Paul Churchland quotes

We do have an organ for understanding and recognizing moral facts. It is called the brain. (Paul Churchland)
The basic idea is that cognitive activities are ultimately just activities of the nervous system; and if one wants to understand the activities of the nervous system, then the best way to gain that understanding is to examine the nervous system itself. View quote
Paul Churchland
Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. View quote
Paul Churchland
How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted – on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness... – is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain. View quote
Paul Churchland
The curiosity of Man, and the cunning of his reason, have revealed much of what Nature held hidden. View quote
Paul Churchland
Your brain is far too complex and mercurial for its behavior to be predicted in any but the broadest outlines or for any but the shortest distances in the future. View quote
Paul Churchland
Seeing our common-sense conceptual framework for mental phenomena as a theory brings a simple and unifying organization to most of the major topics in the philosophy of mind. View quote
Paul Churchland
Folk Psychology is faced with special difficulties here, since its conception of learning as the manipulation and storage of propositional attitudes founders on the fact that how to formulate, manipulate, and store a rich fabric of propositional attitudes is itself something that is learned, and is only one among many acquired cognitive skills. Folk Psychology would thus appear constitutionally incapable of even addressing the most basic mysteries. View quote
Paul Churchland
You and I have a confidence that most people lack ... We think we can continue to be liberals and still move this forward. View quote
Paul Churchland
In his 1981 article, "Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes”, Paul Churchland presents several arguments in favor of dropping commonsense psychology that have shaped the modern debate about the status of ordinary notions like belief. View quote
Paul Churchland