On your analysis, do you think it would be fair to say that it’s at least reasonably possible, and perhaps even probable, that nothing whatsoever which human concepts entertain exists in reality?
For example, I take you as implying that tables, chairs, and centers of gravity do not exist, and are only convenient abstractions.
But I think this same attitude suggests that cells and molecules do not exist, and even atoms, since in reality there are only particles.
But the particles may really be vibrating strings, or other such things; and certainly particle-wave duality casts some doubt on the reality of particles as opposed to, say, disturbances in the quantum-mechanical wave-function.
So it seems plausible to me that this way of using “exists” implies that only very few of human concepts point at things that exist in reality, and perhaps even none, depending on how much fundamental physics there is left to learn.
This is eliminative materialism.
My only objection here is that this seems like a not-so-useful way to decide the word “exists” works. Plausibly eliminative materialism does point to a scientifically and pragmatically important truth, something roughly like “whenever lower-level calculations conflict with higher-level, it’s the lower-level that you should expect to be correct”. But this applies on all levels; EG, chemistry supersedes biology, even though both of these are high-level abstractions relative to quantum mechanics. So my personal take is that the insistence that tables and chairs don’t exist is an ultimately unrefined attempt to communicate a very important empirical fact about the sort of universe we’re in (IE, a reductive universe).
Kinda nitpicky, but it seems to me that the term “eliminative materialism” usually refers to is policed/was optimized by the philosophical linguistic community to refer to something like “deep skepticism about mind-related folk concepts being very reality-at-joint-carving” (SEP, Wikipedia)
On your analysis, do you think it would be fair to say that it’s at least reasonably possible, and perhaps even probable, that nothing whatsoever which human concepts entertain exists in reality?
For example, I take you as implying that tables, chairs, and centers of gravity do not exist, and are only convenient abstractions.
But I think this same attitude suggests that cells and molecules do not exist, and even atoms, since in reality there are only particles.
But the particles may really be vibrating strings, or other such things; and certainly particle-wave duality casts some doubt on the reality of particles as opposed to, say, disturbances in the quantum-mechanical wave-function.
So it seems plausible to me that this way of using “exists” implies that only very few of human concepts point at things that exist in reality, and perhaps even none, depending on how much fundamental physics there is left to learn.
This is eliminative materialism.
My only objection here is that this seems like a not-so-useful way to decide the word “exists” works. Plausibly eliminative materialism does point to a scientifically and pragmatically important truth, something roughly like “whenever lower-level calculations conflict with higher-level, it’s the lower-level that you should expect to be correct”. But this applies on all levels; EG, chemistry supersedes biology, even though both of these are high-level abstractions relative to quantum mechanics. So my personal take is that the insistence that tables and chairs don’t exist is an ultimately unrefined attempt to communicate a very important empirical fact about the sort of universe we’re in (IE, a reductive universe).
That’s mereological nihilism, not eliminative materialism.
Kinda nitpicky, but it seems to me that the term “eliminative materialism”
usually refers tois policed/was optimized by the philosophical linguistic community to refer to something like “deep skepticism about mind-related folk concepts being very reality-at-joint-carving” (SEP, Wikipedia)