Eric Bush, in his 'Rorty Revisited '~ , takes it as a part of Richard Rorty's theory of Eliminative Materialism 2 that (a) 'sensation' has a referring use in that the term is topic-neutral and refers to what we experience, e.g., when someone pinches our arm, and (b), given the appropriate discoveries of future science, will come to refer to brain-processes. Thus, he claims that Rorty's theory is in fact not substantially different from that put forward by J. J. C. Smart. a I shall first of all argue that this interpretation is mistaken, and then make some brief comments on what I take to be the correct interpretation.
I
Putting the issue of topic-neutrality aside for the moment, (b) is an interpretation of Rorty on denotation which Bush unhappily derives, in part, from a paper by Lycan and Pappas, which he is criticizing. 4 Lycan and Pappas insert the claim that 'sensation' denotes brain-processes (not just that it might come to do so, as Bush suggests) as a central part of what they take to be Rorty's theory -although their source is a paper by Cornman. s They call this characterization of Rorty 'Weak Efiminative Materialism', or 'WEM':
(WEM) "What we called 'sensations' turn out to be nothing but brain-processes" (Rorty, 'Mind-Body Identity, Privacy and Categories', p. 28).
"... a mental term such as 'sensation' denotes, but ... what it denotes are brain-processes rather than sensations ..." (Cornman, p. 48; this formulation is seemingly accepted by Rorty in 'In Defense of Eliminative Materialism'). Thus, 'sensation' does denote, pace the SEMist, but it does not denote sensations, pace the RMist. 6
Let us, following Comman, state this claim more precisely in the following way: