Paul Churchland
Encyclopedia
Paul Churchland is a philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy
Neurophilosophy
Neurophilosophy or philosophy of neuroscience is the interdisciplinary study of neuroscience and philosophy. Work in this field is often separated into two distinct methods. The first method attempts to solve problems in philosophy of mind with empirical information from the neurosciences...

 and the philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...

. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego
University of California, San Diego
The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...

, where he holds the Valtz Chair of Philosophy. Churchland holds a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and the Institute for Neural Computation. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...

 in 1969 under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher. His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century...

. Churchland is the husband of philosopher Patricia Churchland
Patricia Churchland
Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She has been a Professor at the University of California, San Diego since 1984...

. He is also the father of two children, Mark and Anne Churchland, both of whom are neuroscientists.

Professional career

Churchland began his professional career as an instructor at the University of Pittsburgh
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...

 in 1969; he also lectured at the University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

 from 1967-69. In 1969, Churchland took a position at the University of Manitoba
University of Manitoba
The University of Manitoba , in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, is the largest university in the province of Manitoba. It is Manitoba's most comprehensive and only research-intensive post-secondary educational institution. It was founded in 1877, making it Western Canada’s first university. It placed...

, where he would teach for fifteen years: as an assistant professor (69 - 74) and associate professor (74 - 79), and then as a full professor from 1979 - 1984. Professor Churchland joined the Institute for Advanced Study
Institute for Advanced Study
The Institute for Advanced Study, located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States, is an independent postgraduate center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry. It was founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner...

 in Princeton
Princeton, New Jersey
Princeton is a community located in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It is best known as the location of Princeton University, which has been sited in the community since 1756...

 in 1982, staying as a member until 1983. He joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 1983, serving as Department Chair from 1986 - 1990.

Churchland has supervised a number of PhD students, including Matthew Brown
Matthew Brown
Matthew Benjamin Brown is a Major League Baseball third baseman for the Minnesota Twins organization...

 (now at UT Dallas), P.D. Magnus (now at the University at Albany), Philip Brey (now at the University of Twente).

Philosophical views

Along with his wife, Churchland is a major proponent of eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...

, which claims that everyday mental concepts such as beliefs, feelings, and desires are part of a "folk psychology
Folk psychology
Folk psychology is the set of assumptions, constructs, and convictions that makes up the everyday language in which people discuss human psychology...

" of theoretical constructs without coherent definition, destined to simply be obviated by a thoroughly scientific understanding of human nature.

Just as modern science has discarded such notions as luck or witchcraft, Churchland argues that a future, fully matured neuroscience
Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...

 is likely to have no need for "beliefs" or "feelings" (see propositional attitudes), and that even consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...

 and personal identity are suspect. Such concepts will not merely be reduced to more finely grained explanation and retained as useful proximate levels of description, but will be strictly eliminated as wholly lacking in correspondence to precise objective phenomena, such as activation patterns across neural networks
Neural Networks
Neural Networks is the official journal of the three oldest societies dedicated to research in neural networks: International Neural Network Society, European Neural Network Society and Japanese Neural Network Society, published by Elsevier...

. He points out that the history of science has seen many posits once considered real entities, such as phlogiston, caloric, the luminiferous ether, and vital forces
Vitalism
Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is#a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions...

, thus eliminated. In "The Engine of Reason" Churchland hypothesizes that consciousness might be explained in terms of a recurrent neural network
Recurrent neural network
A recurrent neural network is a class of neural network where connections between units form a directed cycle. This creates an internal state of the network which allows it to exhibit dynamic temporal behavior. Unlike feedforward neural networks, RNNs can use their internal memory to process...

 with its hub in the intralaminar nucleus
Intralaminar nucleus
The intralaminar nucleus is a nucleus of the thalamus that contains the following nuclei:* central lateral* centromedian * paracentral* parafascicular.Some sources also include a "central dorsal" nucleus....

 of the thalamus and feedback connections to all parts of the cortex. He says his proposal is probably mistaken in the neurological details, but on the right track in its use of recurrent neural networks to account for consciousness. This is notably a reductionist
Reductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...

rather than eliminativist account of consciousness.

Books

Professor Churchland has authored eight books in philosophy, which have been translated into ten different languages.
  • Neurophilosophy at Work, Cambridge University Press, 2007
  • On the Contrary, MIT Press, 1998 (with Patricia Smith Churchland)
  • The Churchlands and Their Critics, Oxford, 1996.
  • The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain, MIT Press, 1995.
  • A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science, MIT Press, 1989.
  • Images of Science: Scientific Realism versus Constructive Empiricism, University of Chicago Press, 1985.
  • Matter and Consciousness, MIT Press, 1984.
  • Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1979.


Of his books, Matter and Consciousness has been the most frequently and extensively reprinted. Both Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind and A Neurocomputational Perspective have also been reprinted.

Essays

Professor Churchland has written a number of published articles that have had a substantial impact in philosophy. His essays have been translated into six different languages.
  • Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes, Journal of Philosophy, Volume 78, February 1981.
  • Functionalism, Qualia, and Intentionality, Philosophical Topics, Volume 12, 1981.
  • Reduction, Qualia and Direct Introspection of Brain States, Journal of Philosophy, Volume 82, 1985.
  • Some Reductive Strategies in Cognitive Neurobiology, Mind, Volume 95, 1986.
  • Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior, Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society, Supplementary Volume LXII, 1988.
  • Could a Machine Think?, Scientific American, January, 1990.
  • On the Nature of Theories: A Neurocomputational Perspective, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume XIV, 1990.
  • Intertheoretic Reduction: A Neuroscientist's Field Guide, Seminars in Neuroscience, Volume 2, 1991.
  • The Neural Representation of Social Reality, Mind and Morals, 1995.


Each of these selected articles has been reprinted at least four times. Churchland's most famous essay is his 1981 Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes. Published in a leading journal, this essay has been reprinted over twenty times and translated into five languages.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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