Abstract
Traditional eliminativism is the view that a term should be eliminated from everyday speech due to failures of reference. Following Edouard Machery, we may distinguish this traditional eliminativism about a kind and its term from a scientific eliminativism according to which a term should be eliminated from scientific discourse due to a lack of referential utility. The distinction matters if any terms are rightly retained for daily life despite being rightly eliminated from scientific inquiry. In this article, I argue that while scientific eliminativism for pain may be plausible, traditional eliminativism for pain is not. I discuss the pain eliminativisms offered by Daniel Dennett and Valerie Hardcastle and argue that both theorists, at best, provide support for scientific eliminativism for pain, but leave the folk-psychological notion of pain unscathed. One might, however, think that scientific eliminativism itself entails traditional eliminativism—for pain and any other kind and corresponding term. I argue that this is not the case. Scientific eliminativism for pain does not entail traditional eliminativism about anything.
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Notes
For discussion, see Dallenbach (1939).
Smart (1959).
As will be seen in discussing Hardcastle’s position in Sect. 4, it is not clear that holding traditional elminativism for a kind—which entails that the members do not exist—while rejecting scientific eliminativism for that same kind—entailing that its members are usefully investigated—can be held consistently without some bizarre commitments, e.g., the members exist and do not exist, successful reference does not require existence, the relevant scientific investigation is into unreal entities, and so on.
I take this view of natural kinds to be a dominant view, and I will not here discuss the alternatives. Most important for present purposes is that all those theorists discussed in text identify natural kinds and natural kind terms—elaborated mechanistically, as in Machery, Boyd, or Dennett, or by appeal to natural laws, as in Hardcastle—in accordance with this scientific utility principle. A reader with a conflicting view of natural kindhood is invited to translate (out) my use of ‘natural kind’ and ‘natural kind term’ accordingly. As should become increasingly clear, the honorary term ‘natural kind’ or ‘natural kind term’ does not matter for the arguments in text, but are instead useful shorthands for kinds and terms referring to those kinds that are useful for scientific inquiry and discourse. Compare to Griffiths (2004).
Machery further distinguishes both types of eliminativism from pluralism. Pluralism about a kind is the claim that despite mechanistic differences across its members, the kind is nonetheless usefully employed for scientific inquiry. I will not discuss his pluralism, since I will not discuss pluralism about pain. Space precludes such discussion. Both Dennett and Hardcastle think the mechanistic heterogeneity they identify does undermine utility of the folk-psychological notion of pain for scientific inquiry, and my arguments here will grant them this.
Since I reject that there are any unanalyzable mental qualities, brutely discriminated—including pain as argued in text—and that the folk are committed to any such qualities, I set premise 2 entirely aside. I am grateful to an anonymous review for pointing out that work in experimental philosophy further supports my contention in this section that the folk do not have the views about pain which Dennett alleges. See, for instance, Reuter et al. (2013) and Sytsma (2010). For a broader discussion of experimental philosophy concerning non-expert views on conscious qualitative states, see Sytsma and Machery (2012).
The reader is again referred to the experimental philosophy literature for further support of this contention.
This is again, of course, reminiscent of Dennett’s classic arguments for pain eliminativism.
Including, in particular, that any theory could be unconcerned with facts of the matter, much less that folk-psychology is one such theory.
This does not mean that for any scientific discourse, we ought to classify such a broad range of experiences as members of some one (natural) kind.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.
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Acknowledgments
The present work was developed thanks to funding from the John Templeton Foundation and “The Value of Suffering” project with Principal Investigators David Bain and Michael Brady. I am also thankful for discussion and comments on this and earlier versions of the paper from David Bain, Umut Baysan, Neil McDonnell, Jesse Prinz, and Keith Wilson.
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Corns, J. Pain eliminativism: scientific and traditional. Synthese 193, 2949–2971 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0897-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0897-8