Mind, Language and Society
by John R. Searle
The “Background”
The study of
philosophy, like any science, requires an accurate knowledge of
reality. The practice of philosophy, like any art, requires skill. In
this way philosophy can be compared to medicine: both a body of
knowledge and a discriminating art.
Yet does it not
chafe the modern ear to have philosophy and medicine spoken of as
equals? Medicine now has the reputation of success while philosophy
is seen, as in Aristophanes' play The Frogs, as a theatre of
sophists. How has this different evaluation come to pass? I venture
to say that a good sense of medicine's history would aid a doctor in
his or her practice. With philosophy, it is even more important. Like
Art, it can only be understood and appreciated with a thorough
knowledge of the subject's history.
John R. Searle's
Mind, Language and Society in the hands of a good professor of
philosophy could be used to introduce students to the present state
of popular Western academic attempts at philosophy.
He begins by
listing and upholding “default positions” or what he calls the
“Background” of our thinking: the real world exists independently
of us; we have access to that world through our senses; words can be
used to refer to and talk about real objects; our statements are true
or false as they correspond to the facts in the real world; causation
really causes the effect.
Searle writes
about how: “Much of the history of philosophy consists in attacks
on default positions”.(p. 10, Basic Books edition) While Searle
says that this work is not intended as a history of philosophy, he
does say “much”. The realistic view typified by Searle's
Background has been most strongly attacked and the attacks most
widely accepted in “modern” times. Searle concerns himself with
what is labeled in the history of philosophy as “Modern Philosophy”
- he examines the time from Descartes to the latest academic
“antirealists”.
He rejects the
antirealist view that we cannot really know the real world and
supports the realistic epistemology of the Background: “...contemporary...attacks on realism are not driven by arguments,
because the arguments are...feeble...Rather...the motivation for
denying realism is a kind of will to power, and it manifests itself
in a number of ways. In universities, most notably in various
humanities disciplines, it is assumed that, if there is no real
world, then science is on the same footing as the humanities. They
both deal with social constructs, not with independent
realities...having been turned loose from the tiresome moorings and
constraints of having to confront the real world – a social
construct designed to oppress the marginalized elements of society –
then lets get rid of the real world and construct the world we want.
That, I think, is the real driving psychological force behind
antirealism at the end of the twentieth century.” (pp.19-20)
Although he says that this opinion about the psychological source
does not invalidate antirealism, he also dismisses their “feeble'
arguments.
Personally, I
would summarize the argument for realism as follows. The “givens”
of reality are such that no proof is necessary. If you think that
there is a real question about the reality of you now reading this,
you reject the possibility of knowing the real, you reject the
foundation of thought.
It is dismaying
(but not surprising given Searle's great devotion to his Oxford hero,
Bertrand Russell) then to read later: ”Matters of religion are like
matters of sexual preference...even the abstract questions are only
discussed by bores.” (p. 34) Yes, biological reproductive reality
is a good example to use. We dismiss that reality as we dismiss any
“abstract” question about God's existence. Simply apply Searle's
own analysis of “antirealist” humanities academics to his pages
on God (and religion, since he confuses the two subjects by treating
them interchangeably). His stamping as “bores” those he forbids
to ask questions is the same “will to power”. I remember as a
Philosophy major in 1974 taking a course in Alfred North Whitehead
(Bertrand Russell's co-author of Principia Mathematica). After a
while I asked the young professor how Whitehead accounted for the
existence of the universe and was told that “we don't ask those
kinds of questions in philosophy any more”. I will have more to
note about this later.
Consciousness
and Thinking
Beginning in
chapter two, subtitled “The Mind as a Biological phenomenon”,
Searle writes against both what he defines as a mind-body dualism and
a materialist denial of the reality of consciousness. He clearly
declares “Consciousness is, above all, a biological phenomenon.
Conscious processes are biological processes.” (p. 53)
But there is a
vast difference between consciousness (my cat is conscious) and
thinking. We are not only conscious but self-conscious. And our self-consciousness is not a void. We reflect on our experience, we
understand ideas, we do what we do, hopefully, now as we write and
read this. Searle would be surprised to learn that both Aristotle (De
Anima, Bk. 1 : Ch. 1) and Thomas Aquinas (SCG, book 2) agree that the
human mind depends upon the biological reality of the body to
operate. Both philosophers reject a “ghost-in-the-machine” view
of the human life. The line of philosophy from Aristotle to Aquinas
still living and strong today is that there is a human intellect that
depends on the biological to both sense and cogitate. Yet that
intellect abstracts (yes, abstraction) from sense data to arrive at
ideas. Such ideas as truth, justice, and value, which Searle himself
mentions, can be iconically represented but are in themselves
immaterial.
In chapter
three, Searle reiterates that he is neither a dualist or a
materialist. He is at pains to recommend that the categories used by
these types of views should be seen as obsolete. He seems sincerely
convinced that he has bypassed the problem of mind/body dualism and
materialistic reductionism. “Once we see that consciousness is a
biological phenomenon like any other...On the other hand,
consciousness is not reducible to any process that consists of
physical phenomena describable exclusively in third-person physical
terms...The solution is not to deny any of the obvious facts, but to
shift the categories around so we recognize that consciousness is at
one and the same time completely material and irreducibly mental. And
that means we should simply abandon the traditional categories of
'material' and 'mental' as they have been used in the Cartesian
tradition.” [Note the limits of Searle's philosophical world.
Abandoning a “Cartesian” way of thinking is exactly what
Aristotle and Aquinas would recommend to us.] How is “mental”
distinguished from “completely material”? He says that our
consciousness is real but subjective. Actually it is difficult to be
fair to his description of consciousness because he simply wants “to
have his cake and eat it”. He uses synonyms for the categories he
rejects but ends up with the same categories.
Before the above
quoted passage Searle tells us that we find it difficult to describe
consciousness. When we are first asked we usually begin by describing
awareness of objects and feelings. But as Searle continues to discuss
consciousness, he studiously avoids abstract ideas such as
universals, meaning, idea, truth, justice, etc.
Re-inventing the Wheel
Someone properly
trained in the tradition of philosophy will have a realistic
epistemology. That simply means that we accept that our senses can
give us data about reality. “Properly trained in the tradition of
philosophy”? Most in popular academic circles today would rebel at
these words. As I mentioned, there continues to be a school of
philosophy from Aristotle to Aquinas which is fruitful in the
understanding of the reality we encounter. Because of threats to his
life, Aristotle was forced to flee Athens thus leaving the Platonic
Academy to dominate the intellectual field. The ancient Greek world
slipped from the sharp intellectual tools of Aristotle to a popular
neoplatonism. The modern world has undergone a similar degradation.
Searle himself begins with a Background which is a realistic epistemology. He
declares the value of natural science and berates those who put their creative views on the same footing as such science. Yet we should remember that Searle is living in a "social reality" that gives us a life-long conditioning in the "opposition" of science and religion. Any thought that sounds religious must be rejected a priori. He was deprived, as most mainstream scholars are, of a solid education in real philosophy. How could it be otherwise? His own history of modern philosophy shows a parade of famous attempts at re-inventing the wheel of philosophy every few decades. Much to his credit, Searle is one of many who recognize this problem. The following will reveal how he fails to overcome it.
Creating a Social Reality
Chapter five is
subtitled “How the Mind Creates an Objective Social Reality”. To
explain how we make social reality he uses the examples of money,
property and marriage. Lets examine his analysis of money. “For
something to be money there has to be more than just a set of
attitudes, even though the attitudes are partly constitutive, and
essentially constitutive of a type of phenomenon being money.” (p.
112) He uses “type” because he acknowledges that a particular
piece of currency might be counterfeit. Yet he emphasizes “...a
type of thing is money over the long haul only if it is accepted as
money. And what goes for money, goes for social and institutional
reality generally.”
Some time ago,
we withdrew four hundred dollars from one bank. Several days later
when my wife and I went to the deposit the four one hundred dollar
bills in another bank we were told one of the bills was counterfeit.
Of course the first bank had no record of the individual bill and
simply would not accept our “social' word about it. But what if we
innocently had spent that bill in a store? It is not just a social
faux pas that the store clerk and we treated the bill as genuine. The
reality is that we have both been duped by a dishonest document and
in that small way all money has been “shortchanged” by the
transaction – yes, even if the bill stayed permanently in
circulation. Nowhere does Searle admit that monetary value depends on
the objective reality of natural resources and human labor and
intellect. The same applies
to his ready dismissal of the human reproductive biological reality
behind lifelong marriage between man and woman. The mere fact that when we remind people of the structure of the genitals, conception, etc. they are now trained to re-act as if we are not just "bores" but moral monsters shows how damaging such social make-believe can be.
Last Remarks
Please re-read
Searle's earlier quote criticizing some people in humanities
departments and honestly apply it to his own social constructing. He
truly fails to apply his realistic epistemic starting principles to
his own thinking. But we all make mistakes. What is most
disappointing in Mind, Language and Society is a social attitude:
even to question the Bertrand Russell – Searle analysis of God,
marriage, money, etc is disparaged.
Socrates, we
don't ask those kind of questions.
