The most decisive step towards pragmatic pluralism occurred when Paul Churchland began to work out the implications of the fact that knowledge is embodied by neural networks. A knowledgeable neural network is one that makes few errors. To say that a network is learning is to say that it is responding to its inputs "in a fashion that systematically reduces the error messages to a trickle" (1989 p.177). It thus undergoes a growth process which might be fancifully described as the network's theories become truer and truer without ever reaching "true", just as we can travel further and further without ever reaching "far".

If we follow Churchland's suggestion and remove the goal of a unique truth ---and I think we should- we also have to remove it's necessarily implied opposite: an unconditional falsehood which has no extension and no reference to reality at all. And Churchland has not done this: Even as late as his 1992, he reiterates that eliminative materialism is based on "the worry that . . . folk psychology constitute[s] a radically false account of the cognitive activity of humans." (p.420). This is why it is possible for him to build some of his most effective arguments around this format.

He uses this argument twice in NP.: 1) to show that folk psychology and Alchemy can both be defended by the functionalist multiple realizability argument (NP pp. 12-13) and 2) to show that the Intentional Stance's high predictive powers buy it no ontological status because "It is an objective fact that much of the behavior of metals and ores is predictable in terms of the Alchemical essences. . . . and yet there are no alchemical essences" (NP p. 126)

In all of the commentary on Churchland I have seen, people have tried to attack the first premise, by showing that in some sense or other folk psychology is not a theory. Churchland effectively disposes of all of those, but there is such wide acceptance of the second premise that no one seems to have noticed that Churchland himself cannot accept it. Churchland's pragmatic pluralism requires him to give the intentional stance essentially the same status that Dennett does: a theory with serious shortcomings, which nevertheless has genuine epistemic merit. The comparison to alchemy does not reduce folk psychology to a false theory, for if Churchland denies all epistemic status to alchemy because we now have better theories, we would have to deny epistemic status to our current theories because they will eventually be replaced by better ones. And this would leave us with the universal skepticism described earlier. We can save ourselves from this skepticism by acknowledging that truth and falsity need not be binary, and that alchemy and folk psychology (as well as special relativity theory and whatever theory replaces it) all possess degrees of epistemic virtue. None of these theories are true in the classical sense, but that does not imply they are all false, anymore than the fact that no one possesses vital spirit implies that everyone is dead.

Some may say that any argument that leads one to grant ontological status to the alchemical essences should be taken as a reducto ad absurdum. After all, we have to draw the line somewhere. What about astrology, unicorns and Sherlock Holmes? And surely we don't want to say that truth always admits of degrees. After all, statements like "Paris is the capital of France" and "2 plus 2 equals 4" are 100% grade A true; There are no degrees of truth there. I don't claim to have all the answers to these questions, but to me they seem more likely to be answerable than the various crises caused by the old assumptions. Perhaps that is just because the problems caused by accepting pragmatic pluralism are new, and philosophy has been wrestling for centuries with the problems of accepting various monisms (such as scientific realism). But I prefer going forward to moving backwards, and new challenges to old ones. So here are few tentative suggestions in the direction towards the pluralistic continuum theory of truth which I feel Churchland has been ambivalently prophecying.

Pragmatic pluralism does not require us to refrain from criticizing or comparing theories. Just because a theory is muddle-headed, or prone to errors, or in need of replacement, does not mean that what it is talking about doesn't exist. Astrology is an unjustified and useless conceptual system, but it is still a real objective fact that there are a certain number of Sagitarians in Kansas, and a certain number of Leos. Even if almost everything that astrology says about Sagitarians is false, it still provides us with an observation language that divides up the world in a distinctive way, however crude and misleading, and is thus doing a different job from the entities that inhabit novels and fairy tales. To ignore this difference is to make a serious category mistake.

Entities like Sagitarians, The Crystal spheres, and the Alchemical essences do not belong in the same category as imaginary entities, like unicorns and Sherlock Holmes. Imaginary entities have no existence or extension, because their only function is to entertain us while in the armchair. They have no pretensions of reaching out to the world, and thus do not apply to reality. Alchemy does apply to reality, because it was formulated by a community of living organisms fighting their way through the thick of things, who spent many generations tuning their neural networks so as to minimize errors. According to pragmatic pluralism, this is the only kind of epistemic pedigree that any theory can have, and alchemy does not lose this pedigree just because people stop using it. Consequently, If folk psychology is abandoned the way alchemy was abandoned, it will not mean that folk psychology is false, does not apply to reality, or that the entities it describes don't exist.

Pragmatic Pluralism and Functionalism

This continuum theory of truth also makes it impossible to be a scientific realist, in any meaningful sense of the word. One can still be an admirer of science, but unless one claims that the entities of science are real in a way that other things are not, then strictly speaking one is not a scientific realist. Once we acknowledge that all theories that have pragmatic value have some degree of truth value, the difference between so-called "science" and other cognitive activities is purely a matter of degree, and this distinction becomes more misleading than useful.

One might try to save scientific realism by pointing out that it is an empirical fact that scientific theories are more useful than non-scientific ones. But I think this description has things exactly backwards. I think that because scientific realism is the orthodox ontology of the knowledge industry, we call theories scientific because they are useful. This also means that theories continue to get enough funding and attention to increase their usefulness only if they manage to jury-rig some resemblance to physics, which may or may not have anything to do with their basic nature. From a Scientific Realist perspective this jury-rigging is indispensable. Because physics is unquestionably science, the entities described by physics are seen as the only real ones, so all other terms must be either reduced (shown to be identical) to physical terms, or else eliminated from use all together. This fear of having one's area of study eliminated is, I think, at the heart of most people's objections to Eliminative Materialism. And when you look at the way that Continental philosophy was treated by Analytic departments in the sixties and seventies, the way that Skinnerian Behaviorism treated all other forms of psychology in its heyday, and the way that Cognitive Science treated Behaviorism shortly after that, these fears are fully justified.

When Richard Rorty made the transition from Eliminative Materialism to his own brand of pragmatism, he rejected the goals of reductionism altogether, for reasons somewhat similar to these. (See Rorty 1982 p. xlvi footnote 31). He suggested that instead of trying to use reduction to create a single unified science, we should "let a thousand vocabularies bloom and then see which survive." (1970 p.230) Letting vocabularies bloom can not be justified by a binary theory of truth like scientific realism, unless there is a final weeding process that enables us to find the one true theory. If this process is permitted to go on indefinitely, it would be seen as a license to tolerate falsehoods and illusions. But fortunately for pragmatic pluralism, this principle has been in effect in scientific circles for some time, regardless of its conflicts with the orthodoxies of scientific realism. Churchland has always been scrupulous in reminding us that even his beloved neural computational theories are largely based on models that are in many ways biologically implausible, and that the similarities between natural and artificial networks are bridged largely by guesswork. Nevertheless, these theories still maintain a grip on the structure of our cognitive practices, because a theory does not have to be True with a capital T in order to be epistemically worthwhile, provided it has some isomorphism with biology and/or cognitive experience. When we stick our necks out and and posit a theory, we discover what errors that theory is heir to, readjust the theory accordingly, and thus scientific growth is acheived. There is no need to puritanically abstain from theorizing merely because there is a risk of error, for error is an inevitable part of all theorizing.

The obvious next step in this movement towards pluralism is to extend this tolerance to non-scientific cognitive strategies--like folk psychology, for example. Within science itself, it has long been recognised that there are qualities inherent in the subject matter of its various subspecialties that require us to relax the rigours of industrial strength laboratory physics. The theory of evolution has never been proven in the laboratory by replicable experiment, nor could it be. Yet it has been accepted as scientific truth, because it is obvious that this is an impossible demand to put on any theory that attempts to explain a processs that took place over thousands of years. For similar reasons, folk psychology can not be held to the same standards as laboratory neuroscience, even if we recognise that both are theoretical structures that can and should evolve together. There will always be a domain of experience for folk psychology which is distinct from neuroscience, even if the former ends up relying heavily on concepts borrowed from the latter. Folk psychology must make sense out of the brouhaha and hurly-burly that we folk live and die in, and when the concepts cultivated in the hot house atmosphere of the laboratory are transplanted to that rough and tumble environment, they will be inevitably forced to adapt. Our inability to recreate laboratory conditions in the outside world produces hugh gaps that must be filled with metaphors and speculations, which extrapolate from the evidence in ways that would never be acceptable in the laboratory. These are what make up the inevitably non-scientific part of folk psychology, and they will always be with us.

On the last two pages of his 1995, Churchland points out that folk psychology has already been profoundly changed by the influx of Freud and "Psychobabble" and then asks:

I would suggest that to some degree the possibility that Churchland envisions here has already begun to be actualized. A great deal of what is dismissed as "Psychobabble" is already heavily infiltrated with neurological data. Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy, is also the author of the Brain Revolution, and publishes a regular newsletter called the Brain-Mind Bulletin. And those cocktail party conversations that used to be peppered with Freudianisms are now full of references to drawing on the right side of your brain. Such neurally inspired talk varies from the vacous to the profound, as do the various books that inspire it. But the fact that most of such talk is probably full of biological errors does not mean that devout rationalists should refrain from it. It has brought some real clarity to our experience of ourselves, and the neurologically informed should not dismiss it as lies and illusions. The writings of Churchland and other neurophilosophers will undoubtedly be useful in correcting and refining this neurological "psychobabble", but ultimately they (we) will have to see those psychobabblers as colleagues, not as superstitous savages. Some of the vagueness in such writing is a result of genuine muddleheadedness, and it should be exposed as such. But we still need to remember that any attempt to apply laboratory science to human experience can never be as rigorous as the science itself, and that something like poetry is the only kind of truth we can have for that messy domain that folk psychology attempts to comprehend.

Nor is there any reason to assume that even if neurologically inspired poetry does bloom in the garden of folk psychology, the other 999 flowers in the garden must therefore be considered weeds. Beliefs, desires, superegos, inner children and Oedipus complexes will no doubt remain useful for making sense out of daily experience despite their numerous incoherencies, and according to pragmatic pluralism, anyone who has any desire to continue to refer to such entities has every epistemic right to do so. As long as there are bureaucrats and lawyers, there will be a use for Freud's concept of anal retention, no matter how much we learn about the brain. Churchland's neurocomputational philosophy of mind can take its place amongst the numerous contradictory conceptual structures tangled within folk psychology, but it will almost certainly not completely replace the rest of them no matter how useful it becomes. Folk psychology has always tolerated inconsistency, and probably always will.

The Churchlands are fond of quoting Quine quoting Neurath that philosophy and science are in the same boat. Now we have to take this one step further and include the butcher and the baker, as well as the physicist, in the same boat. We can't use scientific realism as a canonical justification for throwing useful conceptual systems overboard. If we say that epistemic virtue should be measured on a continuum, or perhaps over an intersection of several continua, we cannot use a binary category that divides cognizers into "scientists" who have "the truth", and everyone else, whose beliefs are false (or at best unjustified) whenever they are unsupported by that truth.

If we follow Rorty's lead and reject reductionism, can we do a reduction of reductionism itself? Can we explain within the context of pragmatic pluralism why scientists and philosophers have always felt that reduction is so important ? I think part of reductionism's appeal is that it invalidates the assumption that individual sciences can be autonomous, which has so frequently lead to errors and sterility. By defending reductionism, Churchland has encouraged communication between disciplines, and all of science has benefited from this. The reason reductionism gives for these benefits is that all science should be unified with the one science which has the firmest foundations. The reason that pragmatic pluralism gives for these benefits is that no science has very firm foundations, so all of the sciences need as much help from each other as they can get.

One could say as, John Bickle does, that my evidence and arguments against reductionism could be taken as evidence in favor of some kind of "new wave reductionism". (1992a 1992b) My rhetorical question about such a move is "Can a process legitimately be called reduction if it doesn't reduce? i.e. doesn't result in fewer entities when it is finished." I don't think so, but I'm willing to admit that this question doesn't have an easy answer. How far can we stretch the concept of reduction before it snaps-- before we are compelled to say that it bears no significant relationship to the concept originally defined by Hempel and Nagel? With abstract concepts like reduction, the metaphor of stretching and snapping breaks down--there is no fact of the matter. If reduction is abandoned as a scientific activity, science will have to come up with a different activity that accomplishes most of what reduction used to accomplish, and decide that whatever else reduction used to do is not worth doing. Should this new activity be called new wave reductionism? Only if you want to stress the continuity between the old and the new. Should it be called something else? Only if you want to stress the discontinuity between the old and the new. The considerations which guide us in making these decisions are pragmatic, when they are rational. If we are going to grant truth value to alchemy, we cannot deny it to reductionism.