Eliminative materialism suggests that we should abandon the language of mental states entirely in favor of a vocabulary that better captures the underlying physical processes in the brain.
-Patricia Churchland
There is a minority philosophical position that goes by the unwieldy name of "eliminative materialism". This stance is most associated with Paul and Patricia Churchland, Paul Feyerabend, and Ludwig Wittgenstein--all well-known gadflies. What this view predicts is that all of our intuitive "folk psychology" words like 'anxiety', 'beliefs', and 'anticipation' are doomed to be eventually replaced by a truly scientific understanding of the brain. I like to tease that this represents an atheist prophecy.
Neuromythography embraces and extends the prediction of eliminative materialism to cover the scientific terms used in research psychology and cognitive science, such as attention, valence, and system justification. Expert jargon is no more immune to the eliminative materialist criticism than common language.
The vocabulary neuromythography offers is as purely metaphorical as we can muster. Such loosely-coupled vocabulary helps ensure that the mind's focus is kept on the biological entity itself, without getting lost in theory translation.
