Friday, December 5, 2008

Eliminativism about minds

Here is a hypothesis: A mature neuro-science will, as the eliminativists claim, have no room for concepts like "belief", "desire", etc. Suppose this hypothesis proves true. What should we then do? Obviously, it would be absurd to deny that we have beliefs or desires. Instead, we should deny that belief, desire, etc. occur in the neural system, which is what the neuro-science studies, and hold that they occur elsewhere. Since there is no other plausible candidate for the mind in the physical world besides the neural system, we should conclude that belief, desire, etc. occur outside the physical world, i.e., that some form of dualism is true. Moreover, I suspect that a neuro-science that would have no room for beliefs and desires would also have no room for the idea that there are states of the brain on which beliefs and desires supervene. Thus, it would lead us to a non-supervenient dualism.

But this is just an exercise in hypotheticality, since we are in no position to make such specific predictions about future science.

6 comments:

Kyle said...

Wouldn't eliminativists actually claim that we do not have beliefs or desires. It's just a mistake that we have made due to our language or something.

Perhaps I'm wrong about this, but I thought eliminativism was a rather extreme view.

Alexander R Pruss said...

Yup, that is what they claim. But I think the very same scientific discoveries which they take to ground eliminativism could be taken as an argument for a very different conclusion--namely, dualism.

AJK said...

You claim that, "Obviously, it would be absurd to deny that we have beliefs or desires." But when a proposition is held to be self-evident, as in the preceding quotation, it's considered an argumentative fallacy to assert that disagreement with the proposition is incoherent (which you imply via the 'absurdity' of its denial). One can deny the truth of a purportedly self-evident proposition given compelling, independent considerations to the contrary. And that's just what eliminativists do.

But your argument is wanting in other respects--specifically, in its misconstrual of the eliminativist's position. No eliminativist denies the phenomenology of beliefs and desires, nor do they deny their useful deployment in certain situations. Rather, the eliminativist asserts that, given what we now know about the brain, beliefs and desires seem unlikely to constitute legitimate representational, state, or process categories in a mature neuroscience. Most eliminativists take folk psychology to be a fairly reliable, albeit a fundamentally mistaken, agent-centred (i.e. intentional) inferential/ explanatory/ predictive theory; it's this theory eliminativists claim is incompatible with neuroscience.

You make a routine category error when you interpret the eliminativist's denial of beliefs and desires as an ontological thesis. Most eliminativists are naturalists with respect to epistemology and methodology, and they usually subscribe to something along the lines of Quine's criterion with respect to ontological claims. But since folk psychology didn't arise in the context of scientific discovery, and since it's categories don't seem useful to our best theory of the brain, they aren't considered good candidates as ontological categories. Most eliminativists consider folk psychology a useful heuristic device, at best.

Perhaps the central failing of your argument is that it's circular, given the claim that "...there is no other plausible candidate for the mind in the physical world besides the neural system...". The the substance dualism implicit in this premise requires defense on independent grounds, and a satisfactory argument for dualism doesn't seem forthcoming (given the widespread rejection of even thoroughly modern arguments for dualism, e.g. Chalmers).

So, even if we agree to drop an outmoded category like 'mind' and substitute it for a respectable scientific analogue, like 'cognitive system', the claim identifying a cognitive system with a neural system is misguided. Content externalism is the order of the day in cognitive science, and today the boundaries of cognitive systems are taken to reside somewhere beyond the neural system. That is to say, cognition is explained in terms of the interactions of whole animals and their environments, so the line demarcating any such system is actually quite hazy.

In sum, your argument is circular and you seem poorly informed about the science you want to condemn. Given the other material I've perused on this blog, most of your work seems motivated by dubious theistic assumptions. Careless arguments like the one in question seem clearly intended to buttress those assumptions, which strikes me as intellectually dishonest.

Alexander R Pruss said...

Thanks for helping me clarify my claims!

1. That we have beliefs, perceptions, etc. is something we should be more confident of than the claims of science. After all, science proceeds through observation, and observation makes use of perception. Without perception, there is no observation. Without observation, there is no science. :-)

2. "Rather, the eliminativist asserts that, given what we now know about the brain, beliefs and desires seem unlikely to constitute legitimate representational, state, or process categories in a mature neuroscience."

Consider the following parallel claim: "given what we now know about the liver, beliefs and desires seem unlikely to constitute legitimate representational, state, or process categories in a mature hepatology." The claim is uncontroversially true. :-) What is the natural conclusion to draw from this? Surely the natural conclusion to draw is not that there are no beliefs or desires, but that if there are any beliefs or desires, they are not found in the liver.

Similarly, the neural claim you give does not lead to the conclusion that there are no beliefs or desires, but to the claim that if there are any beliefs or desires, they are not found in the neural system.

3. "'...there is no other plausible candidate for the mind in the physical world besides the neural system...'. The the substance dualism implicit in this premise requires defense on independent grounds." I am afraid I do not see what substance dualism is implicit in the claim. Does anybody seriously see any other plausible candidate in the physical world for the mind besides the neural system? In the past, the heart was a serious candidate. But once we've learned that the heart is a pump, this became much less plausible.

4. There is a somewhat different way of putting my argument. The eliminativist argument is something like this:
a. If there are beliefs and desires, they are in the neural system. (Premise)
b. Beliefs and desires are not in the neural system. (Premise)
c. Therefore, there are no beliefs and desires.

But of course one can give an argument as follows:
d. If beliefs and desires are physical (states, properties, whatever), they are in the neural system. (Premise)
e. Beliefs and desires are not in the neural system. (Premise)
f. There are beliefs and desires. (Premise)
g. Therefore, beliefs and desires are non-physical.

This argument accepts premise (b) of the eliminativist argument, but puts it to different use.

AJK said...

"1. That we have beliefs, perceptions, etc. is something we should be more confident of than the claims of science."

That we have experience/ perception is something we should be more confident of than the claims of science. That we should trust the way we intuitively carve up that experience/ perception (e.g. into beliefs, desires, etc.) more than a scientifically rigourous account of that experience seems preposterous.

"Surely the natural conclusion to draw is not that there are no beliefs or desires, but that if there are any beliefs or desires, they are not found in the liver."

You miss the point here. The eliminativist is making a claim along the following lines. Beliefs, desires (and the litany of propositional attitudes) are intuitive and, often, effective ways of categorizing aspects of our experience. They're effective insofar as they provide a way to systematically order those aspects of our experience, and (along with certain inferential strategies) to explain and predict other aspects of our experience. That is, they constitute a theory about our experience. But, since beliefs and desires seem unlikely to constitute legitimate representational, state, or process categories in a mature neuroscience--our best theory about the nature of experience--it seems plausible to conjecture that beliefs, desires, etc. may be abandoned as ways of ordering that experience, assuming that neuroscience will influence and inform the way we talk about our experience in everyday language.

So, your arguments in points 4 and 5 are just wrongheaded. Eliminativists will usually say that both folk psychology and neuroscience are ways of talking about certain aspects of the physical world (namely, the nature of experience). Given these two ways of talking about that aspect of the physical world, the eliminativist considers it obvious that we ought to have greater confidence in the account offered by neuroscience.

Alexander R Pruss said...

AJK:

Yes, the eliminativist thinks that folk psychology is a way of talking of an aspect of the physical world. It is this dogmatic assumption that I am questioning.

Once you grant "That we have experience/ perception is something we should be more confident of than the claims of science", you have rejected eliminativism. For the eliminativist claims that there is no such thing as experience or perception. The eliminativist grants that the categories of experience or perception may be useful for organizing data, but that's beside the point. For here we are after the true, not the useful.