I lately endorsed William Lycan's Moorean refutation of eliminative materialism (EM). But I disagreed with Lycan on one point. Lycan thinks that Moorean arguments refute Bradley and McTaggart and that there is no essential difference between the characteristic claims of the British Idealists and the characteristic claims of eliminativists in the philosophy of mind: both deny what common sense must affirm. I believe he is wrong about this, and I will now try to show why. It seems that there are three main positions on this issue. To have some handy labels, I will call them R, L, and V.
R. Just as Berkeley cannot be refuted by kicking a stone, the eliminativist cannot be refuted in any simple Moorean manner. Idealist and eliminativist claims are in the same logical boat, a boat that cannot be sunk by Moorean torpedoes.
L. British and other idealists can be refuted in Moorean ways, and so can eliminativists in the philosophy of mind. Idealist and eliminativist claims are in the same logical boat, a boat that is exposed to Moorean attack.
V. The 'same logical boat' assumption made by R and V must be rejected. There is a crucial difference between what eliminativists are doing and what idealists are doing. The idealist does not deny the existence of physical objects, or time, or relations. Berkeley, for example, does not deny the existence of stones and other meso-particulars. He offers a theory of their ontological constitution. His question is not whether they are, but what they are. His answer, roughly, is that stones and trees and the like are bundles or collections of ideas. Thus he gives an immaterialist account of ordinary particulars. They exist all right, but their status is mind-dependent, the ultimate mind in question being God's.
The eliminativist, however, flatly denies the existence of mental items such as pains, desires, and beliefs. It should be obvious, then, that there is an important difference between what idealists do and what eliminativists do. Idealist accounts are not existence-denying, but they do have an ontologically demoting upshot. If physical object are mind-dependent in the Berkeleyan manner, then they cannot exist in themselves, but only in relation to another, God, who exists in himself. Idealism thus reduces the being-status of physical objects from what it would be on a realist approach. The eliminativist, by contrast, is not engaged in ontological demotion, but in flat-out denial. He does not say of beliefs that they are mind-dependent, or mere appearances, or less than ultimately real; what he says is that they don't exist at all. If the eliminativist said that mental items exist as appearances he would be giving up the game. A pain, e.g., is such that to be = to appear. If you admit the appearance of a mental event such as a pain, you admit its reality.
Whatever the objections that can be lodged against Berkeleyan idealism, it cannot be refuted by kicking a stone. But eliminative materialism can be refuted by simply noting that one desires a beer. Moorean arguments are worthless when deployed against the positions of the great idealists, and this for the reason that the prosaic Moore simply did not understand what they were arguing. But when someone denies a plain datum, then he does run up against common sense in an objectionable way.
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