Folk psychology and eliminative materialis

A brief examination of some of the traditional dualistic views on the relationship of the mind and body reveals significant problems, especially regarding causal interaction. Our common sense, conceptual framework concerning the explanation and prediction of human behavior is construed as a theory, termed folk psychology. This theory is evaluated relative to a proposed competing theory which comes from the neurosciences, according to a variety of well accepted criteria, and found to be deficient. The relationship of folk psychology to dualism is also discussed.;Reductive materialism is shown to consist of two distinct components, intertheoretic reduction from folk psychology to a physical theory and an ontological view called the identity theory. Its relationship to folk psychology is explicated by the drawing of a distinction between weak and strong ontic commitments. Weak ontic commitments involve the types-of-things countenanced by some theory. Strong ontic commitments involve such ultimate types as mental or physical. Both psychoneural and psychofunctional reductivism are examined. Their similarities and differences are brought out by contrasting the type/type and the token/token versions of the identity theory.;Eliminative materialism is presented as an alternative to reductivism. This view is examined in relationship to the network theory of meaning, to the view that perception is theory-laden, and to the identity theory. The major problem facing the eliminative materialist is to account for the qualitative character of perceptual experience. It is maintained that both a dualistic folk psychology and eliminative materialism are best construed as paradigms. These paradigms are summarized and used to resolve some of the contemporary disputes between materialists and proponents of folk psychology.;It is concluded that there is very little substantive support for the strong ontic commitments of either dualism or materialism, regardless of the strengths or weaknesses of neuroscientific or folk psychological theories of human behavior. Thus, the proposed alternative to the theory of folk psychology is better termed 'eliminative neuroscience'.