Eliminative materialism eliminates itself - a familiar idea?

Question

Years ago I concluded that eliminative materialism was self-refuting. It seemed a pretty obvious logical point and I was surprised not to find it 'mainstream' in philosophy books and sources. Then I spotted a few books or quotes in which this point had been made before.

I would like to find more arguments and quotes from philosophers, specifically about the idea that "eliminative materialism eliminates (invalidates, contradicts) itself."

This is because any theory about the human mind (such as eliminative materialism) is itself a product of the human mind, and therefore if a theory about the human mind states that the human mind is an illusion, then it logically follows that this theory itself must be an illusion.

Do you know if this self-contradiction in eliminative materialism has already been spotted and described by other people, for instance philosophers or scientists?

Three examples follow.

The materialist cannot reduce human consciousness to some material phenomenon without thereby manifesting the power that human consciousness holds to understand matter. -- Francis Jeanson, Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre

Materialism seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemistry, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility - that is knowledge - which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result - knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly. -- Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1

According to Wikipedia, the philosopher Mary Midgley states that the idea that nothing exists except matter is self-refuting because if it were true neither it, nor any other idea, would exist, and similarly that an argument to that effect would be self-refuting because it would deny its own existence.

Answer 1

You misunderstand what eliminative materialism is

Schopenhauer never spoke of it, and your quotes from Francis Jeanson and Mary Midgley are about materialism, not eliminative materialism.

How do I know Schopenhauer never spoke of it? Because eliminative materialism is a modern theory. The term was introduced by James Cornman in 1968. Schopenhauer was born a hundred years too early to comment on it.

Eliminative materialism is not just materialism. You can be a materialist, believing nothing exists except physics, and not be an eliminative materialist.

Eliminative materialism is not the belief that we can "eliminate" the soul from our theories of the world. That's already included in materialism. Eliminative materialism instead says that we can eliminate certain aspects of folk psychology, such as propositional attitudes or the feeling of pain.

A materialist who is not an eliminative materialist would say that we do feel pain, and there is a neural basis for pain, and the pain is the result of the neural basis. Such a materialist would say that we do hold propositional attitudes, and there is a neural basis for propositional attitudes. An eliminative materialist would disagree on these points.

Answer 2

The Schopenhauer quote illustrates the nature of this objection, but also the nature of the response by EM advocates.

EM is just the application of absolutist reductionism to psychology. EM was not a new idea, it appeared early in the 20th century in the principle of scientific realism. If you take reductionism to be absolute, then NOTHING at higher levels than the reduced parts is "real". No animals, people, chairs, trees, mountains, planets, ecosystems, or continental drift. OR minds. All of these higher level items, phenomena, etc. are only shorthand used by our neurology to process our complex world, in which the only real things are elementary particles and the laws that govern them.

The objections to EM therefore are the objections to scientific realism's universalizing of reductionism. They constitute claims that there are real things happening, causal things happening, on the higher tiers of phenomena. The objections to EM are therefore part of a suite of arguments to take either scientific pluralism, or strong emergence seriously.

This set of arguments has recently won the day among philosophers of science, who now are in a near consensus that universal reductionism is not true. See section 5 of the SEP article on scientific reduction.

Answer 3

Your argument is an intriguing one, but I believe it involves a misunderstanding of eliminative materialism. The critique seems to rest on a confusion between 'mind' as we commonly understand it and the 'mind' as a neurological phenomenon.

Eliminative materialism does not argue that the 'mind' in its entirety is an illusion. Rather, it posits that our commonsense, or 'folk', understanding of the mind is incorrect. It challenges the existence of 'beliefs', 'desires', 'fears', etc., as we commonly understand them, not the existence of mental phenomena per se.

The fact that eliminative materialism is a product of human cognition does not invalidate it. It simply means that our understanding of cognition needs to change. The predictive and explanatory power of a theory does not depend on whether it is a product of the very thing it tries to explain. After all, we use quantum mechanics to understand particles, even though quantum mechanics is a product of human cognition, not of particles.

Furthermore, the quotes you provided seem to conflate materialism with eliminative materialism. Materialism is a broader philosophical position asserting that everything that exists is physical, or dependent on physical substances. Eliminative materialism, on the other hand, is a more specific claim about the nature of mental states.

As for the claim that an idea can't exist if only matter exists - this is a misunderstanding of what 'matter' means in a contemporary scientific context. We're not dealing with the old notion of matter as 'dead' or 'inert'. Modern physics has shown us that matter and energy are interchangeable, that matter exhibits complex behavior at the quantum level, and that matter can process information, as in the case of computers. If a complex arrangement of matter like a brain can process information, why can't it generate ideas?

In sum, the self-refutation argument seems to misinterpret the claims of eliminative materialism and misunderstands the nature of matter as we now understand it. The challenge for eliminative materialism is not to escape self-contradiction, but to provide a better account of mental phenomena than our current folk psychology does

Answer 4

I found another reference to the same idea in the Avant Propos of Merleau-Ponty's PoP (second para mainly):

All my knowledge of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own particular point of view, or from some experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression. Science has not and never will have, by its nature, the same significance qua form of being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a rationale or explanation of that world. I am, not a ‘living creature’ nor even a ‘man’, nor again even ‘a consciousness’ endowed with all the characteristics which zoology, social anatomy or inductive psychology recognize in these various products of the natural or historical process—I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me would be abolished—since that distance is not one of its properties—if I were not there to scan it with my gaze.

Scientific points of view, according to which my existence is a moment of the world’s, are always both naïve and at the same time dishonest, because they take for granted, without explicitly mentioning, it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself round me and begins to exist for me. To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.