It struck me today that all of the eliminativists about the mind are physicalists (or materialists) and a quick google search didn’t reveal any eliminativist dualist out there. But why is that?

I can see why a particular kind of dualist would reject eliminativism. If one held that the mind was transparent to itself in a strong way then the existence of beliefs and other mental states can be known directly via the first-person method of introspection. But does that exhaust the possibilities? Suppose one thought that there was a robust correlation (or even causation) between the brain and mind. Then one would expect a robust NCC for every conscious state (assuming a law-like connection or at least correlation between the brain and mental states).

To give us a model to work with let’s assume that there is correlation between function states of the brain and consciousness such that whenever certain functional states are realized that guarantees (given our laws of physics, etc) that a certain (non-physical) state of consciousness is also instantiated. Now suppose that we have a pretty good functional definition for what the functional correlate of a given metal state should be. That is, suppose we have worked out in a fair amount of detail what kinds of functional states we expect would be correlated with the conscious mental states posited by folk-psychology. Now further suppose that when we advanced far enough into our neuroscience we saw that there were no such states realized in the brain or that the states were somewhat what we thought but varied in some dramatic way from what we had worked out folk-psychologically.

At that point it seems we would have two options. One thing we could do is to maintain that there is after all no law-like correlation between brain states and mental states. There is a belief or a red quale, say, but it is somehow instantiated in a way independently from the neural workings. This seems like a bad option. The second option would be to abandon folk-psychology and say that the non-physical states of mind are better captured by what the correlates are suggesting. The newly non-physical states might be so different from the original folk-psychological postulates that we might be tempted to say that the originally postulated states don’t exist. Wouldn’t we then have arrived at an eliminative non-materialism?

As a corollary, doesn’t this possibility suggest that there aren’t any truly a priori truths knowable from introspection?