Some Unnoticed Implications of Churchland's Pragmatic Pluralism

Contemporary Pragmatism Editions Rodopi Vol. 8, No. 1 (June 2011), 173–189 © 2011 Beyond Eliminative Materialism: Some Unnoticed Implications of Churchland’s Pragmatic Pluralism Teed Rockwell Paul Churchland’s epistemology contains a tension between two positions, which I will call pragmatic pluralism and eliminative materialism. Pragmatic pluralism became predominant as his epistemology became more neurocomputationally inspired, which saved him from the skepticism implicit in certain passages of the theory of reduction he outlined in Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. However, once he replaces eliminativism with a neurologically inspired pragmatic pluralism, Churchland (1) cannot claim that folk psychology might be a false theory, in any significant sense; (2) cannot claim that the concepts of Folk psychology might be empty of extension and lack reference; (3) cannot sustain Churchland’s criticism of Dennett’s “intentional stance”; (4) cannot claim to be a form of scientific realism, in the sense of believing that what science describes is somehow realer that what other conceptual systems describe. One of the worst aspects of specialization in Philosophy and the Sciences is that it often inhibits people from asking the questions that could dissolve long standing controversies. This paper will deal with one of these controversies: Churchland’s proposal that folk psychology is a theory that might be false. Even though one of Churchland’s greatest contributions to philosophy of mind was demonstrating that the issues in philosophy of mind were a subspecies of scientific reduction, still philosophers of psychology have usually defended or critiqued folk psychology without attempting to carefully analyze Churchland’s theory of reduction. This is a serious mistake, for Churchland’s theory of reduction, properly understood and purged of certain inconsistencies, is simply not capable of unseating folk psychology with the decisiveness that delights Churchland and frightens his adversaries. Because neither side is aware of this, the battle rages on. There is a tension between two positions in Churchland’s theory of reduction. One of these positions (which I will call Eliminativism) leads him inevitably to universal skepticism, and is also the basis for his radical dismissal 174 TEED ROCKWELL of folk psychology. The second position (which I will call pragmatic pluralism) saves him from skepticism, but if he adopts it, he (1) cannot claim that folk psychology might be a false theory, in any significant sense; (2) cannot claim that the concepts of folk psychology might be empty of extension and lack reference; and he (3) cannot sustain the criticism of Dennett’s “intentional stance” that Churchland outlined in the essay “Nailing folk psychology to its perch” (reprinted in his 1989). 1. In which we encounter Churchland’s conception of reduction as elimination, and how it led him into universal skepticism Traditionally, reduction was supposed to preserve the truth of one theory within the context of another theory by means of what were called Bridge Laws. Bridge Laws were supposed to set up identities between old scientific concepts and new ones. Because it was assumed that science progressed by new theories building on the foundations established by old ones, bridge laws were supposedly needed to establish reductive unity between the new and the old. Thanks, however, to research in the history of science done by Kuhn, Feyerabend, Laudan, and others, we now know that this kind of continuity between a reduced and a reducing theory usually does not exist. Science usually progresses by revolu- tionary jumps, which make bridge laws impossible. Awareness of this fact required a new theory of reduction, which Paul Churchland provided in Scientific Reason and the Plasticity of Mind (SRPM.) For Churchland, the essential goal of a reduction is the elimination of the old theory. The relationship between old scientific theories and new ones is thus seen as essentially the same as that between science and superstition: The old theory is shown to be false by the new one, in the same sense that science falsified existence claims for demons and witches. However, this dismissal is not accomplished by merely an imperious wave of the hand. There does need to be a relationship between the two theories, established by correspondence rules. But these correspondences need not be identities, they can even be (and frequently are) contradictions. We find a mapping of one vocabulary onto another, a mapping that preserves certain features thought to be important. ... But the pairing effected therein standardly fail to preserve meaning. (SRPM, 81) A reduction ... provides the basic instructions, as it were, for the orderly displacement of the [old theory] by the [new theory]. (81) The correspondence rule pairings need not be construed as identity claims, nor even as material equivalencies. ... We ... need only the minimal assumption that the second element of each pair truly applies where and whenever the first element is normally thought to apply. (83).

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