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Eliminativists, in philosophy, think that we should abandon certain ontological claims, that we should eliminate certain claims from our account of what exists.
Superstitious people used to make the ontological claim that witches exist. Most people today have eliminated the claim that witches exist from their theory of what reality contains. They are eliminativists about witches. There are more controversial versions of eliminatism. Roughly put, materialists believe that everything is physical. Most materialists believe that mental things do exist, that reality contains mental things, merely claiming that every mental thing is physical. Eliminativist materialists also hold that everything is physical. They also deny that the mental could be physical. So, they infer that there are no mental things: there are no minds, plans or intentions. We should eliminate the claim that mental things exist from our theory of what reality contains. We should be eliminativists about the mental. AJ
See also materialism.Further reading P. Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective; Matter and Consciousness. |
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