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Inquiry
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy
Volume 29, 1986 - Issue 1-4
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Symposium: Patricia Smith Churchland's neurophilosophyFootnote

Nemo psychologus nisi physiologus

Pages 169-185 | Received 16 Dec 1985, Published online: 29 Aug 2008
 

Abstract

This article finds little to disagree with in Neurophilosophy The sole area of disagreement is with Professor Churchland's attitude to common‐sense psychology. Unfortunately, though, the author has already attempted to describe what should be the proper view of common‐sense psychology in an earlier article in this very journal. Therefore the present article tries to build on the earlier one, advocating an instrumentalist constraal of many ordinary‐language mental terms ‐ a construal with which Professor Churchland is unlikely to agree, but which, if she did agree, would give her further ammunition with which to beat her opponents. The other main strand of this article suggests that Aristotle has anticipated Professor Churchland (and also most other theoreticians of psychology and physiology), and so, willy‐nilly, we are ‐ correctly ‐ returning to an Aristotelian picture of human capacity and activity.

Notes

Patricia Smith Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind‐Brain. Bradford Books. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 1986, xiv + 546 pp., $27.50.

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