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On the Speculative Nature of Our Self Conception: A Reply to Some Criticisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Paul M. Churchland*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093
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Extract

I must begin by thanking the editors for offering me the opportunity to respond to two of the other papers in this collection: ‘A Materialist's Misgivings about Eliminative Materialism,’ by Jeff Foss; and ‘Sensation, Theory, and Meaning,’ by Bonnie Thurston and Sam Coval. In some earlier publications I have defended eliminative materialism at some length (1981, 1984), and in others I have argued that the semantics of common observation terms is exhausted by their inferential or conceptual role, to the exclusion of any purely phenomenological component (1975, 1979). Foss criticizes the first thesis; Thurston and Coval, the second. I propose to defend both.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1985

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References

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