"How can
we reconcile our common-sense conception of ourselves as conscious, mindful,
speech act performing, rational agents in a worlds that we believe consist
entirely of brute, unconscious, mindless, meaningless, mute physical particles
in fields of force?" This is the overarching question that has preoccupied
John Searle for half a century now. The fourteen articles collected in that
book, thirteen of which were already published, go some way in answering this
major question. Most cover a wide range of topics from speech acts and
explanations in the social science to consciousness and intentionality, except
the last two ones, which concern rather technical philosophical problems (the
indeterminacy of the translation and Kripke’s Wittgenstein problem of rules). 
The less technical articles are quite accessible to a general public and should
be of particular interest to a large audience including psychologists and
linguists as well as philosophers.

Many of the articles in the collection illustrate or
refine Searle’s views on intentionality on the one hand (articles 4-5, 8-9),
and on language on the other hand (articles 10-11). The scope and consistency
of these views, which have now became classical, is truly impressing. Searle
deepens them when he tackles the problems of conversation (article 10), of
animal thought (article 4) or of collective intentions and behavior (article
4). This last problem is very original and opens some fascinating perspectives.
Searle makes the case that collective intentional behavior (e.g. we are playing
football) and collective intentions are irreducible to the summation of
individual intentional behavior and individual intentions, and that such a
claim does not commit one to the existence of some mysterious group mind. As he
often does, Searle is doing some genuinely pioneering work here, suggesting
some genuinely new research programs in philosophy of mind.

We will now
focus on what we take to be the main thrust of the book: what is the place of
consciousness and of intentionality in nature? (articles 1-3, 5, 7, 12). This
is a metaphysical problem. But unlike many contemporary philosophers, Searle
takes consciousness and intentionality — and our commonsensical conception of
them — seriously. He is also quite suspicious with the way the mind-body
problem is traditionally spelled. Accordingly, he first takes a lot of time to
give a precise ‘descriptive’ or ‘phenomenological’ (the terms are mine) account
of intentionality and consciousness, and of their role in our lives. He takes
it to be obvious that we really have pains, beliefs and desires, and that those
cause most of our behavior. This is probably why he allows himself to study
them for their own sake, even before he tries to understand their place in
nature. So for example (Searle’s descriptive account of intentionality cannot
be mentioned in this review), consciousness is an intrinsic property of mental
states that is characterized, among other things, by ontological subjectivity, qualitativeness
and unity. Some conscious states are intentional and some are not. And
thoughts, not only mere sensations, are conscious in that sense too. This might
seem obvious. But, as Searle notices, many philosophers are so scared by Cartesianism
that they prefer to ignore what we know about consciousness in the first-person
until they have proposed a (hopefully) satisfactory materialist account of it.
As a consequence, they often just change the subject, and surreptitiously
eliminate genuine consciousness and intentionality.

Now the
question is: how can we account for consciousness, intentionality and their
features? Searle proposes a view that he calls "biological
naturalism" according to which (i) "consciousness is a biological
phenomenon caused by brain processes and realized in the structure of the
brain" and (ii) we should accordingly reject the categories of materialism
and dualism altogether (p. 47). Now the second point might seem strange since
most materialists and most dualists would be happy to grant the first point
without any problem.

What are
Searle’s arguments against dualism and physicalism? About dualism, Searle just
says that it "ends up with an impossible bifurcation of the reality into
two separate categories and thus makes it impossible to explain the relation
between the mental and the physical" (p. 47). That is quick. After all, in
its most general form, dualism is just the claim that physical (and biological)
laws and entities are not enough to give a satisfactory account of the world we
live in and that one must add mental entities and psycho-physical laws
connecting them to the physical (and the biological). So Dualism proposes an
explanation of the relation between the two separate realms (see Chalmers
(1996) for a presentation of many varieties of dualism and for arguments
against materialism). This explanation might be false, but it does not seem
inconsistent, or as Searle puts it, impossible.

The arguments
against materialism do not seem much better. Searle contends that according to
materialism, consciousness and intentionality do not exist. Except for
eliminative materialists like Dennett and Churchland, this is plainly false. I
guess that what Searle means is rather a weaker claim, namely that materialist
pretend to reduce consciousness and intentionality to physical phenomena, but
end up eliminating them. But Searle does not give any precise argument to the
effect that this is true for the materialist theories of consciousness that
have been proposed (higher order theories, representationalist theories,
functionalist theories…). He only defends such a claim in the case of
intentionality (articles 7,12). His argument is aimed at classical
(computational) functionalism and is as follow. (i) In order to give a proper
explanation of intentionality theories of intentionality must satisfy the
"causal reality constraint" (p. 107): they must cite real features of
the real world, that is, features that have some causal reality. For our
intentionality is intrinsic and has some causal reality: my wanting to drink a
glass of water causes my drinking a glass of water… (ii) but the
computational level has no causal reality, for computations are
observer-relative: "any system of any complexity at all admits of an
information processing analysis" (p. 110). (iii) So the computational
level cannot explain our intentionality. I believe that (i) is true, and I
agree that it is not obvious that there is a simple way to accommodate it with
classical functionalism. But classical functionalism is not the only
materialist way to do it (e.g. Dretske (1995)’s teleo-semantics can be
considered as an extension of classical functionalism designed to deal with
that problem). And it is not obvious at all that (ii) is true. Indeed such a
claim has been criticized on many fronts (see e.g. Chalmers (1993)), and it is
just frustrating to see that Searle does not consider it is worth answering his
critiques in this a book.

Searle says at
one point that functionalism "requires not so much refutation as
diagnosis" (p. 222). I think he could have said the same thing of most of
his objector’s positions, and that this is really a problem with Searle’s
reflections. While I agree with him that the categories of materialism and of
dualism should be rejected, I believe that this should take a proper and
careful refutation of both materialism and dualism, and not just a convincing
error theory or a great ‘descriptive’ account of consciousness and
intentionality. Those familiar with Searle won’t be surprised by the humor, the
clarity, the vigor and the straightforwardness of his style. But they might
also be disappointed, once more, by the offhand manner with which he sometimes
answers his objectors.

References

Chalmers, D. J. (1993). On
implementing a computation. Minds and Machines, 4:391–402.

Chalmers, D. J. (1996). The
Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press.

Dretske, F. (1995). Naturalizing
the Mind. Jean Nicod lectures. MIT press.

©
2006 Alexandre Billon (CREA, Paris)

Alexandre
Billon (CREA, Paris)

Categories: Philosophical, Psychology