This is made

philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warberton.

Philosophy bites is available at

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philosophy bites dot com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

There's a tradition in philosophy which started in Oxford post World War II

that insist that to understand mental concepts like belief or free will or memory or desire,

we just need to analyze how the concepts are actually used in everyday language.

Some people refer to the set of commonly held views about these psychological states as folk psychology.

Pat Churchland, who's based at the University of San Diego, is a well-known and contentious critic of folk psychology.

With her husband Paul, she works on the relationship between neuroscience and philosophy.

She says that we can't approach folk psychology uncritically.

Folk psychology can be wrong. As we learn more about the brain, we'll need to

modify some of our concepts and even eliminate them.

Pat Churchland, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thanks, it's a pleasure to be here.

The topic we're going to talk about today is eliminative materialism.

Now, to somebody outside philosophy, that's just gobbledygook.

What is it? Okay the idea of eliminative materialism is really quite simple.

When Paul and I were thinking about the nature of mental states and how they relate to brain states. We were motivated to look

at the history of science and one of the things that you can see in the history of

...