In This Selection Churchland Examines Functionalism and the Two Prominent

question 9

True/False

In this selection Churchland examines functionalism and the two prominent versions of materialism in philosophy of mind. Reductivism claims that there is an identity of mental states with brain states. Functionalism rejects any one-to-one correlation between mental types and physical types and concentrates on the relationship between inputs and outputs. For example, the mental event of pain could be similar in two beings that have altogether different types of bodies and brains. Most functionalists are materialists, but someone could be a functionalist and be a nonmaterialist. Eliminative materialism is more radical than either of these other theories and seeks to eliminate "folk psychology"-talk of beliefs, feelings, and perceptions-in favor of more scientific descriptions of what is going on in the brain. Churchland concludes that the truth may be a combination of the two materialist theories, although the evidence points more in the direction of eliminativism.
-Smart says that because neurons are not in physical space and a brain process is, a neuron is not in physical space.

---

Definitions:

LCL

Lower Control Limit, a statistical measure in quality control processes that defines the lower threshold acceptable for variation.

UCL

Upper Control Limit, a line on a control chart that represents the maximum acceptable limit of variation in a process.

T-distribution

A statistical probability distribution utilized for estimating parameters of a population when dealing with a small sample size and an unknown population variance.

Degrees Of Freedom

The number of independent pieces of information available to estimate another parameter or the dimensionality of a statistical calculation.