Feynman’s painter and eliminative materialism

In case you haven’t been following it, my recent critique of novelist Scott Bakker’s Scientia Salon essay on eliminative materialism has generated quite a lot of discussion, including a series of vigorous and good-natured responses from Bakker himself both in my combox and at his own blog.  Despite the points made in my previous post, Bakker still maintains -- utterly implausibly, in my view -- that the incoherence objection begs the question against the eliminativist.  To see the problem with this response, consider a further analogy.

In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, physicist Richard Feynman tells the story of a painter he met who confidently insisted that he could get yellow paint by mixing together nothing but red paint and white paint.  Feynman naturally found this claim highly dubious.  As an expert in the physics of light, he knew this should not be possible.  Still, he was open to hearing the guy out and being proved wrong.  So he went and got some red paint and white paint and watched the painter mix them.  Yet just as Feynman expected, all that came out was pink.  Then the painter said that all he needed now was a little yellow paint to “sharpen it up a bit” and then it would be yellow!

Needless to say, the painter’s procedure was completely farcical.  Obviously, he had done absolutely nothing to show that yellow paint really could be derived from red paint and white paint alone.  It would be ridiculous for someone to say: “Well, I don’t know.  After all, he did get pretty far along the way with just red and white paint.  He only needed to add some yellow at the very end.  So that’s at least good reason to think that someday we might be able to get all the way to yellow paint with just red paint and white paint alone.  We need to just keep mixing red and white in different ways for a few more years and see what happens.” 

It would also obviously be ridiculous for someone to accuse Feynman of begging the question or of simply dogmatically asserting that red and white paint could never yield yellow paint.  For one thing, he had independent reason to think the painter was not going to succeed.  For another, he nevertheless was open to the possibility of being proved wrong and he even asked to see the evidence that he was wrong.  The painter simply failed to provide it.  If the painter persisted in insisting that yellow paint could be derived from red and white paint alone, the lapse in rationality would be his, not Feynman’s.  For the burden of proof was not on Feynman but on the painter, and he had failed to meet it.

I submit that the eliminative materialist who accuses the incoherence objection of dogmatically begging the question is committing exactly the same fallacy as the painter’s would-be defender.  In stating his position, the eliminativist makes use of notions like “truth,” “falsehood,” “illusion,” “theory,” “evidence,” “observation,” “entailment,” etc.  Everyone, including the eliminativist, agrees that at least as usually understood, these terms entail the existence of intentionality.  But of course, the eliminativist denies the existence of intentionality.  He claims that in using notions like the ones referred to, he is just speaking loosely and could say what he wants to say in a different, non-intentional way if he needs to.   So, he owes us an account of exactly how he can do this -- how he can provide an alternative way of describing his position without saying anything that entails the existence of intentionality. 

In particular, he needs to find some way of conveying the notions of truth and falsity without implicitly committing himself to the existence of intentionality.  For at the core of eliminativism are the claims that what Wilfrid Sellars called the “scientific image” of human nature is true, correct, accurate, etc. and that the commonsense or “manifest image” of human nature is false, incorrect, illusory, etc.  So, the eliminativist needs to find some way of reconstructing these claims without implicitly presupposing intentionality.  He needs to say what he wants to say using entirely non-intentional notions, otherwise he’ll be like Feynman’s painter, who ends up smuggling in yellow paint even though he had insisted that he needed to use only red and white paint.

Now, just as Feynman regarded the painter’s task of getting yellow paint from red and white paint alone as a hopeless one, the critic of eliminative materialism regards the task of formulating eliminativism without making use of intentional notions as a hopeless one.  Just as Feynman had independent reason to think it hopeless (i.e. what he knew about the physics of light) so too does the critic have independent reason to think the eliminativist’s task is hopeless (i.e. the intentional nature of crucial notions like “truth,” “falsehood,” “illusion,” “theory,” “evidence,” “observation,” “entailment,” etc. as usually understood).  Just as Feynman was nevertheless open to be proven wrong (since he asked the painter to show him how he got yellow paint from red and white paint alone), so too is the critic of eliminative materialism open to be proven wrong (since the critic asks the eliminativist to show how his position can be re-stated in entirely non-intentional terms).  And just as Feynman’s painter failed to show that he really could get yellow paint from red and white paint alone, so too has every eliminativist attempt to reconstruct eliminativism in entirely non-intentional terms proved a failure. 

So, just as Feynman was guilty neither of dogmatism nor of begging the question, neither is the critic of eliminative materialism guilty of these things.  Nor is it a serious response to suggest that the eliminative materialist is at least able to get rid of many, even if not all, intentional notions -- any more than it would be a serious response to Feynman to say that the painter was able to make at least much of his paint out of non-yellow paint.

So, if you persist in thinking eliminative materialism has a leg to stand on, then you should think that Feynman’s painter does too.  Perhaps we’ll see science fiction novels devoted to exploring in detail “what it might look like” for there to be a world in which we could get yellow paint from red and white paint!