Non-Reductionism and John Searle's The Rediscovery of the Mind

As one would expect, John Searle's latest book The Rediscovery of the Mind, is a daring and controversial work. It is a blunt and lively book, as is exhibited by the title that didn't make it: What's wrong with the Philosophy of Mind? Searle's long term goal is to bring consciousness back to center stage in the philosophy of mind from the rather marginal position it currently occupies in contemporary analytic discussions. But as with most daring and original books, this one, I suspect, will be met with little sympathy, since, in following through on his project, Searle criticizes (almost) everyone in the philosophy of mind and continues his attack on current conceptions of cognitive science. In the following pages I shall briefly discuss two themes from Searle's book; reductionism and irreducibility and the Connection Principle. Despite his ingenious discussion I feel there are a number of problems for his approach. I begin with the question of reductionism. Reductionism and irreducibility are Searle's concern for the first half of the book. He provides us with an impressionistic survey of behaviorism, functionalism, eliminative materialism and some recent accounts of intentional content. None of these topics get serious attention, but Searle's aim, in these chapters, is to remind the-reader of the general landscape of the discussion and to suggest, radically, that this whole tradition of philosophy is confused. Monism and are confused categories, and this confusion has resulted in the abortive attempts at reducing intentionality and the reactions to the failure of this project, such as elimativism and property These projects are confused, claims Searle, because they inherit the incoherence of the materialism/non-materialism distinction. The incoherence, he thinks, stems from what he calls dualism. This is the view that ...in some important sense 'physical' implies 'non-mental' and 'mental' implies 'nonphysical'. Both traditional and materialism presuppose conceptual dualism (p. 26). Searle thinks that this conceptual is mistaken. We should not see materialism and mentalism as being incompatible. Con

Epistemology · Metaphysics · Philosophy of mind · Reductionism · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science