Eliminative Materialism and Ordinary Language

Abstract

Advocates of eliminative materialism (EM) assure us that our current, ordinary approach to describing the mind (dubbed “folk psychology”) will eventually be eliminated, instead of reduced, by a matured neuroscience. However, once we take into account the flexibility, explanatory power, and overall sophistication of ordinary language, then the promissory note offered by eliminative materialism (EM) loses all credibility. To bolster the preceding claim, we present three original problems for EM: (1) the accountability problem, (2) the substitution problem, and (3) the discourse dependence problem.