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74Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/BrainPhilosophical Review 97 (4): 573. 1988.
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61The Necessary-and-Sufficient BoondoggleAmerican Journal of Bioethics 7 (1): 54-55. 2007.No abstract
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52How Quine perceives perceptual similarityCanadian Journal of Philosophy 6 (June): 251-255. 1976.The explanation of a child's discriminate responses to his environment turns on ascribing to the child a perceptual discrimination which counts certain things as more similar to one another than to some other thing. As Quine forcefully puts it:If an individual is to learn at all, differences in degree of similarity must be implicit in his learning pattern. Otherwise any response, if reinforced, would be conditioned equally and indiscriminately to any and every future episode, all these being equ…Read more
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50The Neurobiological Platform for Moral ValuesRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 76 97-110. 2015.What we humans call ethics or morality depends on four interlocking brain processes: caring. Learning local social practices and the ways of others – by positive and negative reinforcement, by imitation, by trial and error, by various kinds of conditioning, and by analogy. Recognition of others' psychological states. Problem-solving in a social context. These four broad capacities are not unique to humans, but are probably uniquely developed in human brains by virtue of the expansion of the pref…Read more
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45From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case against BeliefPhilosophical Review 94 (3): 418. 1985.
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44Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About MoralityPrinceton University Press. 2011.What is morality? Where does it come from? And why do most of us heed its call most of the time? In Braintrust, neurophilosophy pioneer Patricia Churchland argues that morality originates in the biology of the brain. She describes the "neurobiological platform of bonding" that, modified by evolutionary pressures and cultural values, has led to human styles of moral behavior. The result is a provocative genealogy of morals that asks us to reevaluate the priority given to religion, absolute rules,…Read more
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41Is neuroscience relevant to philosophy?Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 16 323-341. 1990.
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37The co-evolutionary research ideologyIn Alvin Goldman (ed.), Readings in Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Mit Press. 1993.
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37Brains and MindsThink 22 (65): 17-23. 2023.How can and does science – and especially neuroscience – inform the philosophical puzzle of mind and body?
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37Human dignity from a neurophilosophical perspectiveIn Adam Schulman (ed.), Human Dignity and Bioethics: Essays Commissioned by the President's Council on Bioethics, [president's Council On Bioethics. 2008.
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35Consciousness: The transmutation of a conceptPacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (January): 80-95. 1983.
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34What is Neurophilosophy and How Did Neurophilosophy Get Started?Journal of Neurophilosophy 1 (1). 2022.As neuroscience has intensely developed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we increasingly see neurobiological results that bear upon age-old philosophical questions about the mind and its relation to the brain. Although neuroscience has not yet completely answered questions about learning and memory, or about attention, social impulses and sleep, for all these topics there are now relevant results. These results suggest that more can and will be understood in the coming years, especia…Read more
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33Psychology and Medical Decision-MakingAmerican Journal of Bioethics 9 (6-7): 79-81. 2009.No abstract
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30Replies to commentsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 29 (1-4). 1986.No abstract
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304 The View from Here: The Nonsymbolic Structure of SpatialIn João Branquinho (ed.), The Foundations of Cognitive Science, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2001.
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24Evolved Morality: The Biology and Philosophy of Human Conscience (edited book)Brill. 2014.Morality is often defined in opposition to the natural "instincts," or as a tool to keep those instincts in check. New findings in neuroscience, social psychology, animal behaviour, and anthropology have brought us back to the original Darwinian position that moral behaviour is continuous with the social behavior of animals, and most likely evolved to enhance the cooperativeness of society. In this view, morality is part of human nature rather than its opposite. This interdisciplinary volume deb…Read more
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24Neuroscience and psychology: should the labor be divided?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1): 133-133. 1980.
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23Introduction: Neurophilosophy and Alzheimer's DiseaseIn Y. Christen & P. S. Churchland (eds.), Neurophilosophy and Alzheimer's Disease, Springer Verlag. pp. 1--4. 1992.
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23Is the Visual System as Smart as It Looks?PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1982. 1982.Irvin Rock's hypothesis that certain stages of perceptual processing resemble problem solving in cognition is contrasted to some recent work in computer vision (Marr, Ullman) which tries to reduce intelligence in perception to computational organization. The focal example is subjective contours which Marr thought could be handled by computational modules without descending control, and which Rock thinks are the outcome of intelligent processing.
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