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- Daniel C. Dennett (1993). Review of Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind. Journal of Philosophy 90 (4):93-205.Everyone agrees that consciousness is a very special phenomenon, unique in several ways, but there is scant agreement on just how special it is, and whether or not an explanation of it can be accommodated within normal science. John Searle's view, defended with passion in this book, is highly idiosyncratic: what is special about consciousness is its "subjective ontology," but normal science can accommodate subjective ontology alongside (not within) its otherwise objective ontology. Once we clear away some widespread confusions about what science requires, and dismiss the misbegotten field of cognitive science that has been engendered by those confusions, the subjective ontology of the mind, he claims, will lose its aura of unacceptable mystery.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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In his recent _The Rediscovery of the Mind_ John Searle tries to destroy cognitive science _and_ preserve a future in which a ``perfect science of the brain'' (1992, p. 235) arrives. I show that Searle can't accomplish both objectives. The ammunition he uses to realise the first stirs up a maelstrom of consciousness so wild it precludes securing the second.
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| | Other links: psyche.cs.monash.edu.au | Scholar | More.. The idea that a computer could be conscious--or equivalently, that human consciousness is the effect of some complex computation mechanically performed by our brains--strikes some scientists and philosophers as a beautiful idea. They find it initially surprising and unsettling, as all beautiful ideas are, but the inevitable culmination of the scientific advances that have gradually demystified and unified the material world. The ideologues of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been its most articulate supporters. To others, this idea is deeply repellent: philistine, (...)
One of the world's most important philosophers of mind and language, John Searle (b. 1932) is direct, combative, and intellectually ambitious. His philosophy has made fundamental and lasting contributions to how we think about speech, consciousness, knowledge, truth, and the nature of social reality. Here, with remarkable clarity, a leading authority introduces students and generalists to those contributions. Nick Fotion explains Searle's ideas in full, while also testing and exploring their implications. He first takes up Searle's philosophy of language, examining (...)
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