INTRODUCTION

What Are Eliminativism and Revisionism?

The view of meanings that has emerged in the last chapter is realist and conservative: Thoughts and utterances have meanings, and meanings are, minor revisions aside (4.12), the properties that we already ascribe for semantic purposes. And meanings are, as many suppose, truth referential, “Representationalist.” But I have not yet seriously considered the radical alternatives of eliminativism (or nihilism) and revisionism. In this chapter, I shall do so. We need to start by clarifying both these alternatives. Eliminativism. Eliminativism about F's is the doctrine that there are no F's. It is important to note that this eliminativism needs to be accompanied by a background assumption about what it would be like for there to be F's, about what is essential to being an F, about the nature of F-hood. For, it is not sufficient simply to say there are no F's; one needs an argument. And that argument will have the following form:

The first premise is the background assumption. A possible realist response is then to deny the assumption: F's are not essentially G. How do we settle this disagreement? That is precisely the methodological issue discussed earlier (2.10). We saw then that it may be difficult to settle the issue even by the “ultimate” method.