Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it displaces, and more substantially (...) integrated within physical science generally. My purpose in this paper is to explore these projections, especially as they bear on (1) the principal elements of common-sense psychology: the propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.), and (2) the conception of rationality in which these elements figure. (shrink)

I discuss donald davidson's argument for the psycho-Physical identity theory and contend that it fails: it relies on an implausible account of mental and physical events. Davidson proposes a linguistic test for determining whether a given event is mental or physical. I argue that the assumptions that are necessary for employing such a criterion of the mental are either false or presuppose the truth of the identity theory.