John R. Searle

Searle reviews selected works of six prominent consciousness researchers (two philosophers, three neurobiologists, and one mathematician). Two chapters, bracketing the others, represent his own views. I find the title a hair misleading. Searle generally purports to be a naturalist rather than a mysterian. By mystery, he merely means the question, how exactly does the brain cause the mind? A majority of the book deals with analyzing the faults of the other authors rather than directly addressing this question. By the end of the book, we are maybe one tiny increment closer to an understanding of the problem. The most entertaining parts of the book are Searle's dialogues with the two philosophers, Dennett and Chalmers. But Searle's sympathies lie more with the neurobiologists. At least two of the three neurobiological accounts are highly speculative, and are perhaps likely to be shortly rendered obsolete except as historical footnotes. But they at least give a peek as to what Searle might regard as the right flavor of account. That is, once you strip them of obvious philosophical errors.

In this major new work, John Searle launches a formidable attack on current orthodoxies in the philosophy of mind. More than anything else, he argues, it is the neglect of consciousness that results in so much barrenness and sterility in psychology, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive science: there can be no study of mind that leaves out consciousness. What is going on in the brain is neurophysiological processes and consciousness and nothing more--no rule following, no mental information processing or mental models, no language of thought, and no universal grammar. Mental events are themselves features of the brain, in the same way that liquidity is a feature of water. Beginning with a spirited discussion of what's wrong with the philosophy of mind, Searle characterizes and refutes the philosophical tradition of materialism. But he does not embrace dualism. All these "isms" are mistaken, he insists. Once you start counting types of phenomena, you are on the wrong track, whether you stop at one or two. In four chapters that constitute the heart of his argument, Searle elaborates a theory of consciousness and its relation to our overall scientific world view and to unconscious mental phenomena. He concludes with a criticism of cognitive science and proposes an approach to the study of mind that emphasizes the centrality of consciousness. In his characteristically direct style, punctuated with persuasive examples, Searle identifies the vary terminology of the field as a main source of trouble. He observes that it is a mistake to suppose that the ontology of the mental is objective and that the methodology of a science of the mind must concern itself only with objectively observable behavior; that it is also a mistake to suppose that we know of the existence of mental phenomena in others only by observing their behavior; that behavior or causal relations to behavior are not essential to the existence of mental phenomena; and that it is inconsistent with what we know about the universe and our place in it to suppose that everything is knowable by us.

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues that there are two kinds of facts--some that are independent of human observers, and some that require human agreement.

Six lectures discuss the mind-body problem, artificial intelligence, the workings of the brain, the mental aspect of human action, prediction of human behavior, and free will.

"John Searle offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality - a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets, and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts exist only because we think they exist, and yet they have an objective existence." "Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry, and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions."--Jacket.

John Searle's Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979) developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically fundamental capacities, and, though third in the sequence, in effect it provides the philosophical foundations for the other two. Intentionality is taken to be the crucial mental phenomenon, and its analysis involves wide-ranging discussions of perception, action, causation, meaning, and reference. In all these areas John Searle has original and stimulating views. He ends with a resolution of the 'mind-body' problem.