Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eliminative materialism is a bold position in philosophy of mind: proponents of it hold that folk psychology is a primitive theory of human behavior, and like most primitive theories, it is, unfortunately, false. The alarming implications of this are that mental states don’t actually exist—humans don’t actually believe anything. In this paper I try to show that several central claims of eliminative materialism (specifically Paul Churchland’s version) are mistaken and, further, that it is, in fact, false. I first argue that folk psychology is not a theory, and that a proper understanding of the nature of basic beliefs, non-basic beliefs, and theories makes this clear; next, I claim that the eliminative materialist response to the charge of incoherence is inadequate as it misunderstands what mental states are; finally, I offer an argument for the falsity of eliminative materialism on common sense grounds, while undercutting objections to the argument by way of scientific anti-realism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".