Eliminative materialism

Eliminative materialism is the view that some or all ordinary psychological concepts, such as belief and desire, will be replaced by a more accurate scientific account of cognition.

Folk psychology: The everyday framework that explains behavior through mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. Eliminative materialists argue that this framework may be an inadequate theory destined for replacement.
Theory reduction: The explanation of one scientific theory by deriving or identifying its claims with those of another theory. It supplies a model for how psychological concepts might be translated into neuroscience rather than abandoned.
Paul Churchland: A Canadian philosopher known for developing and defending eliminative materialism about the mind. He gave the position its systematic contemporary defense and connected it to neuroscience.
Propositional attitude: A mental state, such as believing or hoping, that relates a person to a proposition. Beliefs and desires are central examples of the psychological states targeted by eliminative arguments.
Folk psychology debate: The philosophical dispute over whether everyday mental-state explanations are a genuine theory and how successful they are. Eliminative materialism depends on whether folk psychology is sufficiently theory-like and empirically defective to be replaced.
Identity theory: The view that mental states are identical to physical states of the brain. Unlike elimination, identity theory typically identifies familiar mental states with neural states rather than discarding them.
Scientific realism: The view that successful scientific theories aim to describe a mind-independent world, including unobservable entities. The eliminative argument relies on treating mature cognitive science as a guide to what mental processes really are.
Patricia Churchland: A Canadian philosopher whose work links neuroscience with questions about the mind and human behavior. Her neurophilosophy develops the case that brain science can transform familiar psychological concepts.
Mental representation: An internal state or structure that carries information or stands for something in a cognitive system. Scientific accounts may explain cognition through representations unlike the sentences often attributed by folk psychology.
Mary's room: A thought experiment about a scientist who learns all physical facts about color vision while living without color experience. It tests whether a physical account leaves out knowledge or experience that a replacement theory must explain.

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