Searle Claims Research Articles

A New Foundation for the Social Sciences? Searle’s Misreading of Durkheim

The aim of John Searle’s philosophy of society is to provide a foundation for the social sciences. Arguing that the study of social reality needs to be based on a philosophy of language, Searle claims that sociology has little to offer since no sociologist ever took language seriously. Attacking Durkheim head-on, Searle not only claims that Durkheim’s project differs from his own but also that Durkheim’s sociology has serious shortcomings. Opposing Searle, this paper argues that Durkheim’s account of social reality is still viable and that Searle’s attack backfires on his own theoretical project.

Conceptual Blending and Intentionality

My original thesis was that conceptual blending was solely based on acts of individual intentionality without addressing collective or multiple intentionality (or aboutness). However, after reconsidering the problem, using Arthur Koestler's examples from Act of Creation and Fauconnier's and Turner's examples that were deeply ingrained in shared social contexts, I started to change my initial thesis. What made me switch over to the idea that conceptual blending was, after all, dominantly tacit and unconscious social act that required shared intentionality was John Searle's concept of The Background and Langacker's grounding, which, although different, both pointed at the socially shared elements of internalized knowledge. Thus, on second thought it appeared to me that conceptual blending hinged lot on social factors and/or rituals and definitely needed wider social context. Actually it turned out that I had to try to answer Searle's question: Can an individual harbor both her own ideas and collective ones at the same time? As Searle claims that this dual capacity is biological given that is shared by variety of species and presupposes a background sense of the other as candidate for cooperative agency, I could not help noticing the sheer intellectual effort it takes to break away from the Background. This meant that the only thing that blocked esoteric and weird interpretations was not the semantic content but the shared tacit assumptions. There seems to be more or less relevant counterpart in linguistics proper, too. and that is Langacker's concept of modeling local contextual aspects of meaning (the notion of ground). In the end, I was able to conclude that conceptual blending must have recourse to collectivity as shared background in situations that require it.

The Difference between Obedience Assumed and Obedience Accepted*

Abstract. The analysis of legal statements that are made from an “internal point of view” must distinguish statements where legal obedience is accepted from statements where legal obedience is only assumed. Statements that are based on accepted obedience supply reasons for action, but statements where obedience is merely assumed can never provide reasons for action. It is argued in this paper that John Searle neglects this distinction. Searle claims that a statement from the internal point of view provides the speaker with reasons for actions that are “self‐sufficient” in the sense that they are independent of the speaker's beliefs and desires. This claim is mistaken. A statement that is based on assumed obedience is self‐sufficient, but does not give reasons for action. A statement that is based on accepted obedience gives reasons for action, but these reasons are not self‐sufficient.

The irreducibility of consciousness

Abstract In this paper, by analyzing the Chalmers-Searle debate about Chalmers’ zombie thought experiment, I attempt to determine the implications that the irreducibility of consciousness has for the truth of materialism. While Chalmers claims that the irreducibility of consciousness forces us to embrace dualism, Searle claims that it has no deep metaphysical import and, in particular, that it is fully consistent with his materialist theory of mind. I argue that this disagreement hinges on the notion of physical identity in play in the discussion. Clarifying this notion in turn helps to clarify what it means to claim that consciousness is irreducible, and provides insight into the implications that the truth of this claim would have for the dualism-materialism debate. Ultimately, I suggest that the sort of irreducibility that can be motivated by the zombie thought experiment is not sufficient to require the rejection of materialism.

John Searle and Pierre Bourdieu: Divergent Perspectives on Intentionality and Social Ontology

Despite Searle's claim of theoretical proximity between his concept of the Background and Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, there is at least one substantial difference in the respective ways in which these concepts have been elaborated: the Background is conceived as a nonintentional neurophysiological reality whereas the habitus is fully intentional, or rather constitutes a nonrepresentational level of intentionality completely overlooked from Searle's standpoint. Moreover, each concept implicates a distinct perspective on social reality: the former suggests that significance is superimposed yet essentially external to this reality; the latter indicates that significance is immanent. I elaborate on the comparison between the two concepts/perspectives from different angles in order to highlight the existing differences as well as explore possible underlying affinities, which depend upon reconsidering the conventional understanding of intentionality as an exclusive attribute of mental phenomena. I show that Searle's analysis of the Background is inundated with indications of the undeniably intentional character of something he attempts to define as a nonintentional reality. Finally, I discuss the connection between the immanence of significance in Bourdieu's account of social reality and the conflict-centered orientation of this account. This dimension is noticeably absent from Searle's theorizing of the social.

Reverse Psychologism, Cognition and Content

The confusion between cognitive states and the content of cognitive states that gives rise to psychologism also gives rise to reverse psychologism. Weak reverse psychologism says that we can study cognitive states by studying content – for instance, that we can study the mind by studying linguistics or logic. This attitude is endemic in cognitive science and linguistic theory. Strong reverse psychologism says that we can generate cognitive states by giving computers representations that express the content of cognitive states and that play a role in causing appropriate behaviour. This gives us strong representational, classical AI (REPSCAI), and I argue that it cannot succeed. This is not, as Searle claims in his Chinese Room Argument, because syntactic manipulation cannot generate content. Syntactic manipulation can generate content, and this is abundantly clear in the Chinese Room scenano. REPSCAI cannot succeed because inner content is not sufficient for cognition, even when the representations that carry the content play a role in generating appropriate behaviour.

Collective Intentionality, Self-referentiality, and False Beliefs: Some Issues Concerning Institutional Facts

Abstract J. R. Searle’s general theory of social and institutional reality, as deployed in some of his recent work (The Construction of Social Reality, 1995; Social Ontology and the Philosophy of Society, 1998}, raises many deep and interesting problems. Four issues are taken up here: (1) Searle’s claim to the effect that collective intentionality is a primitive, irreducible form of intentionality; (2) his account of one of the most puzzling features of institutional concepts, their having a self-referential component; (3) the question as to the point, or points, of having institutions; (4) Searle's claim to the effect that false beliefs on the part of the members of the relevant community are compatible with the existence of related institutional facts. It is argued that, under all four respects, Searle's theory proves to be hardly satisfactory.

Unwittingly Recapitulating Freud: Searle's Concept of a Vocabulary of the Unconscious

This paper aims to show that the pivotal notion in John Searle's account of the unconscious, despite his representation of Freud's position, is found in Freud's work as part of a very similar view of the issues surrounding the concept of the unconscious. The pivotal notion in question consists in treating the concept of the unconscious as a vocabulary without ontological commitment which Searle claims we must do for the following reason: to reconcile what he considers to be the dualistic concept of the unconscious with an ontology of the mental which recognises no states but conscious states and states of the neurophysiology with the capacity to cause them. The role of the concept in Searle's account is explained. Then his representation of Freud is challenged: firstly, by explicating how Freud accepted that the concept of the unconscious entailed no ontological commitment and, secondly, by showing how this fitted into his wider thinking on how the concept of the unconscious could be understood in terms of a vocabulary, leading ultimately to a justification of the concept of the unconscious in terms of explanatory power. On the basis of this exposition, Searle's charge of dualism against Freud is disputed

Searle on consciousness and dualism

In this article, I examine and criticize John Searle's account of the relation between mind and body. Searle rejects dualism and argues that the traditional mind‐body problem has a ‘simple solution’: mental phenomena are both caused by biological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain. More precisely, mental states and events are macro‐properties of neurons in much the same way that solidity and liquidity are macro‐properties of molecules. However, Searle also maintains that the mental is ‘ontologically irreducible’ to the physical, a view which follows from his understanding of the status and nature of consciousness. Consciousness is essential to the mind; subjectivity is essential to consciousness; and no purely objective, physical description of consciousness could ever capture or explain its essentially subjective character. None the less, Searle maintains that irreducibility is a ‘trivial’ result of our ‘definitional practices’ and is entirely compatible with his theory. I contend that this latter claim is based on an equivocation: Searle's conclusion only seems to follow because he alters and trivializes what philosophers ordinarily mean by ‘reduction’. I also maintain that Searle's position is reductionist in the ordinary, nontrivial sense. For this reason, his theory fails to accommodate the subjective character of consciousness and fails to solve the traditional mind‐body problem. Finally, I briefly discuss Searle's claim that he is not an epiphenomenalist, and argue that given the assumptions of his view there is no interesting causal role for consciousness in the physical world.

Hussearle's Representationalism and the “hypothesis of the Background”

John Searle's “hypothesis of the Background” seems to conflict with his initial representationalism according to which each Intentional state contains a particular content that determines its conditions of satisfaction. In Section I of this essay I expose Searle's initial theory of Intentionality and relate it to Edmund Husserl's earlier phenomenology. In Section II I make it clear that Searle's introduction of the notion of Network, though indispensable, does not, by itself, force us to modify that initial theory. However, a comparison of this notion to the notion of “horizon” from Husserl's later phenomenology and an interpretation of Husserl's conception of the “determinable X” as providing a solution to the problem of perceptual misidentification lead me to conclude that in his discussion of 'twin examples' Searle had better modified his initial theory. Finally, I critically examine Searle's claim that “anyone who tries seriously to follow out the threads in the Network” will eventually reach a “bedrock” of non-Intentional capacities. In Section III I show in detail, partly in a rather Husserlian vein, that Searle's four official arguments for the Background thesis, though containing some very valuable contributions to a theory of linguistic skills, are not convincing at all if they are to be understood as going beyond the scope of (Hus)Searle's 'content-cum-Network' picture of Intentionality. The upshot of these considerations is that the Background thesis should be read as a thesis concerning the causal neurophysiological preconditions of human Intentionality rather than concerning the logical properties of Intentional states in general. Recently Searle himself has come to the same result, but he does not say for which reasons. The present essay makes it clear why Searle just had to arrive at this important result.

Searle, Syntax, and Observer Relativity

In his bookThe Rediscovery of the Mind(hereafter RM), John Searle attacks computational psychology with a number of new and boldly provocative claims. Specifically, in the penultimate chapter entitled ‘The Critique of Cognitive Reason,’ Searle targets what he calls ‘cognitivism,’ according to which our brains are digital computers that process a mental syntax. And Searle denies this view on grounds thatthe attribution of syntaxisobserver relative.A syntactic property is arbitrarily assigned to a physical system, he thinks, with the result that syntactic states ‘do not even exist except in the eyes of the beholder’(RM,215). This unabashed anti-realism differs significantly from Searle's earlier work. The Chinese room argument, for example, was intended to show that syntactic properties will not suffice for semantics, where the syntax was realistically construed. But now Searle claims that physical properties will not suffice to determine a system's syntactic properties.

Computationalism and the problem of other minds

Abstract In this paper I discuss Searle's claim that the computational properties of a system could never cause a system to be conscious. In the first section of the paper I argue that Searle is correct that, even if a system both behaves in a way that is characteristic of conscious agents (like ourselves) and has a computational structure similar to those agents, one cannot be certain that that system is conscious. On the other hand, I suggest that Searle's intuition that it is “empirically absurd” that such a system could be conscious is unfounded. In the second section I show that Searle's attempt to show that a system's computational states could not possibly cause it to be conscious is based upon an erroneous distinction between computational and physical properties. On the basis of these two arguments, I conclude that, supposing that the behavior of conscious agents can be explained in terms of their computational properties, we have good reason to suppose that a system having computational properti...

A Rediscovery of Consciousness

In his recent book, Searle claims that more than anything else, the neglect of consciousness is responsible for so much barrenness and sterility in psychology, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind. He proposes to locate consciousness in the natural world by breaking with the materialist tradition now reigning in these fields of inquiry into mind and behavior. In Searle′s view, consciousness is a physical, spatial, biological, intrinsic feature of certain brain states and processes. However, he holds that consciousness is (a) a first-person, subjective feature of conscious brain states and processes and (b) not possibly identical to any of the third-person, objective features of conscious brain states and processes, although (c) proximally caused by certain of these third-person features. Searle argues, as well, that the mentality of nonconscious mental states and processes consists entirely in their producing, barring interference, corresponding conscious brain states or processes. I examine Searle′s ontological feature of subjectivity, including how conscious brain states and processes are themselves objects of consciousness; why Searle holds that the first-person features of conscious brain states and processes must be distinct from all third-person features; and Searle′s claim that no nonconscious mental state possesses intentionality since it is not conscious.

Searles Kritik am Funktionalismus — Eine Untersuchung des Chinesischzimmers

Searle claims that for a machine to have intentional states it is not sufficient that a formal programme be instantiated. Various types of objections to this claim have been brought up by Searle's critics. Searle's replies to some of these objections are analysed. It turns out that it is more to these objections than Searle wants to make us believe. What is crucial, however, is that Searle's „Gedankenexperiment“ results in a dilemma. At the outset of the dilemma there are two ways of not understanding. According to one of these ways a person (Searle's homunculus) does not understand something without knowing that s/he does not understand. While in the other mode the person knows that s/he doesn't understand. In the first case the inference from facts about the homunculus to facts about the computer is not valid whereas in the second case one would attribute mental states to the computer. Thereby Searle's claim turns out to be unfounded.

The illocutionary aspect of utterances∗

The first part of this paper criticizes Austin's and Searle's claim that utterances have illocutionary force. It is shown that illocutionary force is the sense of illocutionary descriptive terms, but illocutionary verbs are not names of a definite aspect of utterances. In the second and third parts an alternative account of the illocutionary aspect of utterances is offered, an account which sees illocution as the way in which utterances meaningfully relate to the state of affairs in the world.

Institutional Facts and Brute Values

Previous articleNext article No AccessInstitutional Facts and Brute ValuesA. C. GenovaA. C. Genova Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 81, Number 1Oct., 1970 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/291792 Views: 12Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1970-1971 University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Martin Hapla Justifikace lidských práv a is-ought problém, Časopis pro právní vědu a praxi 28, no.11 (Mar 2020): 37.https://doi.org/10.5817/CPVP2020-1-3David Jason Karp Facts and values in politics and Searle's Construction of Social Reality, Contemporary Political Theory 8, no.22 (May 2009): 152–175.https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.28Rainer Schmalz-Bruns Bibliographie, (Jan 1989): 103–190.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-93831-2_3