Feyerabend's Revisable, Disposable Mind

Philosopher of Science Paul Feyerabend’s early philosophy of mind advances a radical possibility: phenomenal consciousness may be real as lived experience while our familiar concepts for describing it—pain, sensation, thought, image, feeling, and even “the mental”—may belong to an obsolete conceptual framework that a mature brain science could transform or eliminate. His 1963 writings became foundational for eliminative materialism because he rejected the claim that introspective certainty establishes an irreducibly mental ontology; instead, scientific theories can revise the very meanings through which experience is conceptualized (Feyerabend, 1958, 1963a, 1963b). Yet Feyerabend’s position is more provisional than later eliminativism: his primary claim is methodological—that materialism cannot be ruled out by philosophical appeals to common sense or acquaintance—and his later pluralism explicitly abandons the idea that scientific-materialist language has automatic authority over other ways of describing human experience (Feyerabend, 1981; Shaw, 2021).

Thus, Feyerabend's contribution to consciousness studies is not an account of what phenomenal consciousness is but an argument that our conception of it is a theory—inherited, low-level, and therefore capable of being false. In two 1963 papers he argued that commonsense psychology carries essentially non-physical commitments, so that a thoroughgoing materialism would not translate mentalistic descriptions into physical ones but replace them outright (Feyerabend, 1963a, 1963b). Because meaning is theory-dependent, the standard objection that materialism cannot capture what "pain" means loses its grip: the materialist is under no obligation to preserve the term. He pressed the position to its limit in "Science Without Experience" (1969), arguing that experience is logically dispensable at every point in the construction, comprehension, and testing of empirical theory. Whether this makes him an eliminativist about phenomenal consciousness is now contested.

Phenomenal ... Without an Incorrigible Mental Ontology

Feyerabend confronts a seemingly decisive objection to materialism: whatever theories may say about brains, a subject knows immediately that pain hurts, colors appear, thoughts occur, and sensations feel a certain way. Such first-person acquaintance seems to guarantee that phenomenal consciousness possesses characteristics fundamentally different from physical processes.

His response is not simply to deny that experiences occur. Rather, he challenges the inference from the certainty of an experiential judgment—“I am in pain,” for example—to the conclusion that present-day mentalistic concepts correctly identify the ultimate nature of what occurs. The apparent incorrigibility of such judgments depends partly on rules governing our current language: within that framework, saying sincerely that one feels pain virtually constitutes sufficient grounds for applying the concept. That linguistic certainty does not establish that neuroscience must preserve “pain” as the name of an irreducibly mental entity (Feyerabend, 1963a; Shaw, 2021).

Phenomenal consciousness is therefore epistemically immediate without necessarily being ontologically foundational. What experience seems to reveal about its own metaphysical nature may be revisable.

Eliminative Materialism and the Mind-Brain Problem

In “Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem,” Feyerabend deliberately defends an extremely crude materialism according to which reality consists wholly of material entities and their properties. His strategy is methodological: if even crude materialism survives familiar philosophical objections, more sophisticated physical theories cannot legitimately be excluded before their scientific development (Feyerabend, 1963a).

The crucial possibility is elimination rather than reduction. A successful neuroscience need not discover neat identities pairing every ordinary mental concept with a brain state. Instead, existing mental categories might disappear as earlier scientific concepts—such as phlogiston—disappeared when superseded theories reorganized their domains. Thus, a future neurophysiology might not say that an independently characterized mental pain is identical with neural process N; it might replace the conceptual framework within which “mental pain” was thought to designate a separate kind of entity.

This proposal helped establish the tradition later developed by Richard Rorty and especially Paul and Patricia Churchland; Paul Churchland explicitly cited Feyerabend when developing eliminative materialism (Churchland, 1981). But whether Feyerabend himself positively endorsed full eliminativism is disputed. Shaw argues that Feyerabend was demonstrating that eliminative materialism was scientifically and philosophically permissible, not declaring that future science would certainly vindicate it (Shaw, 2021).

Theory-Ladenness and the Phenomenal World

This position follows from Feyerabend’s broader theory of observation. Experience is not an autonomous, theory-neutral tribunal before which competing accounts of reality simply present themselves for judgment. Scientific concepts, background theories, expectations, and learned interpretive practices influence how observations are classified and understood; conceptual revolutions can therefore reorganize what counts as a fact and how experience itself is described (Feyerabend, 1958, 1962).

Applied to phenomenal consciousness, this means that introspective vocabulary cannot be granted immunity from scientific revision. The division between “mental” experience and “physical” brain process may itself reflect inherited theoretical assumptions rather than hard metaphysical boundaries. Feyerabend’s target is thus Cartesian certainty translated into ontology: direct access to experience does not guarantee direct access to its ultimate nature.

This does not, ipso facto, amount to contemporary illusionism about qualia. Feyerabend provides no positive neural mechanism explaining why experiences have qualitative character, nor does he develop an account of how an apparent phenomenal world is constructed. His contribution is more disruptive: he questions whether the phenomenal concepts used to formulate the explanatory gap will themselves survive conceptual change.

From Materialist Possibility to Pluralist Restraint

Feyerabend’s later philosophy makes any simple identification with eliminative materialism still less appropriate. Beginning in the late 1960s, he abandoned his earlier tendency to treat advanced science as entitled to correct ordinary language and increasingly opposed scientism and methodological monopoly.

In a 1980 postscript to his materialism paper, he observes that a materialistic language might possess greater scientific information while becoming poorer in dimensions connecting mental life with emotion, interpersonal relations, art, and the humanities. Choosing such a language therefore involves human and moral values, not merely factual discovery (Feyerabend, 1981).

His mature implication for consciousness is consequently pluralistic. Neuroscience should be free to challenge folk psychology radically, but phenomenological, psychological, artistic, and ordinary descriptions of experience cannot simply be declared illegitimate because they fail to resemble neurophysiology. Competing conceptual schemes may disclose different aspects of an abundant reality.

Significance for Phenomenal Consciousness

Feyerabend supplies no mechanism generating phenomenal consciousness and no answer to why neural activity feels like anything. His importance lies instead at the meta-theoretical level and in his downstream descendants. He challenges three assumptions: that introspection reveals the metaphysical nature of experience; that present mental concepts must appear in a completed science; and that philosophical intuitions can determine in advance what future neuroscience is permitted to discover.

For contemporary consciousness studies, this yields a distinctive warning. The hard problem may reveal an ontological gulf between consciousness and matter—but it might also be formulated partly within conceptual categories that future theories will transform. Feyerabend does not show that phenomenal consciousness can be eliminated; he shows why its present conceptualization should not be insulated from scientific revolution. That combination of radical revisionism and later methodological pluralism distinguishes his position from contemporary illusionism as well as from straightforward reductive physicalism.

The interpretive balance is important and the qualification concerning Feyerabend’s later position is essential. Without it, a philosopher famous for resisting methodological dogmatism would be misleadingly turned into an uncomplicated doctrinal eliminativist. While Feyerabend’s 1963 work is indeed historically foundational for eliminative materialism, attributing to him a settled doctrine that phenomenal consciousness simply “does not exist” overstates the evidence. His deeper contribution is to challenge the assumption that our present first-person vocabulary already reveals the ontology that a science of consciousness must preserve.

References

Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. The Journal of Philosophy, 78(2), 67–90.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1958). An attempt at a realistic interpretation of experience. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 58, 143–170.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1962). Explanation, reduction, and empiricism. In H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (Eds.), Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time (Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, pp. 28–97). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1963a). Materialism and the mind-body problem. The Review of Metaphysics, 17(1), 49–66.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1963b). Comment: Mental events and the brain. The Journal of Philosophy, 60(11), 295–296.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1965). Problems of empiricism. In R. G. Colodny (Ed.), Beyond the Edge of Certainty: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Feyerabend, P. K. (1981). Materialism and the mind-body problem, with postscript. In Realism, Rationalism and Scientific Method: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1 (pp. 161–175). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shaw, J. (2021). Feyerabend never was an eliminative materialist: Feyerabend’s meta-philosophy and the mind-body problem. In K. Bschir and J. Shaw (Eds.), Interpreting Feyerabend: Critical Essays (pp. 114–131). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.