only if realism (of intention) is right can folk psychology beradically
incorrect in this sense. By contrast, there is nothing much for Dennett’s
intentional stance to be radically wrongabout.
What the eliminativist proposes is suYciently iconoclastic to seem ab-
surd. How could it possibly be true that people do not have beliefs, fears,
and hopes? Do we not know for certain in our own case that we do?
Besides, is not the eliminativist view paradoxically self-refuting – daring to
think the unthinkable; in particular, tothinkthat there is no such thing as
thought?
We reject eliminativism, but not for these considerations, which are not
at all so compelling as they may seem atWrst. In fact they just beg the
question. Suppose somebody insisted that weknowthe sun swings round
the Earth through the sky because we can see it rising in the east and setting
in the west. There is no doubt that when we see the sun rise and set we are
observing some sort of phenomenon, a genuine change. We are observing
a real process, but the question is how that process is to be interpreted.
Similarly there is no doubt there are genuine diVerences between the
internal states someone is in before thinking something and during the
thought (as folk psychology might put it). To adopt a neutral vocabulary,
we might say that we can be sure in our own case that we sometimes
experience the changes involved incognitive processing. But the fact that
we are accustomed to describe such changes in the terms of folk psychol-
ogy does not ensure that folk psychology correctly categorises and clas-
siWes them, any more than our lingering habit of talking about the sun
‘rising’ and ‘setting’ establishes anything about how the sun moves in
relation to the Earth. Similarly, eliminativism might now seem to us to be
self-defeating because it is something a few philosophers are crazy enough
to believe. But that only shows that our conceptual resources in this area
are limited by our old-fashioned theories. In time we might come to realise
that there is a better way of understanding what goes on inside someone’s
brain when they are in the process of formulating a true hypothesis.
So that sort of argument does not knock out eliminativism. Nonetheless,
we think eliminativism is mistaken. But we are more conWdent about this
in relation to Churchland’s brand of eliminativism than Stich’s. We will
take these in turn.
4.1 Churchland: elimination nowAccording to Churchland (1979, 1981), the defects of folk psychology
should already be apparent to us, and we are already in a position to
conclude that folk psychology is going to be replaced by a superior
scientiWc understanding of human motivation and cognition. He claims we
Realism and eliminativism 41