Paul M. Churchland. Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78(2):67--90, 1981.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....experimental psychology would lead to a 20 theory that would replace folk psychology. Stich s critique was countered by Double [43] who claimed that counter intuitive results in psychology merely revealed subjects hidden motivations rather than a new theory of motivation in general. Churchland [22] looked forward to the elimination of folk psychology through its reduction to explanations at the level of neurobiology. The recent resurgence of interest in neural network architectures led Dennett [42] to argue that intentional explanations might still be perfectly valid for a system that could ....

Paul M. Churchland. Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, 78(2):67--90, 1981.

....club includes the most unlikely collection of people. Connectionism gives solace both to philosophers who think that relying on the pseudo scientific intentional or semantic notions of folk psychology (like goals and beliefs) mislead psychologists into taking the computational approach (e.g. P.M. Churchland, 1981; P.S. Churchland, 1986; Dennett, 1986) and to those with nearly the opposite perspective, who think that computational psychology is bankrupt because it doesn t address issues of intentionality or meaning (e.g. Dreyfus and Dreyfus, in press) On the computer science side, Connectionism appeals to ....

Churchland, P.M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes, Journal of Philosophy, 78, 67-90.

....right way, and has the commitments, but has less than full blooded belief , for it is not causally responsible for its behaviors. We can now see that the standard ontological analyses of the nature of belief offered within the mind body discourse are partly right and partly wrong. They each 17 (Churchland, 1981) van Gelder, Monism, Dualism, Pluralism 19 March 1997 latch onto an important ingredient of the total belief situation, but each mistakes it for the whole. Physicalists are right that believing that p, in the full sense, essentially involves having one s brain configured in an appropriate ....

Churchland, P. (1981) Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes.

....offers an evolutionary advantage to animals living in complex societies. It is closely related to folk psychology, but Clark uses the term both to relate it to Hayes (1979) naive physics and to distance it from being taken, as folk psychology sometimes is, to be a false protoscientific theory (Churchland 1981; Stich 1983) 11. Our interest in naive psychology stems from this. If there is a real natural faculty involved in understanding other minds, then this natural faculty is strongly connected to the Turing test. There are two sides to this connection: first, the Turing test needs to be strong ....

Churchland, P. M. (1981) Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78:67--90.

....these do not constitute a scientifically rigorous and robust basis for reducing emotional events to physical. An eliminative materialist could go all the way and attempt to discredit the possibility of intertheoretic reduction between the two levels by eliminating the higher level altogether. P.M. Churchland (1981) states: Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our commonsense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, ....

....with that neural region. An emergent model of emotion can then be provided by neuroscience once research is sufficiently advanced. Having a neuroscientific base to emotions is not inconsistent with a commonsense conception of emotion (e.g. x) p) x fears that p) oe (x desires that :p) P.M. Churchland, 1981), where different emotion types are related. Such relationships must be supported by co occurrences of neural activity in the appropriate neural regions. Nor is a neuroscientific base incompatible with the idea that emotions then cause motor activity (by some mechanism which is not yet fully ....

Churchland, P.M. (1981) Eliminative materialism and propositional attitude, The Journal of Philosophy , 78, 67-90. Reprinted in Mind and Cognition: A Reader , W. G. Lycan (Ed.), Blackwell, Oxford. The page reference is to the reprinted version.

....of eliminativism has focused on the second of these claims. 2 In this paper, however, our focus will be on the first. That premise of the eliminativist argument has already provoked a certain amount of debate, with some writers protesting that commonsense psychology 2 See, for example, P. M. Churchland (1981); P. S. Churchland (1986) Fodor (1987) Horgan Woodward (1985) Jackson Pettit (1990) Kitcher (1984) Ramsey, Stich Garon (1990) Sterelny (1990) Stich (1983) Von Eckardt (1993) cannot be regarded as a causal or explanatory theory because its principles are partly normative or largely ....

Churchland, P.M. 1981. "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes," Journal of Philosophy, 78.

....is the thesis that our commonsense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience (P. M. Churchland, 1981, p206) This leaves neuroscientists with the problem of how to account for mind brain. The concept of emergentism is often appealed to at this point: a collection of relatively simple neuronal units, communicating with neuronal units at neighbouring levels, together perform a global (holistic) ....

Churchland, P.M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and propositional attitude, The Journal of Philosophy , 78, 67--90. Reprinted in W.G. Lycan (Ed.), Mind and Cognition: A Reader , Blackwell, Oxford. The page reference is to the reprinted version.

....to natural or formal languages; very likely our models of a biological computer are still very far from the truth. Of course, it is not at all clear whether an appropriate syntactic theory of the mind can ever lead to a theory of belief. This is indeed disputed by philosophers as different as Churchland (1981) and Burge (1979) Eliminative materialists like Churchland believe that the concept of belief will once evaporate and anti individualists like Burge claim that there is no way to get hold of this concept on the individual level on which a syntactic theory would have to be situated. I shall not ....

Churchland, P.M. (1981), "Eliminative Materialism and Propositional Attitudes", Journal of Philosophy 78, 67-90.

....though it bears no relationship to the way in which the underlying mechanism produces that behaviour. If this is the case then we would be justified in eliminating the intentional explanation in favour of an analysis purely in terms of the underlying mechanism, understood as a dynamical system [45][12]. The intentional interpretation would be descriptive, but not explanatory. Consider this analogy. Suppose that a ball were affected by two forces: one pushing north, and one west. We can describe the behaviour of the ball as being due to a single force acting north west, and this is a perfectly ....

P.M. Churchland. Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy, (78), 1981.

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