The Mind Before Language: Churchland and What the Brain Lives Inside

This class explores Paul Churchland’s critique of language-based cognition and his turn toward a pre-linguistic understanding of the mind. Churchland argues that thought does not emerge from syntax or symbolic structures, but from dynamic, high-dimensional patterns of neural activity.

We contrast this with the analytic tradition, where cognition is tied to logical form, and show how Churchland’s view dissolves that boundary. The discussion connects his vectorial model of cognition with Quine’s naturalism, proposing that both reveal thought as a thermodynamic process, not detached from matter, but shaped by energy, adaptation, and survival.

This sets the stage for our next question: if thought begins before language, how do symbols arise at all? And what does this mean for the philosophy of mind, where logic itself appears as the cooled residue of neural heat?

Reference:

Churchland, P. M. (1989). On the nature of theories: A neurocomputational perspective. In P. M. Churchland (Ed.), A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science (pp. 136–156). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Book recommendation (if you buy through my link you help the channel):

Neurophilosophy


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