The most obvious objection to eliminative materialism (EM) is that it denies obvious data, the very data without which there would be no philosophy of mind in the first place. Introspection directly reveals the existence of pains, beliefs, desires, anxieties, pleasures, and the like. Suppose I have a headache. The pain, qua felt, cannot be doubted or denied. Its esse is its percipi. To identify the pain with a brain state makes a modicum of sense; but it makes no sense at all to deny the existence of the very datum that got us discussing this topic in the first place. But Paul M. Churchland (Matter and Consciousness, rev. ed. MIT Press, 1988, pp. 47-48) has a response to this sort of objection:
The eliminative materialist will reply that that argument makes the same mistake that an ancient or medieval person would be making if he insisted that he could just see with his own eyes that the heavens form a turning sphere, or that witches exist. The fact is, all observation occurs within some system of concepts, and our observation judgments are only as good as the conceptual framework in which they are expressed. In all three cases — the starry sphere, witches, and the familiar mental states — precisely what is challenged is the integrity of the background conceptual frameworks in which the observation judgments are expressed. To insist on the validity of one's experiences, traditionally interpreted, is therefore to beg the very question at issue. For in all three cases, the question is whether we should reconceive the nature of some familiar observational domain.
Even if we grant that "all observation occurs within some system of concepts," is the experiencing of a pain a case of observation? If you know your Brentano, you know that early on in Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint he makes a distinction between inner observation (innere Beobachtung) and inner perception (innere Warhnehmung). Suppose one suddenly becomes angry. The experiencing of anger is an inner perception, but not an inner observation. The difference is between living in and through one's anger and objectifying it in an act of reflection. The act of inner observation causes the anger to subside, unlike the inner perception which does not.
Reflecting on this phenomenological difference, one sees how crude Churchland's scheme is. He thinks that mental data such as pains and pleasures are on a par with outer objects like stars and planets. It is readily granted with respect to the latter that seeing is seeing-as. A medieval man who sees the heavens as a turning sphere is interpreting the visual data in the light of a false theory; he is applying an outmoded conceptual framework. But there is no comparable sense in which my feeling of pain involves the application of a conceptual framework to an inner datum.
Suppose I feel a pain. I might conceptualize it as tooth-ache pain in which case I assign it some such cause as a process of decay in a tooth. But I can 'bracket' or suspend that conceptualization and consider the pain in its purely qualitative character. It is then nothing more than a sensory quale. I might even go so far as to abstract from its painfulness.
Now the existence of this rock-bottom sensory datum is indubitable and refutes the eliminativist claim. For this datum is not a product of conceptualization, but is something that is the 'raw material' of conceptualization. The felt pain qua felt is not an object of observation, but an Erlebnis, something I live-through (er-leben). It is not something outside of me which I subsume under a concept, but a content (Husserl: ein reeller Inhalt) of my consciousness. I live my pain, I don't observe it. It is not a product of conceptualization -- in the way a distant light in the sky can be variously conceptualized as a planet, natural satellite, artificial satellite, star, double-star, UFO, etc. -- but a material or object of conceptualization.
So the answer to Churchland is as follows. There can be no question of re-conceptualizing fundamental sensory data since there was no conceptualization to start with. So I am not begging the question against Churchland when I insist that pains exist: I am not assuming that the "traditional conceptualization" is the correct one. I am denying his presupposition, namely, that there is conceptualization in a case like this.
Most fundamentally, I am questioning the Kantian-Sellarsian presupposition that the data of inner sense are in as much need of categorial interpretation as the data of outer sense. If there is no categorization at this level, then there is no possibility of a re-categorization in neuroscientific terms.
I think you are right that Churchland (and probably many other eliminativists) work from an impoverished view of mental life. It's a shame that phenomenology went out of favor in the anglo-american world along with the more obscurantist strains of continental philosophy.
And as suggested in earlier strands of this thread, the problems with eliminativism extend right to the notions of 'observation' and 'conceptual framework' that are appealed to in an effort to explain away the problems to which critics point. The theory that there are no theories should be recognized for the self-refuting nonsense that it is. The fact that very intelligent people try to find ways to avoid this conclusion amazes me.
Although Wilfrid Sellars was not an EMer, to understand EM one has to go back to Sellars and indeed to Kant. When one does that, one can begin to see why very bright people like Churchland espouse EM.
I wholeheartedly agree with you about EM, but I'm not as familiar with continental philosophy as you are. Could you do a post comparing early continental philosophy with its later forms? Which authors would be the best ones to start with, especially for one, such as myself, who knows only a smattering of German? Are there any figures of later continental philosophy that you think to be work reading? Thanks.
Thanks for your suggestion as to a series of posts on Cont. Phil. I'll try to accommodate you before too long.
You're on the mark about Sellars as a source of Churchland's views. I think there has been an uncareful extension of Sellars' argument against the Myth of the Given well beyond the legitimate point that sense data are not givens in perception, but abstracted from it by an act of cognition. To get from there to the elimination of beliefs requires some very debatable definitional stipulations and methodlogical assumptions.
Thanks for another clear post.
You're welcome. And thanks for getting me going on this topic. I am noticing a few points I hadn't thought of before.
This certainly contains the direct seeds of EM. The question is, what is this "principle," and has it ever been defended, or merely assumed, by those such as the Churchlands? Whatever "principle" it is, it seems to amount to the denial of the cleavage between the subjective and objective, in order to arrive at a sort of "view from nowhere." (Science, being a kind of objectivity that is a locus of maximally inclusive intersubjectivity, is the ideal place for the two realms to collapse into; enter Quineanism.) This perspective treats the essence of the subjective as an unreduced surd, which is then simply "swept away." Kierkegaard would have been foaming at the mouth at such "principles."
As for Sellars, he considers three ways of relating the manifest and scientific images. The first way is to identify the objects of the manifest image with the objects of the scientific image. Sellars rejects this solution invoking the following principle:
But this really requires a separate post to be explained properly.
The Sellarsian principle in question doesn't specify that the relations between constituents must be linear, so I don't think additivity is implied. Still, whether we're talking about additive or non-additive properties, I don't see how any combination of physical properties, as these are currently understood, could "give rise to" consciousness.
My italicized qualification is about as much leeway as I can find it in my heart to extend to eliminativists of the Churchland variety -- I acknowledge that perhaps, someday, if we witness a major revolution in the conceptual foundations of physics, it might be possible to construct a "real" alternative (i.e., not a notational variant) to our current taxonomy of mental phenomena. But I have seen no arguments that could persuade me that I should accept promissory notes in this marketplace of ideas. And until such a revolution is realized, it seems eliminativists can't even formulate a positive statement of their view without lapsing into logical incoherence.
And, of course, there's nothing in our current understanding of physical properties that rules out the possibility that some combination of them could "give rise to" consciousness. But the eliminativists seem to assume, a priori as it were, that there is such a fundamental exclusion. This is, ironically enough, quite a Cartesian view of the physical and the mental.
Given the fundamental cleavage between the subjective and objective, and our modern compulsion to collapse the two into one, it's not at all surprising that we tend to rule out the possibility of consciousness being a physical property; and, if monism is true, I would still expect us never to find a theory of consciousness in physical terms (cf. Davidson's anomalous monism). But none of that is justification for eliminativism, as has been pointed out.
I don't know what happened to your previous comment. Strange. It must have appeared if Bob replied to it.
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