Throughout his extensive and
diverse body of work Searle has striven to reconcile the so-called
ordinary-language philosophy he was brought up with in Oxford during the 1950’s
with the empirically-driven philosophical systems that took over soon after. To
this end, he has always set out to respect common sense without dismissing (as
many of his teachers did) the methods and results of modern science. As Barry
Smith’s introductory essay to this volume of newly commissioned critical essays
on Searle clearly demonstrates, this no-nonsense attitude makes him an
extremely appealing philosophical figure. It fails to notice, however, that the
enterprise in question is highly questionable. Indeed, Searle’s belief that
there is no sharp dividing line between philosophy and science has
all-too-frequently lead him to mistake conceptual questions for empirical ones,
and consequently give them answers (e.g. that  ‘a pain-in-the-foot is literally
in the physical space of the brain’) which are at best misleading, and at worst
sheer nonsense.

   
Smith’s introduction (which uses a recent philosophical exchange with Searle as
the canvas on which he sketches Searle’s philosophical ventures from 1969’s ‘Speech
Acts’ up to, and including, his recent writings on Social Reality) is followed by
ten insightful essays whose themes have been carefully selected to provide an
overview of Searle’s work in a variety of areas. Although critical in places,
with a few exceptions (see below), the essays are sympathetic towards Searle’s
views, and chiefly expositional. I shall not be able, in such a short space, to
do full justice to all the questions which they raise.

  
Nick Fotion’s essay on Speech Acts remind us that these are to be distinguished
these from Speech Activities. He then proceeds to sketch a taxonomy for the latter
that is similar to that which Searle had originally outlined for the former,
though he concludes that the order which this brings to Speech Activities does
not quite match that found on the speech act level. Next comes Leo Zaibert’s
essay on ‘Intentions, Promises, and Obligations’. Zaibert points out that
Searle’s philosophical system neglects the realm of morality. The closest
Searle has come to doing moral philosophy has been his work towards bridging
the is/ought gap, but, as Zaibert clearly demonstrates, this (attempt at a)
derivation of an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ neglects to address the ethical dimension
of obligation. Zaibert’s essay is followed by George P. Fletcher’s successful
treatment of how Searle’s work on performatives may be fruitfully applied to
the Philosophy of Law. Fletcher uses examples from our legislative language to
illustrate how useful Searle’s conceptual framework can be in formulating
views in legal philosophy. Likewise, Joëlle Proust’s essay on Action expresses
little dissent. Proust focuses on Searle’s notion of an intention-in-action,
explicating why it is fundamental to the solution of certain puzzles in action
theory. Similarly Neil C. Manson’s essay on consciousness, outlines the central
role which consciousness plays in Searle’s rebuttal of dualism, materialism,
and functionalism alike.

  
Fred Dretske’s essay ‘The Intentionality of Perception’ is the first in the
volume to express any serious criticism of Searle. Although Dretske (in my
opinion wrongly) agrees with Searle that it is a necessary condition of
our perceiving x that x causes in us a conscious experience of
some sort, he argues further, (contra Searle) that the aforementioned
condition is also sufficient for an experience to count as perception.
Searle, by contrast, believes that the experience in question must also have a
special kind of (representational) intentional content i.e. that all visual
experiences have Intentionality. Dretske uses a number of persuasive
examples and analogies to argue against this view.  Here is a self-explanatory
one:

The first time I saw an
armadillo€¦I thought it was tumbleweed. This mistake about what I was seeing
didn’t prevent me from seeing the armadillo. I did, after all, swerve to avoid
it (p. 160).

Brian
O’Shaughnessy’s essay on Sense Data is equally critical of Searle. O’Shaughnessy
bravely defends a version of  the ‘sense-datum theory’ which seems to be immune
to the criticisms which Searle has made towards the theory in general. O’Shaughnessy’s
argument, which relies on the notion of transparency, is ingenious but
it should be noted here that whatever its merits, by O’Shaughnessy’s own
admission it is not meant to amount to an argument for either the truth of the
theory in question, or the falsehood of the ‘naïve’ (or ‘direct’) realist
account of visual perception which Searle (in my opinion rightly) favors.

  
François Recanati’s essay on ‘The Limits of Expressibility’ focuses on the
phenomenon of background dependence as it relates to sentences and their
meanings. Recanati argues that although Searle rightly emphasizes the
importance of this dependence, he nevertheless gives an unsuccessful
explanation of the phenomenon in question. This is because, according to
Searle, the underdetermination of semantic content is but a special case of a
more general phenomenon which holds true of all Intentional states. Recanati
attempts to show that this generalization fails, favoring a Wittgensteinian
position instead. His reason for this (which he then backs up with examples) is
as follows:

Even
if ‘sentence meaning’ is understood as the meaning of the sentence with respect
to contextual assignments of values to indexicals, it is still much more indeterminate,
much more susceptible to background phenomena, than the content of the
speech act or the content of the expressed psychological state€¦we simply
cannot, by manipulating the background, change the conditions of satisfaction
of the speech act or the Intentional state while leaving its content unchanged.
The content of the speech act (or the Intentional state) lacks the form of ‘indeterminacy’
that the meaning of the sentence possesses, and makes it possible to keep it
constant while varying the conditions of satisfaction. (p. 202)

Josef Moural’s lengthy essay
on the ‘Chinese Room Argument’ is a praiseworthy attempt at laying out the
various versions of the argument which Searle has presented over the years, and
spelling out just where their most important differences and similarities (with
respect to both target and expression) lie. The reader who is well acquainted
with the vast amount of literature on the subject may prefer to skip straight to the final sections which assess Searle’s latest
version of the argument which Moural calls the observer- relativity of computation claim.
Moural concludes that although Searle’s argument is decisive against its
main target (namely strong AI, as construed by Searle) it is not simple as
Searle makes it out to be.

   The volume concludes with
Kevin Mulligan’s essay on ‘Searle, Derrida, and the Ends of Phenomenology’. Mulligan
outlines the complex relations which preside between early phenomenologists
(e.g. Husserl, Pfänder, and Brentano’s pupils:  Meinong, Marty, Ehrenfels,
Stumpf, and Twardowski), ‘Oxford Philosophers’ (e.g. Ryle, Austin, Strawson,
and Grice), later analytic philosophers (e.g. Evans, Williamson, Fine, and
Dummett) so-called ‘continental philosophers’ (e.g. Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-
Ponty, Derrida) and Searle. He argues that the preoccupations of early
phenomenology are similar to those of later analytic philosophers, but that
Searle’s conception and practice of philosophy leave him in splendid
isolation from all these camps. This has partly to do with Searle’s
conviction (which I briefly criticized at the start of this review) that
philosophy can in principle cooperate with science, and as a result take the
form of a definite body of knowledge, and partly to do with his ‘descriptivism’
(i.e. his interest in providing complete descriptions of mental states and
social acts). Mulligan ends the volume by suddenly asking whether analytic
philosophy is really still flourishing:

Where, after all, are the
young American Chisholms, Davidsons, van Fraassens, Hochbergs, Kripkes,
Lewises, Putnams, and Searles? (p. 282)

Unfortunately, he gives us
little reason to endorse the spirit behind his question, and no account of the
kind of philosopher he believes these to have been replaced with.

   Overall, the volume
provides a much needed introduction to the work of a philosopher whose work –justly
or otherwise– remains at the centre of current philosophical discussion. The
essays are for the most part detailed in their exposition, but (with the few
exceptions noted above) could have afforded to have been more critical in their
outlook, especially as they were intended to attract professionals as well as
students.

© 2004 Constantine Sandis

Constantine
Sandis is currently completing his PhD on The Things we Do and Why we Do Them
at the University of Reading. He also teaches in the Philosophy Department
there, as well as at Campbell Harris, London.

Categories: Philosophical