuits, measured in action-potential spikes per second. This resemblance between two easily measured variables makes it unsurprising that they would be among the first such structural resemblances to be discovered. Macaques and humans have the same peripheral nervous system sensitivities and can make the same tactile discriminations. Subsequent research into neural processing has increasingly vindicated a structural resemblance or physical isomorphism approach to how information enters the brain and is stored and deployed.
This isomorphism between brain and world is not a matter of some relationship between reality and a map of reality stored in the brain. Maps require interpretation if they are to be about what they map, and eliminativism and neuroscience share a commitment to explaining the appearance of aboutness by purely physical relationships between informational states in the brain and what they "represent". The brain-to-world relationship must be a matter of physical isomorphism—sameness of form, outline, structure—that does not require interpretation.
This machinery can be applied to make "sense" of eliminativism in terms of the sentences eliminativists say or write. When we say that eliminativism is true, that the brain does not store information in the form of unique sentences, statements, expressing propositions or anything like them, there is a set of neural circuits that has no trouble coherently carrying this information. There is a possible translation manual that will guide us back from the vocalization or inscription eliminativists express to these circuits. These neural structures will differ from the neural circuits of those who explicitly reject eliminativism in ways that our translation manual will presumably shed some light on, giving us a neurological handle on disagreement and on the structural differences in neural circuitry, if any, between asserting p and asserting not-p when p expresses the eliminativist thesis.
Dennett notes that it is possible that such indeterminacy problems remain only hypothetical, not occurring in reality. He constructs a 4x4 "Quinian crossword puzzle" with words that must satisfy both the across and down definitions. Since there are multiple constraints on this puzzle, there is one solution. Thus we can think of the brain and its relation to the external world as a very large crossword puzzle that must satisfy exceedingly many constraints to which there is only one possible solution. Therefore, in reality we may end up with only one physical isomorphism between the brain and the external world.
The explanation of why scientific methods work for us must be a causal explanation. It must show what facts about reality make the methods we employ to acquire knowledge suitable for doing so. The explanation must show that our methods work — for example, have reliable technological application — not by coincidence, still less miracle or accident. That means there must be some facts, events, processes that operate in reality and brought about our pragmatic success. The demand that success be explained is a consequence of science's epistemology. If the truth of such explanations consists in the fact that they work for us (as pragmatism requires), then the explanation of why our scientific methods work is that they work. That is not a satisfying explanation.
Admitting that the existence of qualia seems obvious, Dennett nevertheless holds that "qualia" is a theoretical term from an outdated metaphysics stemming from Cartesian intuitions. He argues that a precise analysis shows that the term is in the long run empty and full of contradictions. Eliminativism's claim about qualia is that there is no unbiased evidence for such experiences when regarded as something more than propositional attitudes. In other words, it does not deny that pain exists, but holds that it exists independently of its effect on behavior. Influenced by Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Dennett and Rey have defended eliminativism about qualia even when other aspects of the mental are accepted.
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