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Article 3920 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: rpoldrac@s.psych.uiuc.edu (Russ Poldrack)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: making sense of eliminative materialism
Message-ID: <1992Feb21.200219.3773@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 21 Feb 92 20:02:19 GMT
Article-I.D.: ux1.1992Feb21.200219.3773
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Organization: UIUC Department of Psychology
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I am faced with the onerous task of defending eliminative materialism
at at lab meeting next week with a bunch of psychologists.  The one
stumbling block I have to understanding and making a case for it has
to do with Fodor's 1975 argument against reduction.  He claims that
reduction to neuroscience will be impossible because the resulting
science of mind would fail to capture interesting generalizations
(i.e. functional states like propositional attitudes).  How do the
Churchlands answer this criticism?  The most obvious answer to me ist
that the intuitions that we think must be captured (that is, the
generalizations that we think must be captured) come from within folk
psychology and thus the criticism presupposes the foundations of folk
psychology that we are trying to destroy.  But I can't see how
psychologists are going to buy this.  

Any help clearing this up would be appreciated.

Russ Poldrack
Psychology
University of Illinois


