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Apr 1992
ISBN 0262531062
341 pp.
31 illus.
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A Neurocomputational Perspective
Paul M. Churchland

If we are to solve the central problems in the philosophy of science, Paul Churchland argues, we must draw heavily on the resources of the emerging sciences of the mind-brain. A Neurocomputationial Perspective illustrates the fertility of the concepts and data drawn from the study of the brain and of artificial networks that model the brain. These concepts bring unexpected coherence to scattered issues in the philosophy of science, new solutions to old philosophical problems, and new possibilities for the enterprise of science itself.

"A bold and unified account encompassing an attitude to belief, desire, subjective experience, learning, grasp of theories and explanatory understanding.... A wide-ranging, daring and eloquently expressed vision.... I commend Paul Churchland's book as an achievement of breadth and poetry in a discipline too often breeding only stultifying narrowness."
-- Andy Clark, Times Higher Education Supplement

Paul M. Churchland is Professor of Philosophy and a member of the Cognitive Science Faculty at the University of California at San Diego.

Table of Contents
 Preface
1 Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes
2 Functionalism, Qualia, and Intentionality
3 Reduction, Qualia, and the Direct Introspection of Brain States
4 Knowing Qualia: A Reply to Jackson
5 Some Reductive Strategies in Cognitive Neurobiology
6 Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior
7 Reductionism, Connectionism, and the Plasticity of Human Consciousness
8 The Ontological Status of Observables: In Praise of the Superempirical Virtues
9 On the Nature of Theories: A Neurocomputational Perspective
10 On the Nature of Explanation: A PDP Approach
11 Learning and Conceptual Change
12 Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality: A Reply to Jerry Fodor
13 Conceptual Progress and Word-World Relations: In Search of the Essence of Natural Kinds
14 Moral Facts and Moral Knowledge
 References
 Index
 
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