Churchland Patricia Smith (b.1943), Canadianborn American philosopher and advocate of neurophilosophy. She received her B.Phil. from Oxford in 1969 and held positions at the University of Manitoba and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, settling at the University of California, San Diego, with appointments in philosophy and the Institute for Neural Computation.
Skeptical of philosophy’s a priori specification of mental categories and dissatisfied with computational psychology’s purely top-down approach to their function, Churchland began studying the brain at the University of Manitoba medical school. The result was a unique merger of science and philosophy, a ‘neurophilosophy’ that challenged the prevailing methodology of mind. Thus, in a series of articles that includes ‘Fodor on Language Learning’ (1978) and ‘A Perspective on Mind-Brain Research’ (1980), she outlines a new neurobiologically based paradigm. It subsumes simple non-linguistic structures and organisms, since the brain is an evolved organ; but it preserves functionalism, since a cognitive system’s mental states are explained via high-level neurofunctional theories. It is a strategy of cooperation between psychology and neuroscience, a ‘co-evolutionary’ process eloquently described in Neurophilosophy (1986) with the prediction that genuine cognitive phenomena will be reduced, some as conceptualized within the commonsense framework, others as transformed through the sciences.
The same intellectual confluence is displayed through Churchland’s various collaborations: with psychologist and computational neurobiologist Terrence Sejnowski in The Computational Brain (1992); with neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinas in The Mind-Brain Continuum (1996); and with philosopher and husband Paul Churchland in On the Contrary (1998) (she and Paul Churchland are jointly appraised in R. McCauley, The Churchlands and Their Critics, 1996). From the viewpoint of neurophilosophy, interdisciplinary cooperation is essential for advancing knowledge, for the truth lies in the intertheoretic details.
See also PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE , PHI- LOSOPHY OF MIND , PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENC.
R.P.E. Paul M. (b.1942), Canadian-born American philosopher, leading proponent of eliminative materialism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969 and held positions at the Universities of Toronto, Manitoba, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He is professor of philosophy and member of the Institute for Neural Computation at the University of California, San Diego.
Churchland’s literary corpus constitutes a lucidly written, scientifically informed narrative where his neurocomputational philosophy unfolds. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979) maintains that, though science is best construed realistically, perception is conceptually driven, with no observational given, while language is holistic, with meaning fixed by networks of associated usage. Moreover, regarding the structure of science, higher-level theories should be reduced by, incorporated into, or eliminated in favor of more basic theories from natural science, and, in the specific case, commonsense psychology is a largely false empirical theory, to be replaced by a non-sentential, neuroscientific framework. This skepticism regarding ‘sentential’ approaches is a common thread, present in earlier papers, and taken up again in ‘Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes’ (1981). When fully developed, the non-sentential, neuroscientific framework takes the form of connectionist network or parallel distributed processing models. Thus, with essays in A Neurocomputational Perspective (1989), Churchland adds that genuine psychological processes are sequences of activation patterns over neuronal networks. Scientific theories, likewise, are learned vectors in the space of possible activation patterns, with scientific explanation being prototypical activation of a preferred vector. Classical epistemology, too, should be neurocomputationally naturalized. Indeed, Churchland suggests a semantic view whereby synonymy, or the sharing of concepts, is a similarity between patterns in neuronal state-space. Even moral knowledge is analyzed as stored prototypes of social reality that are elicited when an individual navigates through other neurocomputational systems. The entire picture is expressed in The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (1996) and, with his wife Patricia Churchland, by the essays in On the Contrary (1998). What has emerged is a neurocomputational embodiment of the naturalist program, a panphilosophy that promises to capture science, epistemology, language, and morals in one broad sweep of its connectionist net. See also CONNECTIONISM , MEANING, PHI- LOSOPHY OF MIND , PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENC. R.P.E.