Paul Churchland

Paul Montgomery Churchland[2] was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on October 21, 1942.[3][4] Growing up in Vancouver, Churchland's father was a high school science teacher and his mother took in sewing. As a boy, he was obsessed with science fiction; he was particularly struck by the ideas in Robert A. Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky. Churchland liked building things in his father's woodworking and metal shop in their basement, and expected to become an aerodynamical engineer.[5]

At the University of British Columbia, Churchland began with classes in math and physics, intending to pursue engineering. Conversations with fellow students in the summer before his sophomore year inspired him to begin taking philosophy classes.[5] He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1964[3][4]

He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1969,[6] his dissertation entitled "Persons and P-Predicates" written with Wilfrid Sellars as his advisor.[2][3]

In 1969, Churchland took a position at the University of Manitoba,[3] where he would teach for fifteen years, becoming a full professor in 1979.[6][4] He spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton,[4] and joined the faculty at the University of California, San Diego in 1984.[3] There, he served as Department Chair from 1986–1990.[7]

As of this February 2017, Churchland is recognised as Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego,[8] where he earlier held the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy (through 2011),[9][10] and continues to appear as a philosophy faculty member on the UCSD Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Cognitive Science[11] and with the affiliated faculty of the UCSD Institute for Neural Computation.[12] As of February 2017, he is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Center for Consciousness Studies of the Philosophy Department, Moscow State University.[13]

Churchland's work is in the school of analytic philosophy in western philosophy, with interests in epistemology and the philosophy of science, and specific principal interests in the philosophy of mind and in neurophilosophy and artificial intelligence. His work has been described as being influenced by the work of W. V. O. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Russell Hanson, Wilfrid Sellars, and Paul Feyerabend.[14]

Along with his wife, Churchland is a major proponent of eliminative materialism,[15] the belief that

everyday, common-sense, 'folk' psychology, which seeks to explain human behavior in terms of the beliefs and desires of agents, is actually a deeply flawed theory that must be eliminated in favor of a mature cognitive neuroscience.[6]

where by folk psychology is meant everyday mental concepts such as beliefs, feelings, and desires, which are viewed as theoretical constructs without coherent definition, and thus destined to be obviated by a scientific understanding of human nature. From the perspective of Zawidzki, Churchland's concept of eliminativism is suggested as early as his book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979), with its most explicit formulation appearing in a Journal of Philosophy essay, "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes" (1981).[6]

Churchland believes that beliefs are not ontologically real; that is, that a future, fully matured neuroscience is likely to have no need for "beliefs" (see propositional attitudes), in the same manner that modern science discarded such notions as legends or witchcraft. According to Churchland, 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. He points out that the history of science has seen many posits that were considered as real entities: such as phlogiston; caloric; the luminiferous ether; and vital forces that were thus eliminated.

Moreover, in The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul Churchland suggests that consciousness might be explained in terms of a recurrent neural network with its hub in the intralaminar nucleus of the thalamus, and feedback connections to all parts of the cortex. He acknowledges that this proposal will likely be found in error with regard to the neurological details, but states his belief that it is on the right track in its use of recurrent neural networks to account for consciousness. This has been described as a reductionist rather than eliminativist account of consciousness.

Churchland is the husband of philosopher Patricia Churchland, and it has been noted that, "Their work is so similar that they are sometimes discussed, in journals and books, as one person."[16]

The Churchlands are the parents of two children, Mark Churchland and Anne Churchland, both of whom are neuroscientists.[17]

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers
• List of Canadian philosophers

• Churchland, Paul M. (2014) [1995]. "Neural Networks and Common Sense". In Baumgartner, Peter; Payr, Sabine (eds.). Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists (interview). Princeton Legacy Library. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. pp. 33–46. ISBN 978-1-4008-6396-9. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
• McCauley, Robert, ed. (1996). The Churchlands and their Critics. Philosophers and their Critics. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-0-631-18969-5. Retrieved 11 February 2017. The volume includes critical chapters from editor McCauley, Patricia Kitcher, Andy Clark, William G. Lycan, William Bechtel, Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lapore, Antonio R. Damasio and Hanna Damasio, John Marshall and Jennifer Gurd, and Owen Flanagan. These are then followed by a 94 pp. essay in response, by Paul Churchland and Patricia Churchland (hence the Churchlands are both the subject of and in part authors of this volume).
• Zawidzki, Tadeusz (May 2004). "Churchland, Paul". Dictionary of Philosophy of Mind. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
• Keeley, Brian L. (2006). "Introduction: Becoming Paul M. Churchland (1942–) [Ch. 1]". In Keeley, Brian L. (ed.). Paul Churchland (PDF). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–31, esp. 1-2. ISBN 0-521-53715-0. Retrieved 11 February 2017.
• Ramsey, William (2013) [2003]. "Eliminative Materialism" (revision of 16 April 2013, based on 8 May 2003 original). In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 11 February 2017.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Paul Churchland.

• Churchland's UCSD homepage
• Center for Consciousness Studies of the Philosophy Department, Moscow State University
• "From the Engine of Reason to the Seat of the Soul," The Science Network interview with the Churchlands
• Moscow Center For Consciousness Studies interview with Churchland