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Only a handful of recent American philosophers are widely read outside university philosophy departments, and John Searle is surely among them. Not only does his work ascend to the rarified heights of analytic philosophy, but he has carved out a niche for himself as a popular defender of commonsense realism and a gadfly to postmodern philosophy. John Searle is part of the Philosophy Now series, published by Princeton University Press, which offers engaging looks at some of today's most prominent philosophers. With consistently clear prose, Nick Fotion guides the reader through the nettlesome thickets of recent philosophy of language, explaining how Searle's philosophy of mind is in many ways a corollary of his views on language.

Fotion, a professor of philosophy at Emory University, does an admirable job of limning Searle's philosophical work. Searle first appeared on the philosophical scene in 1969 with the publication of his seminal Speech Acts, which detailed a new theory of how language has meaning. A student of the well-known British philosopher J.L. Austin, Searle elaborated on the importance of intentionality in language use. Of particular interest to a general readership is his latter-day combat with a cohort of intellectual opponents he calls "antirealists." The salvos appeared in his 1995 book The Construction of Social Reality, in which he defends the existence of objects outside our minds. Sound obvious? It's not, according to his adversaries. On this score, and on others, Fotion does a wonderful job of marrying Searle's polemics to his philosophical rigor. --Eric de Place Book Description

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 how Searle treats speech acts and thinks about the metaphorical use of language. Next, the book sketches Searle's philosophy of mind, including his claims for intentionality and for the centrality of consciousness. This discussion highlights Searle's argument that the mind possesses a subjective character that materialist explanations (including behaviorism and strong artificial intelligence) cannot contain. The author goes on to look at Searle's later writings on the construction of social reality--work that mounts a sophisticated but plainly stated case against deconstructionist, skeptical, and relativistic accounts.

Concluding with general reflections on Searle's position vis-à-vis ontology and epistemology, this book is the first to assess and identify common themes and approaches in the whole range of his extensive thought. In doing so, it presents Searle's extremely influential work for the first time as a coherent philosophy.

Customer Reviews (1)

A Critique that Explains Social Facts
John Searle And the Construction of Social Reality by Joshua Rust (Continuum Studies in American Philosophy: Continuum International Publishing Group) In 1995 John Searle published The Construction of Social Reality, a text which promises not only to disclose the institutional backdrop against which speech takes place, but also to initiate a new "philosophy of society." Since then The Construction of Social Reality has been subject to a flurry of criticism. While many of Searle's interlocutors share the sense that the text marks an important breakthrough, he has time and again accused critics of misunderstanding his claims. Despite Searle's characteristic crispness and clarity there remains some confusion, among both philosophers and sociologists, regarding the significance of his proposals.
This book traces some of the high points of this dialogue, leveraging Searle's own clarifications to propose a new way of understanding the text. In particular, Joshua Rust looks to Max Weber in suggesting that Searle has articulated an ideal type. In locating The Construction of Social Reality under the umbrella of one of sociology's founding fathers, this book not only makes Searle's text more accessible to readers in the social sciences, but also presents Max Weber as a thinker worthy of philosophical reconsideration. Moreover, the recharacterization of Searle's claims in terms of the ideal type helps facilitate a comparison between Searle and other social theorists such as Margaret Gilbert.
Excerpt: In 1996 Toy Biz, the manufacturer of Marvel Comic's popular X-men action figures, sued US Customs Service in the Court of International Trade. Toy Biz successfully argued that the play¬things should be classified as toys not dolls. According to Customs' classification, dolls purport to be human, toys do not. If the figures are not deemed to represent humans they would be subject to only a 6.8 per cent import duty instead of the higher 12 per cent for dolls.
On the one hand, the X-men seem human. The US government argued that the figures should be classified as humans, and thus dolls, because each character had a "distinctive individual person¬ality". As for their super-human traits, the defense argued that, for example, Wolverine, who has a set of one-foot-long retractable claws on each hand, is simply "a man with prosthetic hands". How¬ever, it must be conceded that the ability to manipulate fire, shape-shift, or control weather systems at will, sharply distinguishes the X-men from ordinary human beings. In January of 2003, Judge Judith Barzilay declared, following the plaintiff's argument, that the X-men figures appeared to be "nonhuman creatures" due to "their extraordinary and unnatural . . . powers". The figures were thus found to merit the reclassification sought by Toy Biz.
One fan laments that the reclassification "is almost unthinkable. . . . Marvel's super heroes are supposed to be as human as you or I. They live in New York. They have families and go to work. And now they're no longer human?"Indeed, since its inception in 1963 the comic book has tended to use the X-men, depicted as being almost universally feared and despised by those in the mainstream, to explicitly allegorize race relations. To those who follow the comic book, the reclassification from doll to toy--from human to non-human--is not without irony.
The doll status of the X-men figures is a good example of what John Searle, in The Construction of Social Reality (CSR), calls an insti¬tutional fact. The rules that constitute institutional facts can be characterized according to the formula, "X counts as Y in context C," where X is a brute fact and Y is an institutional fact. In this manuscript I will refer to the "X counts as Y in C" formula as the "constitutive formula". Searle intends the formula to convey the sense in which an institutional fact Y is embodied or manifest in, but cannot be reduced to, a brute fact X. Using Searle's for¬mula, playthings that purport to be human (X) count as dolls (Y) within the jurisdiction of US Customs (C), and those that do not purport to be human (X) count as toys (Y). It also underscores the sense in which institutional facts can be traced back to our col¬lective acceptances. Moreover, institutional facts often implicate certain rights and obligations (they have a "status-function"), so that the reclassification of the X-men gives Toy Biz the right to pay the lower import duty.
Another example of an institutional fact is the wooden tally. Developed economies need a means to track debt. In medieval Europe one common means was the wooden tally. This consisted of a hazelwood stick on which was inscribed the date, the amount owed, as well as the debtor's name. The stick, along with this infor¬mation, was split into two pieces, starting at about two inches from the bottom. The longer half the "stock"was retained by the creditor, whereas the shorter half--the "stub" was kept by the debtor. If there was any question as to the size of the debt, the two halves could be put back together again. This helped guard against the possibility of fraud. When the debt was repaid the tally would then be destroyed. The stub (X) counts as an indi¬cation that I owe money to a creditor (Y) in medieval Europe (C). However, outside this context the stub (X) is not in itself an indi¬cation of debt-owed (Y).
Dolls, wooden tallies, or--Searle's archetypical example money, cannot be reduced to the physical properties that underlie them: "a dollar" is not just the paper and ink out of which it is phy¬sically constituted. Nevertheless a dollar must be constructed of something, be it green paper and ink or metal. In claiming that all institutional facts--the US Customs' distinction between toys and dolls, indications of debt, money, language, marriage, football games--can be characterized according to the constitutive for¬mula, Searle is claiming that an institutional fact Y is always founded on some brute fact X.
My intention is not to disagree with Searle on this point. It may be the case, as Searle contends, that for any institutional fact there is some constitutive, underlying brute fact to which I can point. Others dispute this and argue that some institutional facts do not seem to have a basis in some brute fact X.2 My princi¬pal aim, however, is not to falsify Searle's account by way of counterexamples.
My concern runs somewhat deeper: disagreement presupposes that I am in the first place clear about what Searle is trying to convey with the constitutive formula. I am not clear.
Nor is Searle particularly helpful when it comes to the framing of his own insights. The constitutive formula is a crucial part of the answer to the questions Searle asks himself at the beginning of his book: "How are institutional facts possible? And what exactly is the structure of such facts?" (CSR, p. 2) But while Searle deter¬mines the structure of institutional facts to be "X counts as Y in C," what does he mean when he asks about how these facts are possible? Is he providing a foundational ontology of social reality, as Bertrand Russell's atomism attempted to identify the logical structure of brute reality? Or is he proffering a kind of mnemonic by which inquiry into institutional reality might proceed? Even though it is clear that Searle has said something interesting and important, there remain metaphilosophical questions about the significance of those claims.
Chapter 1 Searle's Institutional Atomisms
It is clear that the constitutive formula tells us something interest¬ing about the nature of institutional reality. But there remains a question as to how it is interesting. Which puzzle does Searle intend to solve in asking the question, how are institutional facts possible? There may be an analogy between Searle's project and that of the atomists. Perhaps Searle's formula outlines the most general contours of institutional reality in somewhat the same way the atomists attempted to use logic to lay bare the structure of brute reality. This chapter fleshes out the comparison, noting points where the analogy breaks down. The almost stifling self-consciousness with which the atomists formulated the doctrine of philosophical analysis gives us a portrait of how we might under¬stand the significance of the constitutive formula as an answer to Searle's own question.
Chapter 2 First Criticism of Institutional Atomism
The analogy between Searle and the atomists allows me to mar¬shal part of an extensive body of criticism, originally directed against the atomists, against institutional analysis. I appeal to an argument originally advanced by John Wisdom and J.O. Urmson, who claim that there are principled reasons to think that it is impossible to complete the analysis of a given institution. I advance this argument by looking at difficulties that arise in attempting to characterize the institution of money.
Chapter 3 Second Criticism of Institutional Atomism
I argue that Searle, even by his own terms, has no basis by which to uphold the constitutive formula as the logical structure of institu¬tional reality.
If these criticisms are convincing, we are again in the position of needing to ask what Searle hopes to have accomplished when heasserts that "X counts as Y in C". How else might we understand the constitutive formula if not by means of an analogy with the atomists? Using groundwork established in Chapter 4, I take up this question in Chapters 5 and 6. Suggesting that Searle has advanced an ideal type, I will argue that he can avoid these objections.
Chapter 4 Kuhn, Weber, and Instruments of Inquiry
In Chapter 4 I set aside explicit discussion of Searle's view in order to present Max Weber's concept of the ideal type. I use Kuhn's notion of a paradigm as means of introducing the ideal type. This chapter begins with a sketch of Thomas Kuhn's view of inquiry in the physical sciences. I then chart some of the ways in which Max Weber's view of inquiry in the social sciences complements and anticipates Kuhn's depiction.
Both Weber and Kuhn characterize paradigms and ideal types as tools of inquiry, which give rise to puzzles and crises. I look at a number of responses, outlined by Kuhn and Weber, that the social and natural sciences have recourse to in the event of crisis.
Inquiry, I suggest, can proceed linearly, when there is a domi¬nant paradigm or ideal type, or conjunctively, when there are multiple paradigms or ideal types in play. Regarding the latter possibility, Weber contends that there are no principled reasons why a researcher should not expect to employ several, incom¬mensurable ideal types in order to understand a given phenom¬enon. Following Weber I suggest that reality is complex and so we can only expect so much from any one of our abstractions.
My exposition of Weber will help in my attempt to re-characterize the significance of Searle's constitutive formula in light of the atomist objections.
Why discuss Weber in the first place? Searle writes that since he takes himself to be addressing what "might be thought of as problems in the foundations of the social sciences, one might sup¬pose they would have been addressed and solved already in the various social sciences, and in particular by the great founders of the social sciences in the nineteenth century and the early parts of the twentieth century" (CSR, p. xii). Suggesting that the con¬stitutive formula is an ideal type is interesting and provoca¬tive because it has the effect of locating Searle's examination of social reality under the umbrella of one of the founders of the social sciences, namely Weber.
The final chapters of the book reconnect my discussion of Weber to Searle's project. We can distinguish the constitutive formula itself ("X counts as Yin C") from the explication of a par¬ticular institution by means of the constitutive formula (green pieces of paper count as money). Chapter 5 argues that the latter are ideal types whereas Chapter 6 makes the more ambitious claim that the constitutive formula itself is an ideal type.
Chapter 5 Searle and the Ideal Type: Applications of the Constitutive Formula
In this chapter I argue that we should not expect the constitutive formula to help the researcher generate canonical articulations of our institutions. To make this claim I build off my Chapter 2 dis¬cussion of money. Searle holds that green pieces of paper (X) count as media of exchange (Y). A number of economists and sociologists have formulated alternatives to this neoclassical account of money: according to the chartalist account, green pieces of paper (X) count as an indication of debt-owed (Y). I argue that the chartalists and the neoclassicalists are not engaged in a factual dispute, but are rather advancing incommensurable ideal types. They are not making empirical claims but are rather advancing proposals for how a particular research program might proceed. If this is correct then both of these views can coexist.
Moreover, because both accounts of money can be expressed in terms of the "X counts as Y in C" formula, this suggests that the constitutive formula will not represent our institutions in an unambiguous, fully explicit way. This evokes Wisdom's objection, which I discuss in Chapter 2. Wisdom argues that a complete ana¬lysis of an institution is not in principle possible. Bringing Searle's remarks about money under the rubric of the ideal type sidesteps the force of Wisdom's objection. It does so, not by denying his insight, but by reevaluating the atomist's hyperbolic criteria for success. Because the ideal type brings us back to the actual con¬ditions by which inquiry proceeds and succeeds, we need not be worried about the possibility of not being able to characterize a given institution exhaustively.
Chapter 6 Searle and the Ideal Type: the Constitutive Formula and the Status function
In this final chapter I take aim at the constitutive formula itself, and not just particular applications of it. I argue that, just as the claim "green pieces of paper (X) count as a medium of exchange (Y)" is an ideal type, the formula "X counts as Y in C" is itself an ideal type. In this way, since ideal types highlight and suppress aspects of institutional reality, and the constitutive formula is an ideal type, we should expect that there are additional ideal types that uncover characteristics of institutional reality left unturned by Searle's formula. To this end, if the constitutive formula identifies a certain "norma¬tive component" indicative of institutional reality, I compare Searle's account of social reality with other models of normativity, including Aristotle's conception of the phronimos. I conclude, then, that Searle and the Aristotelians have articulated different ideal types, and so have formulated different instruments that attend inquiry.
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Book Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of John Searles, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 1396 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Book Description
John R. Searle’s 1995 publication The Construction of Social Reality is the foundation of this collection of scholarly papers examining Searle's philosophical theories. The book works to reconstruct the ontology of the social sciences through an analysis of linguistic practices in the context of John Searle's celebrated work on intentionality. The authors provide rich and varied critical appraisals of Searle's original text.

• Reconstructs the ontology of the social sciences through an analysis of linguistic practices in the context of John Searle's celebrated work on intentionality
  
• Authors provide rich and varied critical appraisals of Searle's original text.

Book Description
John Searle es uno de los pensadores más influyentes que ha conocido el siglo XX, y quizás sea el autor vivo más importante de la filosofía analítica. La presente obra recopila las doce horas de conversaciones que el autor sostuvo con John Searle en su despacho de la Universidad de Berkeley, California. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Searle at his best
This is NOT the typical interviews book, filled with self-indulgence and old-time stories. Mr. Faigenbaum uses his deep knowledge of Sarle's developments to discuss the central aspects of his body of work. This non-compromized approach, sheds light on the key role Searle played in 20th century's North American philosophy. Thorough but also entertaining, a book that should be read by anyone who wants to understand the underlying tension in current phlosophical ideas.

Searle's best
This is NOT the typical interviews book, in which the author, too lazy to write critical work, chats aboutpersonal stories. Mr. Faigenbaum thorough understanding of Searle's body of knowledge allows him to delve deeply into his philosophical developments. The reader can therefore easily comprehend the crucial role Searle played in 20th Century American philosophy. Mr. Faigenbaum does a good job at using theinterview format to his advantage, keeping the book conceptual, complete and entertaining.

I recomend it definitely
I was very helpful for me to read this book. It helped me to underestand many complex ideas, and to understand the most general positions of this scholar. I recomend it for everybody studying Searle's developements. It is easy reading and very deep. Dr. Faigenbaum, the interviewer, did a great job. ... Read more

Book Description

This book includes ten original essays that critically examine central themes of John Searles ontology of society, as well as a new essay by Searle that summarizes and further develops his work in that area. The critical essays are grouped into three parts. Part I (Aspects of Collective Intentionality) examines the account of collective intention and action underlying Searles analysis of social and institutional facts, with special emphasis on how that account relates to the dispute between individualism and anti-individualism in the analysis of social behaviour, and to the opposition between internalism and externalism in the analysis of intentionality. Part II (From Intentions to Institutions: Development and Evolution) scrutinizes the ontogenetic and phylogenetic credentials of Searles view that, unlike other kinds of social facts, institutional facts are uniquely human, and develops original suggestions concerning their place in human evolution and development. Part III (Aspects of Institutional Reality) focuses on Searles claim that institutional facts owe their existence to the collective acceptance of constitutive rules whose effect is the creation of deontic powers, and examines central issues relevant to its assessment (among others, the status of the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules, the significance of the distinction between brute and deontic powers, and the issue of the logical derivability of normative from descriptive propositions, and the import of the difference between moral and non-moral normative principles). Written by an international team of philosophers and social scientists, the essays aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of Searles work on the ontology of society, and to suggest new approaches to fundamental questions in that research area.

Book Description
The study of rationality and practical reason, or rationality in action, has been central to Western intellectual culture. In this invigorating book, John Searle lays out six claims of what he calls the Classical Model of rationality and shows why they are false. He then presents an alternative theory of the role of rationality in thought and action.

A central point of Searle's theory is that only irrational actions are directly caused by beliefs and desires--for example, the actions of a person in the grip of an obsession or addiction. In most cases of rational action, there is a gap between the motivating desire and the actual decision making. The traditional name for this gap is "freedom of the will." According to Searle, all rational activity presupposes free will. For rationality is possible only where one has a choice among various rational as well as irrational options.

Unlike many philosophical tracts, Rationality in Action invites the reader to apply the author's ideas to everyday life. Searle shows, for example, that contrary to the traditional philosophical view, weakness of will is very common. He also points out the absurdity of the claim that rational decision making always starts from a consistent set of desires. Rational decision making, he argues, is often about choosing between conflicting reasons for action. In fact, humans are distinguished by their ability to be rationally motivated by desire-independent reasons for action. Extending his theory of rationality to the self, Searle shows how rational deliberation presupposes an irreducible notion of the self. He also reveals the idea of free will to be essentially a thesis of how the brain works. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Extraordinary approach to rationality
In this progressively and amazing treatment of the topic, Searle just goes ahead and displays a thorough analysis on the internal workings of the mind related to rationality. Advancing consistently and clearly through the topics involved in rationality, the book covers a wide range of practical, philosophical and scientific approaches to explain and review the process of conscious rationality of the human brain.
The notion of the self, the workings on deliberation, the creation and recognition of reasons for actions, the acquisition of motivators and the intentionality behind all this process, clears the way for understanding one of the most precious capacities of the human brain, shortly to be able to rationally understand ourselves and others.
I truly recommend reading this book in order to enhance our capacity to cope with reality and to acknowledge the workings of the mind as a resulting/emerging feature of the human brain.
Once again, Searle manages to show us a different point of view much more realistic and complete that clearly states our experience and first person point of view.

Lucid and Stimulating
Searle's _Rationality in Action_ is lucid and accessible.The thrust of the book is to show that desire-independent reasons for action are commonplace (as opposed to the traditional or "Classical" model - Hume, Williams, Davidson, modern decision theory, etc. - that reasons for action follow desires).Searle argues that there is a gap between reason and decision, decision and action, and continuing to do an action and that reasons for rational action actually are made effective by the agent (the person).

I found the section distinguishing reasons for action from justification for action quite interesting.The explanation of what Searle calls "weakness of the will" follows very logically from the rest of his argument and is no problem for his theory of rationality.Finally, Searle touches on the question of neurobiological determinism versus freedom of the will.

Anyone who has followed Searle's previous works on intentionality, consciousness, speech acts, and institutional facts will find this as punchy, logical, and clear.

All in all, _Rationality in Action_ is an enjoyable work of philosophy.

Excellent and honest
This book is in many senses a very unusual philosophy one. First, even though, the topic is not easy Searle has showed an extremeeffort and capacityto express himself with clarity. In this book you can always know what the author thinks, based on which premises he believes so, and of course what problem he is trying to solve.
I got surprised when I saw that Searle changed his view respect to the free will expressed in "minds, brain and science" where he reached to the conclusion that no real free will may exist. In this book he not only accept his error, but also produce a completedescription ofthe "gaps" that cannot be filled with necessity and, therefore, require free will. He moves one step forwardand declares that a humean being is not enough to describe human beings, on the contrary a substantial being able of free will is what is required.
So clarity, rigor and honesty is the characteristic of this book.
Goingto the book, it basically says that in our action there are gaps, meaning for gaps, actions that cannot be completely explained by external causes, so we, as free will holders, must decide our actions. This is extensively discussed in it, and so are many of the consequences of that.
In the book Searle tried to provide an explanation for moral commitment based on the compromise derived from the use of language instead of solutions based on cost-benefit analysis.
I believe that he is right in the second, partially right in the recognition of the importance of speech acts as compromisers but I certainly believe that we need more to justify he ethic behavior.
I'll wait for new books from Searle , I want to read more shinning thoughts like those showed in this book and I may end up finding that he keeps improving.

Excellent and honest
This book is in many senses a very unusual philosophy one. First, even the topic is not easy Searle has showed an extremeeffort and capacityto express himself with clarity. In this book you can always know what the author thinks, based on which premises he believes so, and of course what problem he is trying to solve.
I got surprised when I saw that Searle changed his view respect to the free will expressed in "minds, brain and science" where he reached to the conclusion that no real free will may exist. In this book he not only accept his error, but also produce a completedescription ofthe "gaps" that cannot be filled with necessity and, therefore, require free will. He moves one step forwardand declares that a humean being is not enough to describe human beings, on the contrary a substantial being able of free will is what is required.
So clarity, rigor and honesty is the characteristic of this book.
Goingto the book, it basically says that in our action there are gaps, meaning for gaps, actions that cannot be completely explained by external causes, so we, as free will holders, must decide our actions. This is extensively discussed in it, and so are many of the consequences of that.
In the book Searle tried to provide an explanation for moral commitment based on the compromised derived from the use of language more than solutions based on cost-benefit analysis.
I believe that he is right in the second, partially right in the recognition of the importance of speech acts as compromisers but I certainly believe that we need more to justify he ethic behavior.
I'll wait for new books from Searle , I want to read more shinning thoughts like those showed in this book and I may end up finding that he keeps improving.

Searle's Photo Not on the Front Cover
Well, here we go again. Back to the proverbial rationality and free will drawing board. I recommend a slew of preliminary texts as an overview of the field, such as Williams, Scheffler, Korsgaard, Scanlon, Velleman, Nozick, etc.

Nevertheless, Searle writes with his usual clear, direct, and economic prose. He enters a crowded practical reason debate with, again, his usual bravado. He argues against Williams's externalist view by describing substantial tautological errors. But this approach tends to oversimplify Williams's complex view. One wonders if Searle's reading of Williams is actually right (or careful enough). I prefer Scanlon's handling of W's externalism in the Appendix to What We Owe to Each Other, and McDowell's well-known article on the subject.

The strength of Searle's book is his defense of an internalist view of rationality and action, which resurrects his views on intentionality and speech acts. He thoroughly demonstrates in one chapter how a Deductive Model in rationality (i.e., a practical syllogism ala Kenny) cannot work. He also clearly identifies the major problems in practical reason, conflicting reasons, and defends a novel approach, what he calls a semantic categorical imperative. This is a controversial view, which navigates between (or circumvents) Humean and Kantian theories on moral motivation.

Another stregth of the book is how Searle connects rationality in action (hence the title of the book) and his theory of intentionality to the free will problem. In the last chapters, he clearly identifies just what the nature of the free will problem is, which is pretty much a rehashing of his chapter in Minds, Brains, and Science (Harvard UP). The reader gets a clear picture of how and why the free will issue is a major contemporary philosophical problem, requiring a correct scientific research project to help solve the problem. One also gets a clear view of a top-notch philosopher at work on this serious problem. It is obvious why this problem has kept Searle awake at nights--why he misses the freeway on-ramp during his drive to work. It is a seemingly insoluable problem, and Searle makes the nature of the problem and the reasons that it keeps philosophers awake at night explicit.

So the book closes, basically, with a challenge for philosophers to continue work on free will and rationality. It is also a challenge for scientists in the labs to work on a research program that would identify the whole problem and its potential solution. ... Read more

Book Description
John Searle's Speech Acts made a highly original contribution to work in the philosophy of language. Expression and Meaning is a direct successor, concerned to develop and refine the account presented in Searle's earlier work, and to extend its application to other modes of discourse such as metaphor, fiction, reference, and indirect speech arts. Searle also presents a rational taxonomy of types of speech acts and explores the relation between the meanings of sentences and the contexts of their utterance. The book points forward to a larger theme implicit in these problems - the basis certain features of speech have in the intentionality of mind, and even more generally, the relation of the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Speech Act Theory
If your reading Jacques Derrida, esp. Limited Inc and Psyche this work along with Austin's How to do Things with Words are essential.These two books are the fundamental texts of Speech Act Theory.So if you want to find out about Locutions, Illocutionary Force and whatnot check out this text. ... Read more

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to follow ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Ignore the previous comments on "trick philosophy"
The Chinese Room Argument (CRA) has nothing to do with the speed of computers or any future developments in artifical intelligence (at least as understood as following from Turing). The CRA is a purely formal argument intended to refute the claim that computers (defined as Turing machines) can think, or can understand, or are minds solely by virtue of their formal description. (This claim is the essence of "computationalism," after Turing's original formulation.) The CRA is that: 1) Syntax is not semantics.2) The implemented synatactical or formal programof a computer is not sufficient to generate semantics. 3) Minds have semantics. 4) Therefore, computers (so defined) are not minds/cannot think/do not understand because they are not sufficient to generate semantics.

For example, the concepts we employ to think and the words we use to speak have meanings. But there is nothing in computationalism as syntax that has any meaning whatsoever. Whatever meaning an implemented formal program has results from its being programmed or interpreted by us. Syntax (e.g., a computer program) has no causal powers. Whatever causal powers computers have (e.g., to fly airplanes) results from our programming and our assigning interpretations to the electrical charge insides a chip, not from the program in itself.

The chapters in Views Into the Chinese Room attack different aspects of the CRA. But they address it as an argument that stands or falls on the truth of the premises and the validity of the inference, not on engineering questions such as the speed of computers, which are irrelevant. Searle believes that there are, in fact, thinking machines -- we human beings are biological machines that think. And he believes that there also could be artificially made machines that think. The CRA is meant to show only that an implemented computer program by itself cannot generate mental content or semantic content.

For a clear explanation of the CRA, see chapter 15 of this book, by Stevan Harnad, the editor of The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, where Searle's original paper appeared twenty years ago. Do not rely on reviewers who do not understand the argument in the first place.

Trick philosophy
The human brain evolved to assist the survival of its owner while the owner navigated the dangerous jungles and forests of ancient times.Its ability to extract patterns from the information provided by the retina and optic nerve is quite phenomenal.The process by which your brain is recognizing my words and understanding my meaning is astounding.

Yet if you are asked to act like a computer by reading numbers, moving paper tape, erasing things and following instructions given on the paper tape, you will prove to be one of the slowest computers in the world.The original word `computer' referred to a man sitting in a room with paper, pencil and eraser.These human `computers' were replaced by machines a long time ago because they are too slow.

In summary, humans are fast and intelligent at being humans but slow at being computers.In the Chinese Room Argument, John Searle states that although we have a human mind which could otherwise be used to understand Chinese, this particular human mind does not in fact understand it.Given this stipulation, the human mind's ability to process language cannot be used and the only method of "understanding Chinese" is left to the "Chinese room" which consists of a computer run by the very slowest of CPUs, the human being sans abacus, sans calculator, sans silicon chips and sans hope.

The Chinese Room Argument is a trick argument that proves nothing.The computer room is so slow that it cannot ever think or understand Chinese.On the other hand, this doesn't say anything about whether a high-speed computer with the memory and processing power of the human brain might one day speak and understand Chinese quite well. ... Read more

Book Description
This is a formal and systematic study of the logical foundations of speech act theory. The study of speech acts has been a flourishing branch of the philosophy of language and linguistics over the last two decades, and John Searle has of course himself made some of the most notable contributions to that study in the sequence of books Speech Acts (1969), Expression and Meaning (1979) and Intentionality (1983). In collaboration with Daniel Vanderveken he now presents the first formalised logic of a general theory of speech acts, dealing with such things as the nature of an illocutionary force, the logical form of its components, and the conditions of success of elementary illocutionary acts. The central chapters present a systematic exposition of the axioms and general laws of illocutionary logic. ... Read more

Book Description
Introduction to Bioethics is a comprehensive introduction to the broad field of bioethics, focusing on key issues directly relevant to students of modern biological and medical sciences. Ethical issues relating to both plants and animals are covered, drawing out scientific, medical, social and religious concerns. ... Read more

Book Description

Minds, Brains and Science takes up just the problems that perplex people, and it does what good philosophy always does: it dispels the illusion caused by the specious collision of truths. How do we reconcile common sense and science? Searle argues vigorously that the truths of common sense and the truths of science are both right and that the only question is how to fit them together.

Searle explains how we can reconcile an intuitive view of ourselves as conscious, free, rational agents with a universe that science tells us consists of mindless physical particles. He briskly and lucidly sets out his arguments against the familiar positions in the philosophy of mind, and details the consequences of his ideas for the mind-body problem, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, questions of action and free will, and the philosophy of the social sciences.

Customer Reviews (7)

Not bad...
"Minds, Brains and Science" collects John Searle's 1984 Reith lectures. These lectures focus on some of the essential issues in the philosophy of mind and related areas, such as artificial intelligence.

Searle plunges directly into the classical mind-body `problem'. Searle suggests four features of mental phenomena that have traditionally made them difficult to integrate with our physical conception of the universe. These four features consist of: consciousness, intentionality (intentionality in the technical, philosophical sense whereby mental states are said to be representational, to be 'about' things), subjectivity and mental causation. Searle believes that the supposed mind-body problem disappears once we realize that all mental phenomena are caused by neurobiological processes. A special, biological sort of causation is put forth in which mental phenomena are both caused by brain processes at the neuronal level and simultaneously realized in that same system. This is similar to the way in which the liquidity of water (a surface or macro-level feature) is both caused by and realized in the system that is made of hydrogen and oxygen micro-elements. Thus, "there is a cause and effect relationship, but at the same time the surface features are just higher level features of the very system whose behavior at the micro-level causes those features." This is different from the straightforward notion of cause and effect (e.g., billiard balls clacking into one another). It is the adoption of the `billiard-ball' model of causation that leads to an apparent dualism between mental and physical phenomena.

Searle follows up this discussion with an attack on the strong A.I. position. According to the strong A.I. view, the brain is not LIKE a computer, the brain IS a kind of computer, in the sense that it takes in a given set of inputs, performs rule-governed operations on the input and produces meaningful output. Brains and minds stand in the same relation to each other, as computer hardware does to its programs. For Searle, this computational theory of mind is deeply flawed. He uses his famous thought experiment (the Chinese room) to prove his point. A thought experiment (or gedanken) is a way of imagining a hypothetical scenario in order to investigate the nature of things. Thought experiments have a history not only in philosophy but also in the physical sciences (e.g., Einstein's street-car approaching the speed of light, the `elevator thought experiment' showing the ways in which gravity and acceleration are isomorphic, the leaning tower of Pisa and Galileo's law of falling, etc.).

What Searle deduces from his Chinese room thought experiment is that brains are made of the right kind of `stuff' to cause intentional, semantic states whereas computer programs are solely formal or syntactical in structure. Thus, for Searle, it would be a gross error to say that when a computer runs a language comprehension program, it understands in any real sense of the term (simulation does not equal duplication). The computer is a machine that manipulates formal symbols; it does not have semantic states. For Searle, the computer is at best a metaphor for the way in which the brain works, a metaphor that is no more `valid' than previous ones (telephone switchboard, steam engine, etc.). The brain is first and foremost a biological organ.

The Chinese room argument has been much maligned in some circles (Dennett coined the term `intuition pump' in referring to it), but it is such a well-known thought experiment that everyone interested in philosophy of mind and cognitive science should have some level of familiarity with it. Searle uses it as a foundation to mount a more large-scale critique of the cognitivist/computational position.

Searle's other lectures discuss the reasons why the psychological/behavioral and social sciences have not enjoyed the same astounding successes as the strictly physical sciences such as physics and chemistry. He concludes with an insightful lecture on the problem of free will. Our scientific conception of the physical world is seemingly incompatible with our commonsense notion that we are conscious, freely acting agents. The obsolescence of the Newtonian clockwork universe does not alter this deep incompatibility says Searle. Quantum mechanics and particle indeterminacy are not enough to safeguard free will, because (i) indeterminacy at the particle level does not translate into indeterminacy at the macro-level and (ii) "it doesn't follow from the fact that particles are only statistically determined that the human mind can force the statistically-determined particles to swerve from their paths." Searle's conclusion is that our notion that we have free will is a kind of illusion, built into our brains by evolution. In principle, an `ideal observer' (of the sort postulated by Laplace) could predict all of our actions, but for all practical purposes we behave as if we had free will. Perhaps, as Steven Pinker once stated, "free will is the idealization of human beings that makes the ethics game playable."

Overall, "Minds, Brains and Science" is a rather enjoyable read, despite some of the weaknesses in Searle's argument. It is short and accessible and worth reading for its many ideas.

a classic
I recently attended a lecture by a university professor on 'Philosophy of the Mind'.Thinking back to these BBC Reith Lectures which I heard in 1984 (on radio, not TV, by the way) I asked him about models for the brain other than the computer, such as water mills.He seemed blissfully ignorant that there had been any.Reading this book shortly afterwards, I was reminded that not only mills but also hydraulic engines, switchboards, and telegraph systems have, at various times, been used as models for the brain. This should give caution to anyone who thinks it's obvious that the brain is a computer.

The text thankfully retains the combination of conversational style and intellectual depth of the original lectures.It's illuminated by examples such as the artificial intelligence researcher (John McCarthy) who believes a machines as simple as thermostats can have beliefs ("it's too hot in here"), which is both unforgettably absurd and seductively radical.

An obvious problem in this field is that people are disposed to declaim at each other rather than listening.Searle and Dennett are still going hammer and tongs over the former's 'Chinese Room'.I can't help thinking that if the parties really wanted to settle these disputes they'd try to agree on definitions for their terms.Admittedly this may not always be easy - - for example 'understanding' is a strange word if you think about its etymology - - but would surely be more constructive than abusive cross-talk.

The book is impressively wide-ranging in its 100 pages and includes, for example, the clearest exposition of the arguments for and against free will which I've ever read.

There's some occasional slackness, eg what exactly are the 'powers' by which we are supposed to judge any machine against brains, before ascribing mental states to the former?But, line for line, it's by far the most valuable book I've read in the field.

Concise, Clear and Important
Dealing with some of the problems in philosophy that persist, even in our "post-modern" times, this book by John Searle of the U.C. at Berkely provides a quick, easily read survey of some of the issues about minds, bodies and artificial intelligence that are of special relevance today. Searle is especially keen to restore a commonsense view of things and so his philosophy seems particularly down-to-earth with regard to some of the knottier problems.

His notion that consciousness (the stuff of minds) is to brains as digestion is to the stomach (a function of it) and that there are various orders of explanation that can be invoked for the same phenomenon go a long way toward enabling those who are stuck in the mind-body conundrum to get beyond it. In some ways he offers an updating of Wittgenstein who, similarly, offered a way of getting beyond such "problems" though Wittgenstein reduced it all to a matter of how we talk while Searle wants to say that this only answers the question in part. Unlike Wittgenstein, who dismissed the idea of theoretical explanations superceding ordinary language, Searle wants to reaffirm the importance of such explanations, and to offer a way to develop them. In many ways his proposals make quite a bit of sense.

However, I remain struck by his argument against the possibility of what he terms the claims of "strong artificial intelligence" proponents. He describes this view (page 28) as "saying that the mind is to the brain as the program is to the computer hardware" and elaborates by noting that "on this view, any physical system . . . that had the right program with the right inputs and outputs would have a mind in exactly the same sense that you and I have minds." Thus, "strong AI," as he repeatedly terms it, is the view that minds are in no way unique to creatures like us (with organic brains like ours) but are merely the function of the right sort of programs on the right kind of hardware operating in the right sort of way. That is, inorganic machines, like digital computers, can be made to have minds like ours (with the same kinds of features ours have).

Searle is very much opposed to this view and in this book brings to bear his most famous argument against it: the Chinese Room thought experiment. In a nutshell it holds that a computer, insofar as it is no different from someone inside a sealed room following purely formal rules in responding to written questions submitted in Chinese (a language he doesn't know) who appears to be responding AS THOUGH HE KNEW CHINESE, so too, can that computer appear to have intelligence, to understand its inputs, without really doing so.

His core argument against "strong AI" is that this is ALL a computer can do, but that simulation in this way is not what we mean by intelligence at all. In fact, he rightly notes, when we think of intelligence, we think of understanding, what he variously calls intentionality and/or meaning (semantic content). But the computer modelled on his Chinese Room evidences no understanding but only a rote process of mechanically producing certain squiggles, according to some pre-established rules that look like they reflect an understanding.

The crux of this is a syllogistic argument he also reproduces in this book:

1) Brains cause minds.
2) Syntax is not sufficient for semantics.
3) Computer programs are entirely defined by their formal, or syntactical, structure.
4) Minds have mental contents; specifically they have semantic contents.

On the basis of the above he offers a number of conclusions but his first is telling: "No computer program by itself is sufficient to give a computer a mind. Programs in short are not minds, and they are not sufficient by themselves for having minds."

While thinking highly of Searle's work, I believe his Chinese Room argument is deeply flawed. I can't offer a full account here for reasons of space, but the point is that, while he has correctly noted that the kind of intelligence we have (and that we might be interested in recreating on a computer) is a conscious intelligence, his argument that computers can never offer a medium for recreating this hinges on a mistake. He says in point #2 that "Syntax is not sufficient for semantics." He amplifies this by noting that this is "a conceptual truth," i.e., it is true by definition. "It just articulates our distinction between what is purely formal and what has content," he adds. But the fact that the two notions are conceptually different does not entail a claim that one type of thing cannot give rise to another.

Searle wants to say that computers can never provide an adequate platform for the phenomena of consciousness on this basis but his argument doesn't demonstrate this. In fact, despite all his efforts with the Chinese Room thought experiment, one can still envision a complex of computer-driven programs that replicate all the various functionalities we find in our own minds which, if combined in the layered and integrated way they are in humans, can presumably yield the kind of consciousness we have. Of course, this is not to say this CAN be done technically, only that Searle's argument that it can't be founders on the meaning of the term "sufficient" that he uses in the second step of his argument. He wants us to accept that though step #2 arises from a purely conceptual claim, it can be construed to have an empirical implication. In this I think he errs.

All of this said, however, I want to add that this is a very fine book. It is concise, clear, and profound in its thinking. Searle is certainly right in his recognition about what "intelligence" is, as far as he takes it, which may be about as far as a philosopher can. The rest is up to the scientific workers in the field, those who are experimenting with and designing new ways to operationalize minds in machines.

SWM

Cogent and hard-hitting
Searle is an interesting philosopher for me to read, because I was trained in neurobiology, and Searle is a philosopher who thinks like a neurobiologist. On the other hand, I am a neurobiologist who thinks like a philosopher.

Although the book discusses several classical problems such as the problem of freedom and free will, the mind-body problem, right and wrong, etc., for me the two most interesting chapters were the one on the mind-body problem, and the one on cognitive psychology.

Here Searle proposes a thorough-going biological and physical explanation that, as a neurobiolgist, I've always liked myself.

You really need to read these two chapters to understand all the details, of course, but I'll briefly summarize his idea, and you can decide if it makes sense to you.

Basically, Searle says there really is no mind-body problem. This dichotomy occured because philosophy completely misunderstood the entire issue. There is no mind-body problem, because the mind depends on the brain, and on the neural workings of the brain, and there is no reason even to say that consciousness itself is separate from the brain itself.

Searle points out that we explain the properties of normal matter, such as a steel ball, which has mass, weight, is impenetrable, is magnetic, and so on, by reference to its atomic and molecular properties. There is no reason to posit any intevening layer of "rules" or theory.

It's the same with the mind-body problem. Mind depends on neurons. All our behavior depends on neurons. There is no reason to posit this intermediate entity of consciousness or of mind which is separate from the underlying biology. There is no doubt that consciousness exists, but there's nothing special about it, and although Searle doesn't claim it can be reduced to neural functions yet, he leaves no doubt that classical views about the mind and consciousness are fundamentally flawed.

Anyway, I can certainly sympathize with this point of view, and would like to make a point of my own. I've studied the brain, and when you see people with tiny, focal, strokes in the language area of the brain who have no detectable impairment except they can no longer use articles or conjunctions in their speech, or people with temporal lobe damage who can easily name an object when you show it to them, but who can't tell you its function, and vice versa, where there are people who have temporal lobe damage in an adjacent area with exactly the reverse syndrome--they can tell you what its for but can't name the object--in other words, the naming function and the definition function seem to be separate in the temporal lobe, and the two areas must communicate in order to be able to do both, or at least the information is stored separately and you need access to both--you very quickly get the idea that if it's not in the brain, it's not anywhere. There are legions of other neurological cases where people have lost very specific or general functions depending on the source and extent of the damage to the brain.

Furthermore, it's becoming clearer as a result of research that there is no single part of the brain that gives rise to consciousness. Consciousness relates to different functions located in different parts of the brain being integrated in time through a finely controlled and switched system of neural communications pathways. Thus, consciousness is not a unitary entity at all, although it might seem so to our own introspective minds. More accurately, it is a unified process that occurs through the integration of diverse brain areas and brain functions.

Anyway, Searle's biological reductionism and determism isn't very different from how neuroscientists think, and I give him credit for being willing to discuss the subject in those terms and propose such a radical solution (from the standpoint of most philosophers) to the mind-body problem.

A short thought inspiring book
This is the kind of book that you can finish in a day and makes you think about things like whether computers will think or not.I personally found it interesting and a good introduction to things like cognitive science. ... Read more