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Quote by Patricia Churchland

“I made the assumption, wrong of course, that conceptual analysis was a brief preliminary on the road to finding out about the nature of free will, consciousness, the self, the origin of values, and so forth.”

Quote by Patricia Churchland

Author

Patricia Churchland

Patricia Churchland is a renowned philosopher known for her contributions to cognitive science and neurophilosophy. Born on July 16, 1943, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Ph.D. in philosophy. Churchland's research focuses on how the brain produces consciousness and how these processes influence our moral and philosophical thinking. more

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“Eventually I realized that for contemporary philosophers conceptual analysis per se was an end in itself. For some, it was somehow supposed to lead to the truth about these phenomena, not just to tidy things up a bit.”

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“Analyzing a concept can (perhaps) tell you what the concept means (at least means to some philosophers), but it does not tell you anything about whether the concept is true of anything in the world.”

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“Many philosophers in the second half of the 20th century really seemed to think that they were laying the foundations for science by laying down the conceptual (necessary) truths.”

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“If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.”

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“Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive.”

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“Given how long philosophers have been at conceptual analysis (I mean the 20th century stuff), and how many have been doing it, what can we say are the two most important concept results of all that effort?”

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Author:Patricia Churchland

“When philosophers try to understand consciousness, much of what they claim is not conceptual analysis at all, though it may be shopped under that description.”

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Author:Patricia Churchland

“All architecture is shelter, all great architecture is the design of space that contains, cuddles, exalts, or stimulates the persons in that space.”

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“When that theory is isolated from known facts, it is likely not to be productive.”

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Author:Patricia Churchland

“There are many levels of organization in nervous systems. Hence we aim to explain mechanisms at one level in terms of properties and dynamics at a lower level, and to fit that in with the properties at the higher levels.”

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Author:Patricia Churchland