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| | Sutton review of Churchlands |
 | | In the 1980s, this stress on the theoretical and revisable nature of our self-conception was augmented by the Churchlands' attention to new connectionist models in cognitive science, which promised seductive accounts of thought as fundamentally non-linguistic, of memory as thoroughly reconstructive rather than reproductive, and of a reductionism which didn't rule out context and complexity. |
 | | This is plausible enough, and Paul Churchland rejects the scientistic authoritarianism which critics ascribe to him through an 'anti-utopian' philosophy of science, by which the neurocognitivism he enthusiastically embraces is not a Final Theory but just another fallible, pragmatic, but promising way of carving and recarving world and mind into new categories. |
 | | The Churchlands claim to 'embrace' the point that consciousness is constituted not just by intrinsic facts about an isolated individual, but also by 'the rich matrix of relations it bears to the other humans, practices, and institutions of its embedding culture'. |
| www.phil.mq.edu.au /staff/jsutton/Churchlands.htm (1104 words) |
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