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February 2000 · 3 volumes · 2,136 pages · 8"x10"

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Patricia Smith Churchland (Courtesy of Patricia Churchland)

World Philosophers and Their Works

Patricia Smith Churchland

Born: July 16, 1943; Oliver, British Columbia, Canada

By building a bridge between philosophy and neuroscience, Churchland demonstrated that empirical study of the brain is crucial to the philosophy of mind.

Principal Philosophical Works Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain, 1986; The Computational Brain, 1992 (with Terrence J. Sejnowski); On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987-1997, 1998 (with Paul Churchland).

Early Life From a very young age, Patricia Smith Churchland was interested in how things work. As she speculated in an interview published in Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists (1995): Maybe it's because I grew up on a farm, and as a kid I had to solve, as a matter of daily life, a lot of practical problems. If an irrigation pump did not work or a cow was having trouble calving, we had to figure out how the thing worked and do what we could to fix it. In this way, Churchland's childhood provided her with a mechanistic understanding of the world that has significantly influenced her approach to philosophy, particularly to the philosophy of mind. Much in the way that she once attempted to understand the workings of irrigation pumps, she has throughout her philosophical career attempted to understand the workings of the human brain or, as she usually puts it, the "mind-brain."

Churchland received a bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia in 1965 and then entered graduate school in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. Her time at Pittsburgh was important to her philosophical development for several reasons, not the least of which was that her schooling there planted the seeds of skepticism about what is often called "ordinary language philosophy." Owing primarily to the works of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the British philosopher J. L. Austin, ordinary language philosophy was the dominant school of Anglo-American philosophical thought in the 1950's and 1960's. Reacting against early twentieth century philosophers such as Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, who claimed that philosophy required a technical language of its own, ordinary language philosophers argued that philosophical problems could best be solved by attending to the ordinary meanings of words, that is, by doing conceptual analysis. While working toward her M. A. degree at Pittsburgh, Churchland developed a growing uneasiness about the tenability of conceptual analysis as a philosophical method. In particular, she became frustrated with philosophers' attempts to develop a theory of the mind by way of a priori reflection on ordinary mental concepts. Even within the strongly Wittgensteinian climate of Oxford University, where she studied from 1966 to 1969, Churchland's disdain for a priori philosophy, and what she saw as its antiscientific narrowness, grew.

This disdain was shared by her husband, Paul M. Churchland; together, they began to explore the view that the way to make progress in philosophy of mind was to look to science, and in particular, to the neurosciences. Though many philosophers at that time were arguing that empirical science had little to offer a philosophical study of the mind, the Churchlands began to steer a different course, becoming more and more convinced that the key to understanding cognition lay in understanding the processes of the brain. This conviction would remain at the center of Patricia Churchland's work throughout her philosophical career.

Life's Work Churchland began her academic career as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 1969. During her early years at Manitoba, she and her husband had two children, Mark in 1972 and Anne in 1974. She also published her first article, "Logical Form and Ontological Decision," which appeared in Journal of Philosophy in 1974. It was soon followed by several other well-received articles in professional journals, and her substantial publication record no doubt paved the way to her promotion to the rank of associate professor in 1977.

Throughout this time, however, Churchland's frustration with a priori philosophy continued to grow, and by the mid-1970's she was seriously disenchanted with the current state of the discipline. One of the sources of her frustration was functionalism, a theory that was then beginning to dominate philosophy of mind. Functionalism views the mind as an information-processing system based on a computational analogy. Roughly, functionalists compare the relationship between mind and brain to the relationship between program and computer. In keeping with this comparison, functionalists believe that understanding the brain, seen simply as a piece of "hardware," is largely irrelevant to understanding the program, human cognition, that it runs. This assumption, though widely shared, struck Churchland as misguided. She firmly suspected that there was much to be learned about human cognitive processes by understanding the brain, the center of such processes. Deciding to explore this suspicion for herself, she turned to science and began a systematic, empirical study of the brain.

Given her childhood on the farm, once Churchland decided that she wanted to learn neuroscience, it is not surprising that she would choose a hands-on approach rather than simply immerse herself in books. She began a course of study at the University of Manitoba Medical Center, conducting experiments and dissections and observing patients with brain damage in neurology wards at the Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg. After achieving the level of mastery of neuroscience expected of the medical students, she began to take graduate-level courses in neurophysiology, and ultimately she did considerable work in a neurophysiology laboratory, headed by Larry Jordan, that was doing research on how the spinal cord controls locomotion. Her laboratory work was important not only because it gave her a basic grounding in neuroscientific techniques but also because it helped reorient her thinking about what empirical research is important to philosophy. Churchland had immersed herself in neuroscience in an attempt to shed some light on cognition. As a result, her neuroscientific interests primarily concerned topics such as perception and memory. Although Jordan's work on locomotion initially seemed to her to be tangential to her main focus, she gradually became convinced that animal movement is closely tied to cognition. How an animal moves, she learned, is at a very fundamental level connected to how it represents the world.

Churchland spent the academic year 1992-1993 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, at which time she wrote much of Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain. Upon returning to the University of Manitoba, she was promoted to the rank of full professor in 1983. However, the following year, both she and her husband Paul departed Manitoba to assume professorships in the department of philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). When the Churchlands arrived in San Diego, they joined a vibrant, interdisciplinary community studying cognition, including such cognitive science luminaries as Francis Crick, James McClelland, and David Rumelhart. UCSD is regarded as the West Coast birthplace of cognitive science (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is generally recognized as the East Coast birthplace) and was the site of the first research institute for cognitive science, the Center for Human Information Processing. While at UCSD, Churchland began to work closely with Terrence Sejnowski, a professor of biology and the director of the Institute for Neural Computation. The two also worked together at the Salk Institute, where Churchland became an adjunct in 1989. Both were associated with the Salk Institute's Computational Neurobiology Lab (CNL), a laboratory devoted to investigation into the computational aspects of the brain. The research at CNL led to numerous collaborations between Churchland and Sejnowski, the most notable of which is The Computational Brain. In this book, Churchland and Sejnowski advance a heterodox theory of neural representation commonly known as "connectionism" or "parallel distributed processing." According to the conventional wisdom among artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, the brain can be understood on the model of digital computers. This analogy involves two basic assumptions: first, that cognitive processes consist of symbol manipulation; second, that these processes run sequentially. The connectionist rejects both of these assumptions. In particular, connectionism views the brain's representations not in terms of symbols but in terms of a pattern of activity that is distributed across a network of neurons. In the years following the publication of The Computational Brain, connectionism gathered steam and became more than a minority view.

Churchland's frequent collaborations with Sejnowski as well as with numerous other cognitive scientists underscore the interdisciplinary nature of her work. Viewing cognitive science as in need of contribution from a multitude of disciplines- not only the neurosciences, such as neuropsychology, neuroanatomy, and neurophysiology, but also experimental psychology, linguistics, and molecular biology- Churchland reserved a key role for philosophy. According to Churchland, it is the philosopher's job "to synthesize and theorize and ask the questions everyone else is either too embarrassed or too focused or too busy to ask." In 1992-1993, Churchland served as the president of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association (APA). Her presidential address, "Can Neuroscience Teach Us Anything About Consciousness?," stands as an excellent précis of her distinctive take on the interconnections between philosophy and neuroscience. Originally published in 1993 proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, this paper was later reprinted in The Nature of Consciousness (1997), a widely used anthology of articles on consciousness. Other pieces of Churchland's work were also reprinted in influential anthologies, such as Mind and Cognition (1990), and in the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience (1988).

Influence Churchland became the recipient of many awards and grants, but one award deserves special mention. In 1991, Churchland was one of thirty-one individuals awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Every year since 1983, the MacArthur Foundation has awarded between twenty and forty such fellowships, often referred to as the "genius" awards (although that is not a label the MacArthur Foundation itself uses). Through these substantial monetary awards, the MacArthur Foundation aims to recognize and reward individuals who have exhibited special creativity, whether by making or finding something new or by drawing together things that have previously seemed unconnected. It is in this latter respect that Churchland's work is most influential. Her unique synthesis of philosophy and neuroscience broke down the walls between these two disciplines, opening bidirectional lines of communication. She became arguably the philosopher best informed about the state of neuroscience in the 1980's and 1990's and, as such, almost singlehandedly introduced philosophers to a wealth of information about the brain and the nervous system, conveying technical neuroscientific results in a fashion accessible to the nonscientist. Most important, however, she not only conveyed the details of the scientific research but also extracted the philosophical implications of such research. Insofar as such implications have threatened the traditional philosophical conception of the mind, Churchland may have encountered resistance from fellow philosophers, but at the same time she undoubtedly commands their respect.

Amy Kind

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Additional Reading

Bechtel, William. "Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind: An Overview." In Mind and Cognition, edited by William Lycan. Oxford, England: Blackwell,
1990. Bechtel provides a useful, general survey of some of the philosophical issues surrounding connectionism, the theory of the mind that Churchland puts forward in both Neurophilosophy and The Computational Brain.

Campbell, Keith, et al. "Commentaries on Neurophilosophy." Inquiry 29 (1986). In a special issue devoted to a symposium on Churchland's book Neurophilosophy, six commentaries are followed by replies from Churchland.

Churchland, Patricia Smith. "Take It Apart and See How It Runs." In Speaking Minds: Interviews with Twenty Eminent Cognitive Scientists, edited by Peter Baumgartner and Sabine Payr. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. This interview finds Churchland discussing her approach to philosophy, how she initially became interested in neuroscience, and her views on the discipline of cognitive science. The volume also contains an interview with Churchland's husband, Paul, entitled "Neural Networks and Commonsense."

McCauley, Robert N., ed. The Churchlands and Their Critics. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1996. The first half of this anthology contains nine essays on the works of both Patricia and Paul Churchland. The contributors come from a wide variety of fields, such as philosophy, neurology, neuroanatomy, and psychology. In the second half of the anthology, the Churchlands jointly respond to their critics. Their responses proceed thematically, covering five major topics: the future of psychology (both folk and scientific), the impact of neural network models on the philosophy of science, semantics in a new vein, consciousness and methodology, and moral psychology and the rebirth of moral theory. Suitable for advanced students.

Stich, Stephen. From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983. The argument that Stich launches against folk psychology makes many points of contact with Churchland's work. Especially relevant is chapter 10.

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