Proponents of the Standard View divide into two camps: non-eliminativists, who set about showing how brain states can be beliefs, and eliminative materialists, who doubt that brain states can be coherently identified with particular beliefs, and hence deny that there are beliefs or other attitudes. By denying that there are any beliefs, eliminativists bypass the problems discussed in Chapter 2. The arguments for eliminative materialism, however, all depend on construing commonsense psychology as a kind of folk theory – dubbed ‘folk psychology’ – in competition with scientific psychology. Although I do not dispute anything eliminativists say about the scientific psychology that they envisage, I think that they are seriously mistaken about the nature and function of commonsense psychology: It is not a folk theory in competition with science.

The arguments for eliminative materialism proceed from a premise with which I am in sympathy to a conclusion I reject. From the premise

the eliminative materialist concludes:

The truth of (S) depends upon the fate of a particular research program in psychology. If sentential theories, according to which beliefs are syntactically structured entities tokened in the brain, were supplanted by, say, certain kinds of neurophysiological or connectionist theories, which generalize over nothing describable as beliefs, then (S) would be established.