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eliminative behaviorism

eliminative behaviorism noun: the theory that mental entities do not exist and therefore, all statements of the mind must be referring to physical behavior.

Noun

eliminative behaviorism (uncountable)

  1. (US, uncommon) The theory that mental entities do not exist and therefore, all statements of the mind must be referring to physical behavior.
    • […] thus, to the establishment of a sort of eliminative behaviorism. Strictly speaking, according to this new account, there is no question of truth of falsity about what a man believes, hopes, intends, supposes, etc. Strictly speaking, we could encounter all the facts there are and not encounter...1979, William E. Cooper, Edward C. T. Walker, editors, Sentence Processing: Psycholinguistic Studies Presented to Merrill Garrett, Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, →ISBN, →LCCN...
    • In rejecting mental language as false, this “eliminative behaviorism” in effect asserts that, contrary to what we have always believed, people do not act on their ideas, they do not have beliefs, and they are not swayed by emotions.1985, G. E. Zuriff, Behaviorism: A Conceptual Reconstruction, New York: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, page 202

Forms of eliminative behaviorism

alternative formeliminative behaviourism

Origin of eliminative behaviorism

From eliminative + behaviorism.

Questions about eliminative behaviorism

What does eliminative behaviorism mean?
Eliminative behaviorism means the theory that mental entities do not exist and therefore, all statements of the mind must be referring to physical behavior.
What part of speech is eliminative behaviorism?
Eliminative behaviorism is a noun.

Words near eliminative behaviorism in the dictionary

  1. eliminationism
  2. eliminationist
  3. eliminationists
  4. eliminations
  5. eliminative
  6. eliminative behaviorism
  7. eliminative behaviourism
  8. eliminative materialism
  9. eliminativism
  10. eliminativist
  11. eliminativistic

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: eliminative behaviorism (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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