Your Refutations Don't Have To Depend On Self-Confirming Antecedents When What You Are Refuting Contains Its Own Self-Contradictions - Hate Mail

I recommend you read, or, in your case, try to read the article about eliminative materialism at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  you might want to know what it is you believe you are talking about before you continue.   While you are reading the various objections raised to the absurd notion and the defenses of it, keep in mind one thing that the eliminative materialists and, to an extent, their critics, pretend, that they are talking about these things as if they weren't all happening in the minds of people. 

The answer to the objections about eliminative materialist debunking of the categories of thought, claiming that none of them have significance, truth value,  pretend that there are some ideal form of Eliminative Materialism, which isn't, in fact, the creation of some rather decadent academic scribblers who get paid to uphold the religious faith of materialism to the bitter end of its logically mandated debunking of the very human minds which invented it.

Many writers have argued that eliminative materialism is in some sense self-refuting (Baker, 1987; Boghossian, 1990, 1991; Reppert, 1992). A common way this charge is made is to insist that a capacity or activity that is somehow invoked by the eliminativist is itself something that requires the existence of beliefs. One popular candidate for this activity is the making of an assertion. The critic insists that to assert something one must believe it. Hence, for eliminative materialism to be asserted as a thesis, the eliminativist herself must believe that it is true. But if the eliminativist has such a belief, then there are beliefs and eliminativism is thereby proven false.

Eliminativists often respond to this objection by first noting that the bare thesis that there are no beliefs is not itself contradictory or conceptually incoherent. So properly understood, the complaint is not that eliminative materialism (qua-proposition) is self-refuting. Rather, it is that the eliminativist herself is doing something that disconfirms her own thesis. In the above example, the disconfirming act is the making of an assertion, as it is alleged by the critic that we must believe anything we assert with public language. However, this last claim is precisely the sort of folk-psychological assumption that the eliminative materialist is suggesting we should abandon. According to eliminative materialism, all of the various capacities that we now explain by appealing to beliefs do not actually involve beliefs at all. So the eliminativist will hold that the self-refutation critics beg the question against eliminative materialism. To run this sort of objection, the critic endorses some principle about the necessity of beliefs which itself presupposes that eliminative materialism must be false (P. S. Churchland, 1986; Cling, 1989; Devitt, 1990; Ramsey, 1991).

However, the issue of question begging is irrelevant to the claim in that it is the doctrine of eliminative materialism that contains its own refutation, it's not so much question begging as denial requiring and absurdity identifying. 

All of the preliminary supports for eliminative materialism would have to have the same degraded status that eliminativists deride all of the beliefs of human minds with.  Including their own.  That is especially true of eliminative materialists who deny that ideas are anything but the result of physical structures in our physical brains.   Under materialism, no human mind has access to anything outside of the physical structures present in our brains, under their own framing, no human being has access to some pure, disembodied thing which has any possibility of transcending the physical conditions they claim produce all of our minds, all of our ideas.   Yet they want to make an exception for the apple of their eye, whatever that is, eliminative materialism, Darwinism, multiverse conjecture, string-theory, etc.

It is the radical reductionism of materialism that carries the assumptions of it own refutation, not any kind of question begging in the content of the criticism of the idea.

That is especially true when someone like Alex Rosenberg carries on his discrediting program into biology, where he wants natural selection, the most complex of all claims within science, to have the status of law which he wants to deny to all other holdings of biologists on the basis of their complexity.  However, in his case it's even more absurde because his own claims rest on such ideas in biology as he demotes, especially in the highly dubious claims of materialist-neurobiologists which are some of the most problematic of all of them.   I'd love to see him try to wriggle out of his same program of debunkery as applied to the beliefs of neurobiologists that he likes and uses to make his claims on the basis of his own degrading of biological law.

At the center of the current minor fad of eliminative materialism are two things, the hankering of some decadent humanities profs after the status and glamor and often overblown repute of science and a more generalized conceit of scientism, that what is held to be the knowledge of science is, somenow, not as dependent on the same human mind that the eliminativists want to get by because atheists of the scientistic kind, can't use science to account for our minds.

Every aspect of science, from counting things, even the fingers of our hands as toddlers to the most rarefied of conjecture that people want to call science, even exempting it from verification in the physical universe, rests on the acceptance of beliefs.   Any claim that any aspect of science or philosophy or ideology can escape that fact merely denies that hardest of hard facts, that science, that philosophy, that scientific statements and laws and philosophical claims all rest solidly on the same bedrock of belief that only the most pudding headed of decadent university profs seem to deny even as they rest their claims on such belief. 

Eliminative materialism is the most decadent position in the history of academic claims.  It may be possible for materialists to find something as decadent, but I think eliminative materialists have achieved the ultimate level of the absolute in academic decadence.

Update:  I doubt there is a field granted the status of science by university faculties in which scientific holdings held on any particular day have a shorter shelf-life than in those dealing with the mind or minds.  As I've mentioned several times this week, the history of psychology is a history of risings and fallings of not only ideas or even schools of thought but of entire framings of thought.  Freudianism - in all its myriad of sniping, backbiting, and contradicting schools, Behaviorism, today's Evo-psy (which I think is already on the decline) and whatever, all within the relatively short history of psychology as an alleged science.

I would bet the farm that the various cog-neuro-whatever sciences they devise to get by the abject failure of the social sciences will not have much more success in generating durable scientific "fact" but will, also, consist of a line of such "fact" which will, similarly, rise and fall, though they might avoid some of the personality-centered "science" such as has characterized psychology.   Let's see if they can avoid that much of it.

But I will bet you that a lot of the stuff that the eliminativists such as the Churchlands and Rosenberg base their faith on will not endure as science any better than the psychology that previous atheists have based their denominations, sects and cults in.   What does happen to such faiths when their scientific bases dissolve from under them?   Will they become like some of the more hardened of Marxist cults, generating such angry accusations as I found you can hear from such as those who give workshops at the Left Forum?   Or maybe they'll exist like the Comtian Postivist Temples that are maintained as empty museums getting few visitors, museums to the futility of materialism which can't even sustain belief in claims made through it. 

Update 2:  If that's the end of such stuff, considering that Comtian positivism has led to the ultimate degradation of not only human beings but our minds into base insignificance, it would be fitting, if anything could be fitting.   All of his high-flown nonsense, as well as the ironic development of that in atheist neo-Humanism, just shows how they couldn't face the logical end of their ideological faith. It makes the struggle over predestination trivial or the strife over the question of evil meaningless.  Though they'll still cite the question of evil to score debate points.