A Critical Refutation of Eliminative Materialism Alex Djedovic University of Toronto Introduction: The Eliminativist Stance in Context Philosophy of mind,

since the latter half of the 20th century, has been entangled with progress in the cognitive sciences. In particular, the rapid expansion of neuroscience has added initial plausibility to the naturalization of mind, with far-reaching conse uences for the conception thereof. !his essay will focus on how neuroscience may affect the scientific integrity of fol" psychology. #ol" psychology is the conceptual framewor" people use to predict, attribute and explain the actions of other people $%hulz, 2002&. 'entral to fol" psychology are the concepts of belief and desire $as well as less paradigmatic concepts such as hopes, wishes, remembrances, etc.& (nder this framewor", explaining why someone is rummaging through a fridge, for example, relies on both an attribution of a desire to eat, and the belief that there is food in the fridge. )aturally, there is a spectrum of positions on what the normative impact of neuroscience on fol" psychology ought to be. *ualistic positions can dismiss neuroscience out of hand. +onistic positions $in particular materialism& need to address the issue of reduction. In science, an intertheoretic reduction is accomplished when it is shown that for every proposition in theory !,, it is possible to translate it into a proposition in a more encompassing theory !2 using bridge principles. #or example, the reduction of chemistry to physics entails, among other things, that a proposition about such-and-such properties of a chemical bond be reducible to a proposition about the uantum mechanical events constituting the chemical bond. +ind-brain identity theory is committed to a reduction of fol" psychology. #or every attributable state of belief, desire, etc., it claims a corresponding neurological state. Functionalist positions are committed to a looser reductive re uirement. !he eliminativist position claims that neuroscience is not bound by reductive re uirements. !his is the most radical materialist position and the focus of this essay. !he argument for eliminative materialism has two simple premises(P1) #ol" psychology is a theory, (P2) #ol" psychology is radically ron!, therefore (C) !he ontological primitives of fol" psychology $beliefs, desires, etc.& can find no reductive lin" to the ontology of a mature neuroscience. !he .eliminative/ portion of the position comes from the assertion that fol"-psychological concepts cannot be reduced to a future ontology. !he .materialism/ portion arises from the suggestion that the conceptual framewor" of neuroscience ought to replace the current fol"psychological framewor".

0s it stands, the argument for eliminative materialism is not valid. !he concepts it wor"s with are very broad and contestable. 1ecause of this, many lines of suggestive argument exist both for and against each of the premises described above. In isolation, no argument is particularly compelling. 2liminative materialism stands or falls based on constellations of arguments3 this is the motivation for the survey-li"e nature of this paper. !he primary impetus behind the eliminativist position is the assertion that abandoning fol" psychology4s belief-desire framewor" will bring progress on what are otherwise intractable riddles in psychology and philosophy of mind. 5owever, it is controversial how much of what the eliminativist attac"s is a direct product of the fol"-psychological framewor". 0nother important uestion is 6ust how wrong fol" psychology has to be before we can 6ustifiably eliminate it. I will argue that the eliminativist has not made a sufficiently strong case that fol" psychology should be eliminated. Instead, I suggest that the most tenable normative stance is reduction on only some levels of analysis, and substantial room for retention of the framewor" on pragmatic grounds. %ection , will examine the primary arguments used to support an eliminative conclusion. %ection 2 will cover the main criticisms of both premises of the eliminative argument, and section 7 will attempt to come to a synthesis of the debate and a suggestion for its resolution. "#"# $eneral Ar!uments for Eliminative %aterialism: Sta!nancy& 'evolutions& and (i)elihood of %atchin! Paul 'hurchland $,89:& laid out three main lines of argument for eliminative materialism- $,& an argument from the stagnancy of fol" psychology, $2& an inductive historical argument, and $7& an a priori argument based on vindication. !he first argument rests largely on examples of common occurrences that escape ade uate explanation within a fol"-psychological framewor", such as sleep, intelligence and certain "inds of mental illness. 0ll of these are phenomena which psychology ; using fol" psychology4s conceptual framewor" ; has struggled to explain for a long time, with little progress. !his leads 'hurchland to suggest that fol" psychology has been stagnant for 2,<00 years, and a theory that has not produced any innovation in such a long time does not deserve scientific credibility. !he second argument draws on the history of science and argues that scientific revolutions have led to us 6ustifiably abandoning various commonsense conceptual framewor"s. 0ccording to 'hurchland, our initial theories of motion, astronomy, biology, and chemistry were all radically off the mar". !hey contained concepts such as crystal spheres, *lan vital, and phlogiston, which are no longer thought to refer to anything. #ol" psychology, our na=ve theory of cognition>a phenomenon vastly more complex than astronomy>would be expected to be an even bigger failure. It would be uite improbable that we had stumbled on the right conceptual framewor" right from the start. #inally, 'hurchland points out that there are simply many more ways for a neuroscience to be explanatory while not bridging to fol" psychology, than to be explanatory while supporting reductive bridge principles. !his a +riori consideration is designed to loosen our strong intuitions that reduction of fol"-psychological terminology is more li"ely than tout court elimination.

"#,# The Failure of Fol) -sycholo!y: (an!ua!e of Thou!ht In order for the preliminary arguments to hold, the burden of proof is on the eliminative materialist to demonstrate in what ways fol" psychology has misguided attempts to explain the mind, and also to suggest a framewor" capable of carrying the explanatory burden. !o start, Patricia 'hurchland $,898, ,90-,88& claims that fol" psychological intuitions have led psychologists and philosophers to presuppose a framewor" for cognition that assumes that thought is abstract symbol manipulation within a .sentential paradigm/. !he commitments of this position are laid out in #odor $,89,&, as proposed in the lan!ua!e of thou!ht $?@!& hypothesis. ?@! see"s to explain the productivity of human cognition by claiming that thought exhibits combinatorial syntax that ranges over discrete elements, which are the features of language that allow for linguistic productivity. 2ssential for this debate is #odor4s assertion that thoughts are sentence-li"e. 'hurchland contends that this model suffers from a number of intractable problems. !he first of these problems is the .infralinguistic catastrophe/, which arises from the observation that many non-verbal creatures display intelligent behaviour, which is +rima facie evidence that cognition of a sufficient complexity is occurring. 'laiming that infra-linguistic problem solving is not cognitive seems arbitrary. @ne can respond by claiming that all creatures of sufficient cognitive complexity have a language of thought, but this raises additional problems. #or example, the ?@! framewor" implies that when an infant is learning a specific language, it is finding correlates between ?@! categories and the categories of that language. 1ut this suggests that no truly new concepts can be learned. 'hurchland ta"es this to be an absurd conclusion. 0 second and perhaps bigger problem for ?@! is that of tacit belief. !acit belief is our "nowledge, for example, that an egg dropped from a tall building will brea". 'hances are we never explicitly stored this proposition, but inferred it from various non-tacit beliefs about eggs, gravitational acceleration, hard surfaces, etc. !he problem is that there are an infinite number of logical conse uences of one4s current beliefs, and it is difficult to give a principled criterion of how some sentences can count as beliefs, but other logical conse uences of them count as only tacit beliefs. !he obviousness of some inferences over others is unhelpful, since it is that very .obviousness/ one is trying to explain. In a word, fol" psychology presupposes a solution to a legitimate and underadressed problem. 0nother related problem concerns "nowledge access. In practice, a cognitive agent needs information that is relevant only in a particular context. 5owever, accessing relevant "nowledge can be accomplished only by "nowing what is irrelevant in order to ignore it. 1ut this is a deeply paradoxical problem- an organism must intelligently ignore vast regions of its "nowledge and a vast number of the conse uences of its actions. !he "nowledge access problem is 6ust a version of the frame problem that has bedeviled classical 0I $see 5augeland ,89< for an apt description of the problem&. 'hurchland suggests that this paradoxical conclusion arises from a false premise- that "nowledge, beliefs, and other aspects of cognition are represented in a sentential way.

'hurchland argues that these three considerations militate against the ?@! hypothesis. %he suggests that we abandon the premise that thoughts need to be sentential. !his is incompatible with a fol"-psychological description of thought. "#.# The Failure of Fol) -sycholo!y: -ro+ositional %odularity 0nother related line of argument suggests that fol" psychological intuitions have committed many theories of belief and memory to a thesis whose claims can find no reduction to a successful theory of belief and memory $Aamsey et al. ,880&. !he thesis they attac" is +ro+ositional modularity $P+&. !his thesis concerns propositional attitudes- attitudes ta"en towards propositions, such as in .+artin desires that there is food in the fridge/. !he set of attitudes corresponds to the set of fol"-psychological primitives. P+ consists of the claim that propositional attitudes are- $,& functionally discrete units, $2& semantically interpretable, and $7& play a causal role in producing other propositional states and behaviours. Aamsey et al $,880& argue that connectionist models of memory>models explicitly inspired by neural architecture>share no assumptions with P+. In direct contrast to the claims of P+, $,& they encode information in a widely distributed manner $within the weights of the networ"4s connections&, as opposed to doing so in functionally discrete units $2& they are subsymbolic, having no obvious semantic interpretation, and $7& it does not ma"e sense to spea" of specific causal transitions between two states. 'onnectionist models of memory have a number of features that have made them theoretically attractive, including graceful degradation, spontaneous generalization and sidestepping the problem with explaining the speed of "nowledge access because, unli"e in more traditional computer architecture, connections serve as both program and memory store. Interestingly, some connectionist models can solve very complicated problems in which it is extremely difficult to pic" out the relevant features, such as in speech recognition $see Aosenberg B %e6nows"i, described in P. +. 'hurchland, ,880&, which suggests that early progress is being made on the "nowledge access problem described by P. %. 'hurchland $,898&. #rom this, Aamsey et al concluded that if connectionist models of memory turn out to be theoretically superior to more traditional models based on P+, then we would have an empirical basis from which to re6ect the model that is based on our fol" psychological intuitions. ,# Anti/Eliminativism )ow that the rationale for eliminative materialism has been laid out, several lines of criticism begin to emerge. !he proposal that for all of human history we have been wrong about the existence of entities such as beliefs and desires is highly provocative, so it is unsurprising that eliminative materialism has been criticized from a variety of approaches. !he criticisms fall into three broad lines of argument- one dismisses eliminativism as self-contradictory, a second attac"s the premise that fol" psychology is a theory that needs to be held to a scientific standard, and the last denies that fol" psychology is wrong enough to warrant elimination. ,#"# The 0bjection from Self/contradiction

%ome philosophers $e.g. 1a"er, ,89C& have argued that the position is inherently selfcontradictory, as caricatured by the statement .the eliminativist believes there are no beliefs/. !his, however, is not a very convincing argument, simply because within the current framewor" of discourse, resorting to belief is the only available method for describing the eliminativist4s claims. 0n analogy drawn from the history of science might be an early atomic theorist who asserts that tal" of subatomic particles is meaningless since an atom is, by definition, indivisible. It is, at the very least, not an a +riori impossibility that the future framewor" the eliminativist envisions could have a successor concept that would explain the phenomenon that prompts as shorthand the use of the term .belief/ ; and much moreD In that way, a mature neuroscience might contain the concept of .shbelief/ which refers to a class of neural states explanatory of what we formerly too" to be belief, appropriately modified. It would not be self-contradictory to utter, .I shbelieve that there never were any beliefs/. !his is all the eliminativist currently needs to establish. Ehether such a framewor" is achievable is an empirical uestion. ,#,# Ar!uments A!ainst -remise ": That Fol) -sycholo!y is a Theory If it can be shown that to hold fol" psychology to the same standards as other scientific theories is a mista"e, then the eliminativist argument collapses. !here are three lines of argument against the theory/theory of fol" psychology, which are convincing to differing degrees. !he first argument against the theory-theory is an introspective one. !his argument claims that our self- understanding is ualitatively different from the "nowledge we obtain about the broader world. !he "nowledge we obtain through the senses can be distorted, but our "nowledge of our own internal states is .epistemically secure/ $%hulz 2002&. !his is the most unconvincing of the three arguments, since this "ind of introspectionism has been brought into direct uestion by empirical wor" in psychology. #or example, #reud introduced the idea that unconscious processes direct a great amount of our behaviour, and this idea still persists, albeit in a modified form. 0n experiment by %chacter and %inger $,8F2& demonstrated that the same state of bodily arousal can be interpreted as being any one of many different affective states, depending on context, which suggests that Ginternal signals4 are not as epistemically secure as introspectionism suggests. 2xperiments on people with blindsight have suggested that some form of "nowledge can occur while escaping the awareness of the sub6ect $Eeis"rantz ,89F&. 1lindsight is a phenomenon that accompanies lesions to certain parts of the cortex responsible for processing visual input. !he sub6ects experience no conscious awareness of visual sensation, but they perform significantly above chance when as"ed to ma"e guesses as to what is in their blind spot. !hese and other studies have cast doubt on the infallibility and special empirical status of our self-"nowledge claims, since in both cases the introspective report is at odds with the sub6ect4s actual cognitive capacities. It appears that fol" psychology is in this way not radically different from fol" biology or fol" physics. 0n alternative proposal to the theory-theory is the simulation theory of fol" psychology. @n this account, the predictions we ma"e of other people4s behaviour are not based on theoretical inference, but rather on a simulation of what we would do in similar circumstances $%hulz 2002&. !his position purports to counter a deductive-nomological model of fol" psychological explanations,. 5owever, it is not clear that this is incompatible with a theory-li"e description of fol" psychology since such an account is compatible with a functional account of the grasp of

fol"-psychological concepts. @ne would still need a conceptual framewor" of how one would act in a given situation, and as suggested by the wor" of %chacter and %inger $,8F2& and Eeis"rantz $,89F&, this is not absolutely epistemically secure. Eil"es $,89:& provides the most convincing ob6ection to theory-theory. %he points out that fol" psychology is also used for non-scientific purposes such as to insult, threaten, and warn. 0n analogy can be drawn to physics. +odern physical theories are explanatory of many facts such as the structure of matter, the laws of motion, and the nature of heat, but these are largely irrelevant to the performance of a simple tas" such as ball-catching, which is something arguably mediated by .fol" physics/. %imilarly, neuroscience would ma"e us no better at lying to people, offending them, or following convoluted mystery novel plots, and therefore could not merit doing away with a fol"-psychological framewor". In Eil"es4 view, the eliminativist is overstating the scope of the revision of fol" psychology. %o, Eil"es $,89:& suggests that the scope of fol" psychology extends beyond prediction and explanation, and the simulation theory suggests that fol" psychology may not be wrong in a deductive-nomological sense. 5owever, these arguments seem to miss the central issue. #ol" psychology may be used far into the future>the eliminativist4s future framewor" notwithstanding>but this is no more proof of its ontological accuracy than is the use of fol" physics by ball-catchers, or )ewtonian physics by engineers. !he simulation theory proposes that the description of ho fol"-psychological capacities are realized needs to change, but it says nothing on the ontological accuracy of its conceptual framewor". It appears that all the eliminativist needs to defend is the claim that fol" psychology is in principle false. !he ob6ections presented above do not address that claim>except for the ob6ection from introspectionism, which fails. It seems, then, that premise ,>that fol" psychology is a theory>still seems to hold. 5owever, it should be noted that the simulation and multi-purpose ob6ection suggest that fol" psychology is a construct that is in one sense empirical but does not follow the deductive-nomological form of other scientific theories. !his is not an outright refutation of the first premise, but serves to wea"en the force of the inductive argument from the history of science made by P. +. 'hurchland in section ,.,. @f course, fol" psychology may very well be false. !he primary argument against eliminativism is the denial that fol" psychology is so far off the mar" that we will need to eliminate our fol"psychological ontology altogether. !his is the focus of the next section. ,#.# Ar!uments A!ainst -remise ,: That Fol) -sycholo!y is 'adically False 5ere too there are three broad approaches. @ne can uestion the proposal that fol" psychology is committed to the theses attac"ed by the eliminativists $?@! and P+&. @ne can attac" the claims that fol" psychology has been stagnant on historical grounds. #inally, one can argue that even if fol" psychology is wrong in a large number of domains $a claim yet to be substantiated&, this does not warrant elimination.

!he arguments laid out by P. %. 'hurchland $,898& and Aamsey et al $,880&, which aim to point out the empirical and theoretical defects in the language of thought and P+ hypotheses are the primary motivators for ta"ing an eliminativist stance. 1ut a closer loo" at these arguments reveals a hidden premise that is addressed by neither- that fol" psychology is logically committed to the above theses. 'ertainly it is plausible that fol"-psychological intuitions contributed to the creation of these framewor"s, but a successful eliminativist argument seems to re uire more than this. It should be noted that there is a +rima facie tension between two eliminativist arguments if it is accepted that ?@! and P+ necessarily follow. !his would imply that fol" psychology has not, as P. +. 'hurchland $,89:& claimed, been stagnant for the past 2,<00 years. It has been, at the very least, generating theories of human memory organization, one of which is P+. !his leads to the second strategy- the denial of stagnancy. P. +. 'hurchland4s $,898& stagnancy argument is irredeemably vague. Ehat would count as progress in fol" psychologyH ,8th century 2uropeans were much more inclined to explain personality defects in terms of .character/, whereas the 20th century saw many more explanations using situational factors, unconscious processes, and psychosocial factors. It doesn4t even matter whether one informal fol" theory is more right than another. Ehat matters is that there has been develo+ment ithin a fol)/ +sycholo!ical frame or). !o claim that #reud4s theories, for example, were not fol"psychological in character because of their counterintuitiveness would be unprincipled. 5ow, then, would the eliminativist support the claim that ?@! or P+ are necessary conse uences of fol" psychologyH !he crux of the argument, however, lies in a closer analysis of the eliminativist4s understanding of the re uirements for reduction or elimination of a theory4s terms. ?et us grant, for the sa"e of argument, that the framewor" of fol" psychology is logically committed to ?@! and P+3 let us also grant that something li"e a connectionist model has succeeded in explaining the mind. (nder these hypothetical circumstances, what is to be done with propositional modules and sentences in the head, presumably the hallmar"s of fol"-psychological intuitionH %hulz4 $2002& analysis of Aamsey et al4s $,880& argument suggests that there are two re uirements that propositional attitudes>beliefs that P, desires that I, etc.>must meet in order to be reduced and not eliminated- $,& the fol"-psychological state has to be described by a cognitive science that describes natural )inds, and $2& it must be motivated as a natural "ind from the micro/level of description. !he first re uirement is not very controversial. +ost people would agree that the goal of science is to identify natural "inds, which are necessarily independent of our own attitudes. !he second re uirement, however, betrays an inade uate characterization of reduction. 1y this re uirement, neuroscience itself is a candidate for outright elimination. Presumably, the .natural "inds/ of neuroscience $e.g. neurons& occur as an assemblage of various lower-level natural "inds $proteins, molecules, uar"s&. %o from the level of physics, a neuron will not appear as a natural "ind in any principled way- it is a chaotically heterogeneous set. #or example, from the level of chemistry, the molecular composition of a neuron changes depending on what function it is performing $%hulz, 2002&. !his consideration was further explored by #odor and Pylyshyn4s $,89C& attac" on connectionism, which has been championed as the theoretical foundation of a future neuroscience. 1riefly, #odor and Pylyshyn argued that connectionist theory could not explain the

systematicity and productivity of thought, nor could it differentiate between two distinct thoughts on the level of a co-activation model because it was fundamentally committed to only causal relations between nodes, not causal and structural relations as posited by ?@!. %tructural relations, in ?@!, are the syntactic category of a to"ened state. #odor and Pylyshyn concluded that connectionism was an implementation theory of how symbolic cognition>cognition as described by ?@!>can occur in a neural networ". %molens"y $,88<a& showed that at a more abstract level of description, connectionist nets were in fact performing systematic-type operations, ma"ing transformations that seemed to follow structural roles. !his is highly relevant to the debate on eliminative materialism. ?@! or P+ led to a theoretical dead-end, but connectionist nets made progress where the other paradigms could not. 5owever, (0T/li)e features re/emer!e at a hi!her level of descri+tion. !his militates against outright elimination of the concepts suggested by fol" psychology. 0ccording to %molens"y, all that is really happening is the activity of a neural networ", but Jablo $,882b& argued that cause and explanation are intimately entangled, and that explanations need to be +ro+ortional to the effects they explain. #or example, the best explanation of why a building collapsed would describe the load-bearing beam that snapped. 0 successful explainer would not need to discourse on the chemical properties of the beam, or of the architectural aesthetics attached to the beam. %imilarly, if our goal is to explain systematicity in language, it is reasonable to avail ourselves of an explanation that incorporates structural as well as causal relations, not as conse uences of a higher-level analysis of a lower level of description, but as a feature of the explanation itself. !he implication here is that the appropriate level of description for all of cognition might not be the connectionist level, which suggests a much more interesting intertheoretical dynamic than outright reduction or elimination. 0t different levels of analysis we may encounter different explanatory re uirements. !his "ind of view suggests that the fol"psychological account provided by ?@! or P+ will be useful at explaining at least some of the effects we4ve been interested in. !herefore, given the purported lin" between fol" psychology and ?@!KP+, the re uirement for vindicating fol"-psychological terms is too strict, since it would entail eliminativism about every scientific concept outside of physics. I have also suggested that even a fully successful connectionist-neuroscientific theory of mind may be restricted to a specific domain where it would act as the best explanation. .# Conclusion !he debate over eliminative materialism is complex and multifaceted, and any assessment of what all of the arguments should amount to is certainly a bit of an ordeal. Ehat this essay has shown is that the eliminativist can support the first premise of their argument, albeit in a modified form that ta"es some of the force from the 'hurchlands4 appeals to the history of science. !he second premise is the most widely contested, but it appears that the place where the eliminativist fails is the inference to the conclusion. 2ven given the radical failure of fol" psychology ; the criterion for which is never fully explicated in the debate ; it does not follow that its conceptual framewor" needs to be eliminated tout court. %upporting this is an analysis that suggests that the effects which connectionist-inspired models and fol"-psychologicalinspired models explain ought to be limited to a particular level of analysis.

Perhaps an analogy demonstrates the conclusion best. *escartes thought that the defining property of matter was extension, and on one level of analysis $the macroscopic everyday world&, this allowed a greater scientific understanding of matter. 1ut such a characterization left many phenomena mysterious. 0dvances in physics allowed for greater explanatory power and greater control. @ccasionally our common-sense intuitions were turned upside-down $e.g., contrary to what seems apparent, the ma6ority of space ta"e up by any solid ob6ect is empty&. Jet it still seems appropriate to use the .matter as extension/ principle for our everyday purposes $e.g. moving a box so I can open the fridge door&. !his seems to be a recapitulation of Eil"es4 $,89:& argument that fol" psychology has other uses, although she did not come by it through an analysis of the eliminativist4s re uirement for reduction as laid out here. In the end, there is a sense in which P. +. 'hurchland $,89:& was right- it is unreasonable to expect our fol" psychology to successfully explain our cognition. I suggest the following revision of this claim- fol" psychology cannot explain the microstructure of our cognition, because at that level of analysis our intuitions brea" down. 5e was wrong, however, about what this implies for fol" psychology. Perhaps the ontology of fol" psychology will have to be modified by neuroscience until it is unrecognizable, but it appears that its conceptual framewor" is proportional to the effects $beliefs and desires& we want explained. (ndoubtedly, fol" psychology will change as neuroscience advances, but the extent of its faults and the need for revision or reduction remains an empirical matter. References 1a"er, ?ynn. ,89C. Savin! 1elief: A Criti2ue of -hysicalism. Princeton- Princeton (niversity Press. 'hurchland, Paul +. ,89:. %atter and Consciousness# 'ambridge- !he +I! Press. 'hurchland, Patricia %. ,898. 3euro+hiloso+hy. 'ambridge- !he +I! Press, $pp. 790-788& Paul +. 'hurchland, .'ognitive 0ctivity in 0rtificial )eural )etwor"s,/ in An Invitation to Co!nitive Science: 4olume .: Thin)in!, ed. *aniel ). @sherson and 2dward 2. %mith. 'ambridge- !he +I! Press, ,880. #odor, Lerry 0. ,89,. 'e+resentations. 'ambridge- !he +I! Press. #odor, Lerry 0, and Pylyshyn, Menon E. ,89C. .'onnectionism and 'ognitive 0rchitecture- 0 'ritical 0nalysis,/ in Connections and Symbols, ed. %teven Pin"er and Lac ues +ehler. 'ambridge- !he +I! Press, ,899. 5augeland, Lohn. ,89<. Artificial Intelli!ence: The 4ery Idea# 'ambridge- !he +I! Press.

Aamsey, Eilliam, %tephen %tich and Loseph Naron. ,880. 'onnectionism, 2liminativism and the #uture of #ol" Psychology. -hiloso+hical -ers+ectives 5: Action Theory and -hiloso+hy of %ind :88-<77. %chacter, % and L. %inger. ,8F2. 'ognitive, %ocial and Psychological *eterminants of 2motional %tate. -sycholo!ical 'evie F8$<&. %hulz, %. 2002. Alien %inds: Investi!atin! Eliminative %aterialism. Paderborn- +entis. %molens"y, P. ,880. !ensor product variable binding and the representation of symbolic structures in connectionist systems. Artificial Intelli!ence :F$,-2&- ,<8-2,F. Eeis"rantz, ?. ,89F. 1lindsi!ht: A Case Study and Im+lications. @xford- 'larendon Press. Eil"es, O. ,89:. Pragmatics in %cience and !heory in 'ommon %ense. In2uiry 2C- 778-7F,. Jablo, %. ,882. 'ause and 2ssence. Synthese 87- :07-::8. Endnotes , 0 deductive-nomological model is a first-approximation formalization of how scientific inference runs, namely as deduction from a set of premises, which minimally include at least one universal generalization, i.e. a scientific law $hence the term Gnomolo!ical6&.