Online research in philosophy

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.

In this book, John Searle makes a significant contribution to the philosophy of rational action, and its implications for the problem of free will. The book also marks a change in Searle’s thinking since his 1992 book The Rediscovery of the Mind , particularly in that he now leaves open, as a reasonable possibility, that consciousness may be able to cause things that cannot be fully explained by the causal behaviour of neurons: for me, a step in the right direction (cf. Hodgson 1994). Searle also for the first time supports a non- Humean notion of the self, as an entity that can, as a whole, consciously try to do things.

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.

John Searle offers what he thinks to be a reasonable scientific approach to the understanding of consciousness. I argue that Searle is demanding nothing less than a Kuhnian-type revolution with respect to how scientists should study consciousness given his rejection of the subject-object distinction and affirmation of mental causation. As part of my analysis, I reveal that Searle embraces a version of emergentism that is in tension, not only with his own account, but also with some of the theoretical tenets of science. I conclude that Searle has offered little to motivate scientists to adopt his proposal.

John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Min is a sustained attempt to locate the mind and the mental firmly in the realm of the physical. Consciousness ,claims Searle, is just an ordinary biological feature of the world ... More specifically,``[t]he mental state of consciousness is just an ordinary biological, that is, physical featureof the brain''. Searle is adamant: ``Consciousness,to repeat, is a natural biological phenomenon''.

In Intentionality and other works, John Searle establishes himself as a leading defender of the view that consciousness of what one is doing is always a component of one'€™s action. In this paper I focus on problems with Searle'€™s view to establish that there are actions in which the agent is not at all aware of what she is doing. I argue that any theory that misses this sort of action keeps us from important insights into autonomy, self-knowledge and responsibility.