Re-inventing the Wheel in Philosophy

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.