Abstract

This paper is concerned with the question as to whether biological naturalism (John Searle’s solution for the mind-body problem) can be construed as a physicalist account of the mind. Despite defending physicalism in connection with particulars (section 2), Searle accepts the dualists’ basic argument for the irreducibility of mental properties (section 3). However, Searle is unable to substantiate his claim that such irreducibility is compatible with physicalism (section 4). This being the case, his theory about the mind is shown to be a variety of property dualism.