Eliminative materialism: Going Concern or Passing Fancy?

Will the recent outbreak of respect-even support-for eliminative materialism (EM) be viewed by our successors as a late twentieth-century aberration or the beginning of wisdom? Barbara Hannan's helpful overview of the debate makes a case for the former assessment. Her argument divides into two broad points. On the one hand she contends that, insofar as there are clear positive arguments for EM, they entirely depend on the conception of ordinary commonsense intentional psychology as incorporating a rudimentary empirical theory which, there is purported reason to think, will be superseded by mature science-and superseded not just in the detail of its hypotheses, but in the basic concepts and categories of explanation which it distinctively employs. But this view, Hannan arguesthe 'theory-theory' of commonsense psychology (CP)-can and should be rejected. Second, Hannan emphasises that, notwithstanding the questionable character of certain standard attempts to demonstrate that EM is selfdefeating, it remains that eliminative materialists have given us not even the most rudimentary explanation of how it might be practical to dispense with the concepts of CP, nor the slightest inkling of a way of thinking about the province of (what we now conceive of as) human rational agency which might supplant them. Ordinary intentional psychology, Hannan reminds us, cannot be entirely wide of the mark if it is granted that there is legitimate use for the concepts of cognition and rational action, for the applicability of CP's distinctive modes of explanation is presupposed in