Abstract
A critical outline is given of Rorty’s early, “eliminativist” attempt to formulate a materialist version of the mind-body identity theory that does not fall foul of the “irreducible properties objection” (the thought that if mental states are brain states then the latter must exhibit the same properties as the former). An explanation is offered of why Rorty continued to describe himself as a materialist/physicalist despite having come to reject any version of mind-body identity.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Rorty first proposed what he refers to as the “disappearance” form of Identity Theory in his 1965 essay “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories.” The position is extended and defended in the “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” (1970) and “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism” (1972). These and other important essays from the period are collected in Rorty 2014 (Chaps. 6, 8, and 10 respectively). The more popular descriptor “eliminative” materialism was coined by Cornman (1968a).
- 2.
I’ll say more about the Antipodeans in Sect. 5.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Ryle was of course familiar with the German phenomenological tradition and famously reviewed Being and Time (Ryle 1929).
- 6.
For an influential contrasting view of the status of such identities see Kripke 1980.
- 7.
For a response to this from the ‘Oxford’ school see Grice and Strawson 1957.
- 8.
“for my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits” (Quine 1980, p. 44).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
The name is of course a tongue-in-cheek homage to the Australasian materialists who first propounded the reductive version of the identity theory.
- 12.
See Gascoigne (forthcoming) for a fuller account.
- 13.
The positing of what we need to “talk about.” See Rorty 1976.
- 14.
“If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and no propositional attitudes but only the physical constitution and behavior of organisms” (Quine 2013, p. 202).
- 15.
In Gascoigne 2008, ch. 3 I melodramatise this as Rorty’s “Kehre.”
- 16.
My thanks to Martin Müller for “encouraging” me to finish this and for his editorial acumen!
Bibliography
Armstrong, David M. 1968. A materialist theory of the mind. London: Routledge.
Bernstein, Richard J. 1968/2000. The challenge of scientific materialism. In Materialism and the Mind–Body Problem, 2nd edn., ed. D.M. Rosenthal, 200–222. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Brandom, Robert. Ed. 2000. Rorty and his critics. Cambridge: Blackwell.
Bush, Eric. 1974. Rorty revisited. Philosophical Studies 25: 33–42.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1956. The methodological character of theoretical concepts. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1: 38–76.
Churchland, Patricia S. 1986. Neurophilosophy: Toward a unified science of the mind-brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Churchland, Paul M. 1979. Scientific realism and the plasticity of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Churchland, Paul M. 1981. Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. The Journal of Philosophy 78(2): 67–90.
Churchland, Paul M. 1984. Matter and consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Churchland, P. M. 1989. A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Cornman, James W. 1962/2000. The identity of mind and body. In Materialism and the mind–body problem, 2nd edn., Ed. D.M. Rosenthal, 73–9. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Cornman, James W. 1968a. On the elimination of “Sensations” and sensations. The Review of Metaphysics 22: 15–35.
Cornman, James W. 1968b. Mental terms, theoretical terms, and materialism. Philosophy of Science 35(1): 45–63.
Cornman, James W. 1971. Materialism and sensations. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Feigl, Herbert. 1958. The ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2: 370–497.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1890. The Essence of Christianity, 2nd edn., Trans. M. Evans. London: Kegan Paul
Feyerabend, Paul. 1963. Mental events and the brain. In Materialism and the mind–body problem, 2nd edn., Ed. D.M. Rosenthal, 172–173. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Gascoigne, Neil. 2008. Richard rorty: liberalism, irony and the ends of philosophy. Cambridge: Polity.
Gascoigne, Neil. Forthcoming. After metaphysics: Eliminativism and the protreptic dilemma. In The Cambridge companion to rorty. Ed. D. Rondel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grice, H. Paul, and Peter F. Strawson. 1957. In Defense of a dogma. The Philosophical Review 65(2): 141–158.
Hiley, David R. 1978. Is eliminative materialism materialistic? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 38: 325–337.
Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and necessity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lycan, William G., and George S. Pappas. 1972. What is eliminative materialism? Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50(2): 149–159.
Place, Ullin T. 1956. Is consciousness a brain process? British Journal of Psychology 47: 44–50.
Quine, Willard V. 1952/1976. On mental entities. In The ways of paradox, 2nd edn, 221–227. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quine, Willard V. 1980. From a logical point of view, 2nd edn, revised. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Quine, Willard V. 2013. Word and object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ramsay, William. 2020. Was Rorty an eliminative materialist? In A companion to rorty, Ed. A. Malachowski, 25–42. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rorty, Richard. 1976. Realism and reference. The Monist 59: 321–340.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1991. Objectivity, relativism, and truth. Philosophical papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 2014. Mind, language, and metaphilosophy: Early philosophical papers, Eds. S. Leach and J. Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ryle, Gilbert. 1929. Review of Sein und Zeit. Mind 38(159): 355–370.
Ryle, Gilbert. 1954. Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures 1953. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Savitt, Steven. 1974. Rorty’s Disappearance Theory. Philosophical Studies 28(6): 433–436.
Sellars, Wilfried. 1997. Empiricism and the philosophy of mind, Ed. R. Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Smart, John J.C. 1962/2000. Sensations and Brain Processes. In Materialism and the mind–body problem, 2nd edn., Ed. D.M. Rosenthal, 53–66. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Stich 1983. From folk psychology to cognitive science: The case against belief. MIT Press.
White, Morton G. 1950. The analytic and the synthetic: An untenable dualism. In John Dewey: Philosopher of science and freedom, Ed. S. Hook, 316–331. New York: The Dial Press.
Further Reading
Brandom, Robert. 1998. Making it explicit. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
A systematic development of the innovative approach to the practice-based explication of social norms that Brandom ascribes to Rorty’s eliminative materialism.
Davidson, Donald. 1980. Essays on actions and events. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Essays outlining the ‘reason can be causes’ thesis that Davidson calls ‘Anomalous Monism’ and which is one of the sources of Rorty’s non-reductive physicalism.
Gascoigne, Neil. 2015. Richard Rorty. In Oxford bibliographies in philosophy, Ed. D. Pritchard. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0190.
A critical bibliography of works on and by Rorty.
McDowell, John. 1998. Reply to commentators. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53(2): 403–432.
On the ‘baldness’ of Rorty’s naturalism amongst other things.
Ramsey, William. 2013. Eliminative materialism. In The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, summer edn. Ed. E.N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/materialism-eliminative
An informative overview of how eliminativism developed in the aftermath of Rorty’s early work.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, ein Teil von Springer Nature
About this entry
Cite this entry
Gascoigne, N. (2022). Philosophy of Mind: Mind-Body Identity and Eliminative Materialism. In: Müller, M. (eds) Handbuch Richard Rorty. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16260-3_36-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-16260-3_36-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer VS, Wiesbaden
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-16260-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-658-16260-3
eBook Packages: Springer Referenz Sozialwissenschaften und Recht