A Conversation with Patricia Churchland.

108 Terence Horgan And

In debate over the truth or falsity of folk psychology (henceforth, FP, a notation which also will go proxy for 'folk psychological'), the most influential players tend to line up on the U.S. coasts: friends of FP, like Jerry Fodor and William Lycan, on the East; foes, like Paul Churchland, Patricia Churchland, and Stephen Stich until recently, on the W e s t . 1 There are important voices in o...

Moral decision-making and the brain

On Bickle’s failure to give a formal account of the location in the new-wave reductionist spectrum

In this paper I discuss John Bickle’s attempt to provide a formal procedure to locate a certain reduction relation in the Hooker’s and Churchland’s New wave reductionist spectrum. Bickle’s main motivation is to react against the ‘Khunnian flavored,’ internal-to-scientific-practice pragmatist solution endorsed by Patricia Churchland when faced with the lack of a formal and external way to identi...

Churchland, Kandel and Dooyeweerd on the Reducibility of Mind States1

This article is devoted to the conceptual analysis of two texts of leading scholars in cognitive neuroscience and its philosophy, Patricia Churchland and Eric Kandel. After a short introduction about the notion of reduction, I give a detailed account of the way both scientists view the relationship between theories about brain functioning on the one hand and consciousness and psychopathology, r...

McCauley’s Demand for a Co-level Competitor

McCauley’s is perhaps the most straightforward of the criticisms. He sees some form of reductive accommodation as the relation most likely to develop between propositional-attitude psychology, on the one hand, and the underlying neurosciences, on the other. In support of this expectation, he cites the typical co-evolutionary process described by Patricia S. Churchland, wherein theories at adjac...