[Wittrs] Eliminative Materialism
- From: Gordon Swobe <gts_2000@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2010 15:00:00 -0700 (PDT)
--- On Fri, 4/2/10, SWM <wittrsamr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> That is absurd. To deny there is a dualistic mind/matter
> dichotomy is not to "accept the dualistic mind/matter
> dichotomy".
You misunderstand and misstate my position.
Fearing the stigma of dualism, and wanting at any cost to deny the existence of
the Cartesian ghost in the machine, eliminative materialists such as Dennett go
too far: they in effect embrace the dualist mind/matter dichotomy in order to
deny the ontologically first-person nature of mental phenomena in favor of the
third-person physical descriptions of those same phenomena.
They deny the basic reality of such sense common notions as intentionality,
objectifying the subjective and defying common sense. They then wrongly label
Searle a dualist for not doing the same. But they, *not Searle*, have accepted
the Cartesian categories.
Searle acknowledges that we really do have beliefs, desires, semantic
understandings of symbols, and so on, as we ordinarily understand these
intentional states, and that we have these states intrinsically and independent
of any associated "behaviors" and "dispositions". But because they fear the
Cartesian ghost, eliminative materialists like Dennett do not admit the same.
Searle sees that no ghost exists, so he doesn't run away from the obvious.
-gts
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