John Searle was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1932. He studied at the University of Wisconsin from 1949 to 1952 and then went to Oxford, where he remained until 1959. That year, he defended his doctorate, returned to the United States, and settled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has worked for more than four decades. In 1967, Searle became a professor at the university and two years later published his first book, Speech Acts: Essays in the Philosophy of Language. It was followed by a number of other monographs and collections of articles, including Expression and Meaning: Studies in Speech Act Theory (1979), Intentionality: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Mind, Brain, and Science (1984), Rediscovering Consciousness (1992), The Construction of Social Reality (1995), The Mystery of Consciousness (1997), Consciousness and Language (2002), and Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004). Of particular note is Searle’s 1998 book Consciousness, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World, in which he attempted to bring together the main themes of his research.
Philosophy of language. In his student years, Searle was influenced by the ideas of the founders of analytical philosophy, G. Frege and L. Wittgenstein. He was also influenced to a certain extent by G. Ryle and the ideologist of the return of analytical philosophy to metaphysics, P. Strawson. Searle was even more indebted to his academic supervisor at Oxford, J. Austin. Austin made a turn from the then popular “linguistic philosophy,” which analyzed the metaphysical distortions of ordinary speech, to the “philosophy of language,” which studies the fundamental structures of speech, and laid the foundation for the theory of “speech acts,” i.e. meaningful utterances. He believed that a speech act includes three components: 1) speaking itself, 2) the purpose of speaking, and 3) the consequences of speaking. Considered in the first aspect, it is called a “locutionary act,” in the second—an “illocutionary act,” and in the third—a “perlocutionary act.” Austin also attempted to systematize the illocutionary acts that form the basis of speech, but did not manage to complete this project. Searle picked up his initiative and developed a detailed classification of illocutionary acts that received wide recognition in the linguistic community: “assertives” (the goal is to reflect the real state of affairs), “directives” (urging someone to action), “commissives” (binding the speaker himself with an obligation), “declarations” (changing reality by the very fact of the speech act, as in the case of solemn formulas when concluding a marriage, etc.) and “expressives” (expression of the speaker’s states).
Illocutionary acts, Searle emphasizes, always have a communicative aspect, which, however, presupposes the presence of a representative component. But the spoken words and sentences themselves do not represent or designate anything. This role is derivative and is attributed to them by speakers and listeners. Such attribution, Searle believes, is possible only if such subjects have mental states, the structure and content of which, in fact, reflect illocutionary acts. For example, an order given by one person to another presupposes a certain desire of the first, as well as his conviction in the possibility of achieving the fulfillment of this desire with the help of the one to whom the directive is given. Considering the fundamental role of mental states in the constitution of speech acts, Searle concludes that “the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of mind” (5: VII).
Intentionality. Searle’s analysis of language thus develops into an investigation of mentality. Since speech acts that depend on certain mental states are representational, it is logical to assume that these states themselves can be so. And although Searle acknowledges the existence of non-representational mental states, such as causeless anxiety, the most important mental states, in his opinion, do have a representational nature. Searle calls them “intentional”, i.e. aimed at some object. The representational aspect of the concept of intentionality is revealed by the doctrine of the “conditions of realization” of intentional states. For example, the condition for the realization of a person’s belief in the existence of elementary particles is the actual existence of the latter, which this intentional state thus represents. The direction of correspondence between this state and the world is from the state (or its verbal formulation) to the world. In the case of desires, the direction changes to the opposite, and the condition for the realization of desires turns out to be bringing the world into conformity with the desired state of affairs.
According to Searle, intentional states always have an “aspectual” character, i.e. they represent a thing “somehow,” from a certain angle or in relation to some category. They are also inseparable from one or another mood tone. In addition, “every intentional state,” Searle asserts, “has an intentional content and a psychological mode” (5: 12). The original psychological modes, in his opinion, are perception and intention, but for classification purposes it is better to consider their derivative forms, belief and desire, as basic modes. All other intentional states include some beliefs and desires, “and in many cases the intentionality of such states can be explained by some beliefs and desires” (5: 35).
In his early works, Searle acknowledged the existence of not only conscious but also unconscious beliefs and desires, and argued that they form a Network of intentional states that support each other. For example, a person’s conscious desire to run for president presupposes his or her belief in the existence of the institution of the presidency, a constitution, etc., and not all such beliefs can be actually conscious. In his programmatic work, Rediscovering Consciousness, however, Searle abandoned the thesis about the existence of unconscious intentional states and accused Freud of imposing this erroneous theory on twentieth-century philosophers. All mental states, Searle now claimed, must be accompanied by consciousness, although not all of them are equally conscious—this depends on the level of attention. Apart from consciousness, the brain contains only neural processes. Some of them, unrelated to actual intentional states, were associated with them in the past and can, if necessary, cause them again. Such processes correspond to what he had previously called the unconscious intentional states of the Network. At the same time, Searle noted that, regardless of the interpretation of the Network, intentional states are not self-sufficient, since it is impossible to set unambiguous conditions for the realization of specific states of this kind either by these states themselves or by their Network. An illustration of this is the variability of the literal meaning of words in speech acts. Thus, the word “cut” has different meanings in the sentences “cut the grass” and “cut the cake”, although in both cases we are talking about a literal, not metaphorical meaning. The specific meaning of the word is thus determined by the context. But this context cannot be fully expressed in other words due to the similar semantic insufficiency of the latter. This is true not only for speech acts, but also for other intentional acts and states. In order to avoid the danger of infinite regress, Searle suggests admitting the existence of a non-explicit and non-intentional Background that sets the conditions for the realization of intentional states.
In an ontological sense, the Background, like the Network, is a set of neural processes in the brain. The Network can even be considered part of the background. But specifically background processes are usually not associated with intentional states, but form what can be called dispositions, “abilities,” and habits, in other words, “cultural and biological know-how” (5: 148).
Searle thus believes that the context of intentional states can be created not only by universal biological dispositions of people, such as the ability to walk upright, and by “default positions” such as “pre-intentional” assumptions about the existence of a material world outside our consciousness, about the possibility of direct contact with this world, etc. – Searle calls all this “deep background” – but also by “local cultural practices” (8: 109). This, however, does not mean that socio-cultural reality exists independently of human intentionality. In “The Construction of Social Reality” Searle, on the contrary, argues that this reality is derived from a special, “collective intentionality”: “we want this,” “we believe that,” etc. Collective intentionality is born in joint actions, such as hunting. Searle is confident that it “cannot be reduced to individual intentionality” and is a product of evolution, “a biologically original phenomenon” (6: 24).
The mere presence of collective intentionality allows us to speak of “social facts.” But animals also have collective intentionality. The specificity of human social life consists in the existence of social institutions. They arise when collective intentionality is enriched by language, which allows us to attach symbolic meaning to some natural objects, to endow them with a “status” that entails certain functions that do not follow from their physical nature. Social institutions are epistemologically objective and marked with universal significance, but in the ontological sense they do not possess an existence independent of thinking human beings. For example, money is money as long as people consider it as such. Each social institution can be described by a set of rules that determine its functional significance. But this does not mean that all people must learn these rules by heart in order to navigate social reality. Many simply get used to it, developing corresponding patterns of behavior that are part of the Background.
Ontology. Searle’s discussion of the subjective nature of social reality is embedded in the broader context of his creation of a unified ontological picture of the world. The difficulty of this task, in his view, is that although “the most fundamental features of the world are described by physics, chemistry, and other natural sciences” (6: 1), it contains a vast number of facts that do not belong to the natural sciences. They must nevertheless be based in some way on the “brute facts” of the physical world. An analysis of the nature of institutional facts and social reality is the first step in this direction. Social reality, as Searle shows, cannot be called an objective reality, and it depends on the mental states of human subjects.
The main problem, however, is how to explain the relation of mental states themselves to the world of atoms and molecules. However, Searle does not consider this very difficult. He believes that conscious mental states are causally generated by the brain and realized in it. This approach allows Searle to talk about consciousness as a natural biological phenomenon. Although, unlike other phenomena of this kind, consciousness is purely subjective, it can nevertheless influence physiological processes, when, for example, a conscious desire to do something causes the corresponding behavior. To illustrate the possibility of such “intentional causation,” Searle draws an analogy between consciousness as a phenomenon generated by the interaction of many neurons in the brain, and complex natural phenomena in which the properties of the whole cannot be reduced to the properties of their constituent parts. For example, water is fluid, but this cannot be said about the molecules that form it. Meanwhile, it is obvious that the fluidity of water can play a causal role in physical processes. The same can be said about consciousness and intentional states.
Disputes about consciousness. Thus, Searle concludes, social reality, speech acts and the mental states that underlie them can be organically built into the physical picture of the world, which is what had to be shown. But Searle does not limit himself to presenting his positive doctrine. He also rejects alternative concepts. In particular, he rejects the dualistic approach to solving the mind-body problem, revived by K. Popper and J. Eccles, since he considers it to be contrary to the physical unity of the world. He also has a negative attitude towards the attempts at an “ontological reduction” of consciousness, undertaken by “eliminative materialists” such as R. Rorty and P. Feyerabend, as well as supporters of the “identity theory” G. Feigl, D. D. Smart and others, who want to eliminate the mental and equate mental states with neural processes. These philosophers either assume that mental states are necessarily identical to neural events, which, however, is contradicted by the fact that they can be thought of separately (in this matter Searle agrees with S. Kripke), or they speak not of an essential, “type” identity, but only of the fact that specific mental states are identical to specific neural events, although the latter may be different in different individuals. In this case, however, to explain this circumstance, one has to resort to functionalist arguments and say that “a neurophysiological state became a certain mental state due to its function” (1: 57). But functionalist explanations of consciousness, either falling into behaviorism (which has had a tendency to revive in recent years under the name of connectivism), or equating consciousness with computer programs or computational processes, evoke no less rejection from Searle, and he generally declares the theory of D. Dennett, who consistently pursues the “computer line,” to be a product of “intellectual pathology” (7: 112).
In an attempt to prove the falsity of the computer theory of consciousness, Searle back in 1980 put forward a thought experiment that caused a huge stir, which he called the “Chinese room argument.” He proposed to imagine a person in a locked room with a set of Chinese characters that are completely incomprehensible to him, and rules for combining them to adequately answer questions in Chinese asked by people behind the wall. Such a person can be equated to a computer with an installed program for communicating in Chinese. Although his interlocutors will think that he understands Chinese, this is obviously not the case. This person simply mechanically combines symbols, without any idea what he is being asked about or what he is answering. The meaning of this experiment is simple: artificial intelligence cannot be identified with natural intelligence. The principles of their work are completely different. The first is reduced to operations with symbols, to pure syntax, the second is endowed with real intentionality, allowing it to have not only syntax, but also semantics.
The Chinese Room thus refutes the “strong version” of artificial intelligence (AI), i.e. the view that possessing consciousness is identical to installing a computer program. At the same time, Searle supports the “weak version” of AI, according to which mental processes can be modeled by a program of this kind. He decisively opposed R. Penrose, who, relying on the famous Gödel theorem, tried to prove that human consciousness cannot be algorithmized. But computer modeling of mental life, he believes, can no more generate consciousness than modeling a thunderstorm can cause rain. And interpreting the human brain as a “digital computer”, according to Searle, is incorrect. After all, computers, unlike brains, lack objective reality, since the natural phenomena involved in the creation of these devices do not exist as computational processes, but are only interpreted by us as such. So while humans can rightly be called “thinking machines,” calling the human brain a digital computer is an example of imprecise usage.
Searle’s sharp attacks on his opponents generate waves of counter-criticism, which is all the more dangerous because his theories are not without their own problems. The Chinese room argument alone has generated hundreds of critical responses, many of which have attempted to prove that Searle is wrong to identify the man in the room with the subject of understanding Chinese, which, in their view, should be the entire system, i.e., the entire room. Searle’s doctrine of intentional and mental causality also provokes much criticism. Indeed, he does not explain very clearly how conscious states can cause bodily movements and how this is consistent with the existence of purely neurophysiological causes of the latter. He says that mental causation is simply a high-level description of neural causation, but he does not explain how such reductionism is consistent with the fact that low-level and high-level explanations, in his words, are related to different modes of existence, to objective and subjective ontologies. Moreover, Searle proclaims the unity of consciousness, the “transcendental unity of apperception,” as a fundamental feature of mental life, but it remains unclear how mosaic neural processes can provide this unity. In this sense, Dennett’s “multiple sketches” theory seems more adequate to the data of modern neuroscience. Dennett believes that Searle’s doctrine of consciousness also lacks a positive research program. This charge may seem strange, but it has its reasons. Although Searle emphasizes that consciousness is a “systemic property” of the brain, he does not give a clear explanation of how to study the causal mechanism of its generation. In his “The Mystery of Consciousness,” he examines the works of F. Crick and J. Edelman, who put forward specific hypotheses about the neurophysiological foundations of consciousness, and notes that even if they are confirmed, the “mystery” or at least the “problem” will remain.
The point is that although Searle agrees that the initial answer to the question of the causes of consciousness can be given in such neurophysiological terms as “synapse”, “peptide”, “ion channels”, “40 Hz” (Crick and Koch’s hypothesis), “neural maps” (Edelman), etc., “since they constitute real features of the real mechanism that we are studying”, he emphasizes that “later we may discover more general principles that allow us to abstract from biology” (7: 176). In other words, by saying that consciousness is causally determined by the brain, Searle does not at all mean that neural or other processes in the brain are a necessary condition for consciousness. What is at issue is merely a sufficient condition from which all unnecessary components can subsequently be removed and a certain causal core extracted, knowing which it would in principle be possible to construct conscious non-biological objects, unless, of course, it turns out that purely biological components are part of it. The problem, however, is that Searle believes that at present we not only cannot specify this core, but also imagine what it could in principle be. It is not surprising that such an approach may seem futile, in contrast to various projects for computer modeling of consciousness.
David Chalmers attempted to overcome the shortcomings of Searle’s theory of consciousness and the computer-functionalist approach to the psyche by radically combining their strengths. On the one hand, like Searle, he demonstrates the irreducibility of human subjective experience. On the other hand, he claims that all external manifestations of this experience can be explicated in terms of a functionalist theory of the psyche in the spirit of Dennett. Finally, he postulates the “coherence” of the subjective and functional levels and admits their common ontological root in Information.
Chalmers’s book The Conscious Mind (1996), which presented this theory, which he labeled “naturalistic dualism,” was hailed by many as a breakthrough in the study of consciousness. Searle, however, dismissed the work as “a mass of confusion” and a collection of absurdities. Admittedly, Chalmers did, by starting from plausible premises and developing them conscientiously, come to shocking conclusions about the existence of primitive forms of consciousness in computers, thermostats, and everything else. He also argued that the presence of subjective conscious states cannot be considered the cause of our reports of these states. In reproaching Chalmers, Searle appealed to common sense. The history of philosophy, however, shows that thinkers’ appeal to this source does not always indicate the strength of their theoretical positions, since common sense is usually “charged” with uncritical metaphysics. In any case, it is Searle who is the main representative of common sense philosophy in contemporary debates about consciousness. For a long time, however, he maintained that at least one of the axioms of common sense (the “default settings”) was rejected by him. This concerns the existence of personality as something distinct from the body. However, in his 2001 work “Rationality in Action” Searle announced a modification of his previous views and the need to adopt a “non-Humean” concept of personality as a kind of independent entity, without which, in particular, it is impossible to explain the existence of a “gap” between human desires and their fulfillment, a gap that constitutes the very essence of human rationality and expresses the fundamental phenomenon of free will.
Literature
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