Paul Churchland Quotes

Paul Montgomery Churchland is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars , Churchland rose to the rank of full professor at the University of Manitoba before accepting the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego and a joint appointments in that institution's Institute for Neural Computation and on its Cognitive Science Faculty.

As of February 2017, Churchland is recognised as Professor Emeritus at the UCSD, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies of Moscow State University. Churchland is the husband of philosopher Patricia Churchland, with whom he collaborates, and The New Yorker has reported the similarity of their views, e.g., on the mind-body problem, are such that the two are often discussed as if they are one person. Wikipedia

✵ 21. October 1942

Paul Churchland: 11 quotes3 likes

Famous Paul Churchland Quotes

“We do have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts. It is called the brain.”

Paul Churchland

Paul Churchland. A Neurocomputational Perspective, 1989.

“How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted – on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness…”

Paul Churchland

is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.
Paul Churchland. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. (1st ed.). MIT Press. 1995. pp. 181: Talking about Freudian analysis.

“Your brain is far too complex and mercurial for its behavior to be predicted in any but the broadest outlines or for any but the shortest distances in the future.”

Paul Churchland

Paul M. Churchland (1996) The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey Into the Brain. MIT Press, 1996. p. 3

“The curiosity of Man, and the cunning of his reason, have revealed much of what Nature held hidden.”

Paul Churchland

Source: Matter and Consciousness, 1984/1988/2013, p. 1: opening sentence of chapter 1.

“How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted – on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness… – is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.”

Paul Churchland

Paul Churchland. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. (1st ed.). MIT Press. 1995. pp. 181: Talking about Freudian analysis.

“Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.”

Paul Churchland

Source: "Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes," 1981, p. 67; As cited in: Paul K. Mose (2002). Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, p. 21

Paul Churchland Quotes

“The basic idea is that cognitive activities are ultimately just activities of the nervous system; and if one wants to understand the activities of the nervous system, then the best way to gain that understanding is to examine the nervous system itself.”

Paul Churchland

Source: Matter and Consciousness, 1984/1988/2013, p. 96; As cited in: Peter Zachar (2000) Psychological Concepts and Biological Psychiatry. p. 132

“Eliminative materialism also doubts that the correct neuroscientific account of human capacities will produce a neat reduction of our common-sense framework, but here the doubts arise from a quite different source. As the eliminative materialists see it, the one-to-one match-ups will not be found, and our common-sense psychological framework will not enjoy an intertheoretic reduction, because our common-sense psychological framework is a false and radically misleading conception of the causes of human behavior and the nature of cognitive activity. On this view, folk psychology is not just an incomplete representation of our inner natures; it is an outright misrepresentation of our internal states and activities. Consequently, we cannot expect a truly adequate neuroscientific account of our inner lives to provide theoretical categories that match up nicely with the categories of our common-sense framework. Accordingly, we must expect that the older framework will simply be eliminated, rather than be reduced, by a matured neuroscience.”

Paul Churchland

Source: Matter and Consciousness, 1984/1988/2013, p. 43; Partly cited in: Advances in Descriptive Psychology (2006), p. 43

“Seeing our common-sense conceptual framework for mental phenomena as a theory brings a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind.”

Paul Churchland

Source: "Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes," 1981, p. 68: About "Why folk Psychology is a theory."

“Folk Psychology is faced with special difficulties here, since its conception of learning as the manipulation and storage of propositional attitudes founders on the fact that how to formulate, manipulate, and store a rich fabric of propositional attitudes is itself something that is learned, and is only one among many acquired cognitive skills. Folk Psychology would thus appear constitutionally incapable of even addressing the most basic mysteries.”

Paul Churchland

Source: Matter and Consciousness, 1984/1988/2013, p. 7

“You and I have a confidence that most people lack ... We think we can continue to be liberals and still move this forward.”

Paul Churchland

quoted in Larissa MacFarquhar, "Two heads: A marriage devoted to the mind-body problem", The New Yorker (2007)

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