Early eliminativists such as Rorty and Feyerabend often confused two different
notions of the sort of elimination that the term "eliminative materialism"
entailed. On the one hand, they claimed, the  cognitive sciences
 that will ultimately give
people a correct account of the mind's workings will not employ terms that
refer to commonsense mental states like beliefs and desires; these states will
not be part of the  ontology  of a mature
cognitive science.  [5]  [6]  But critics immediately countered that this view
was indistinguishable from the  identity theory of mind
 .  [2]  [18]  Quine
himself wondered what exactly was so eliminative about eliminative
materialism:

> Is physicalism a repudiation of mental objects after all, or a theory of
> them? Does it repudiate the mental state of pain or anger in favor of its
> physical concomitant, or does it identify the mental state with a state of
> the physical organism (and so a state of the physical organism with the
> mental state)?  [19]

On the other hand, the same philosophers claimed that commonsense mental
states simply do not exist. But critics pointed out that eliminativists could
not have it both ways: either mental states exist and will ultimately be
explained in terms of lower-level neurophysiological processes, or they do
not.  [2]  [18]  Modern eliminativists have much more clearly expressed the
view that mental phenomena simply do not exist and will eventually be
eliminated from people's thinking about the brain in the same way that demons
have been eliminated from people's thinking about mental illness and
psychopathology.  [4]

While it was a minority view in the 1960s, eliminative materialism gained
prominence and acceptance during the 1980s.  [20]  Proponents of this view,
such as  B.F. Skinner  , often made
parallels to previous superseded scientific theories (such as that of  the
four humours  , the  phlogiston
theory  of  combustion
 , and the  vital force  theory of life) that have all been successfully eliminated in
attempting to establish their thesis about the nature of the mental. In these
cases, science has not produced more detailed versions or reductions of these
theories, but rejected them altogether as obsolete.  Radical behaviorists
 , such as Skinner, argued
that folk psychology is already obsolete and should be replaced by
descriptions of histories of  reinforcement  and  punishment 
"Punishment \(psychology\)") .  [21]  Such views were eventually abandoned.
Patricia and Paul Churchland argued that  folk psychology
 will be gradually replaced as 
neuroscience  matures.  [20]

Eliminativism is not only motivated by philosophical considerations, but is
also a prediction about what form future scientific theories will take.
Eliminativist philosophers therefore tend to be concerned with data from the
relevant  brain  and  cognitive sciences
 .  [22]  In addition, because
eliminativism is essentially predictive in nature, different theorists can and
often do predict which aspects of folk psychology will be eliminated from folk
psychological vocabulary. None of these philosophers are eliminativists _tout
court_ .  [23]  [24]  [25]

Today, the eliminativist view is most closely associated with the Churchlands,