Samuel Guttenplan

Derived from the Greek word ‘telos’ meaning purpose or goal, ‘teleology’, as it is most often used in the philosophy of mind, is thought of as the study of the purposes, goals or, more broadly, biological functions of various elements of the mental realm. For example, it has been suggested that we can better understand the propositional attitudes when we have discerned their evolutionary function. It has even been suggested that one can begin to understand specific propositional attitude contents in this way. (see content.)

Eliminativists believe there to be something fundamentally mistaken about the common‐sense (sometimes called ‘folk psychological’) conception of the mind, and they suggest that the way forward is to drop part or all of this conception in favour of one which does not use notions such as belief, experience, sensation and the like. The rationale for this suggestion is, in the main, because these notions are fraught with conceptual difficulties as well as being recalcitrant to any REDUCTION to natural science. Since the conception with which they propose to replace the common‐sense conception is invariably physicalist or materialist, one finds eliminativism also called ‘eliminative materialism’. (see connectionism; dennett; An Essay on Mind section 3.7; folk psychology; lewis; supervenience.).