Can eliminativism save evolutionary naturalism from defeat?

Abstract This paper evaluates whether eliminativism – the thesis that the posits of folk psychology do not refer to anything real – can be employed by the naturalist to deflect Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN). I start by trotting out Plantinga’s argument. After that, I present the conditionalization problem and propose to treat eliminativism as a defeater-deflector against EAAN. I then argue that eliminativism does not fall prey to Plantinga’s response against other potential defeater-deflectors from philosophy of mind. The next part consists of showing why the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable on evolutionary naturalism combined with eliminativism is high. The last part of the article is aimed at arguing that despite the initial appeal, eliminativism is not a solution most naturalists would be happy to adopt – that is because eliminativism forces the naturalist to interpret naturalism as a methodological postulate.