Mind, Language and Society
Searle J. Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World. Phoenix, London. 1999. 173pp.
prince是什么意思This book is a good, brief, but comprehensive summary of the mind-brain discussion by an eminent philosopher in the area. Searle starts his discussion debunking some of the philosophical excess of his colleagues, and establishing what he calls “default positions” which any nsible person understands. For instance Searle accepts causation as one of his default positions, in spite of Hume’s hyper-rationalism against causation. Searle also accepts the existence of a real world, that we have direct perceptual access to that real world, that our words have clear meanings, and that truth and falhood can be accepted on the basis of whether a proposition corresponds to the real world. In doing so Searle has a significant, if sweeping, swipe at post-modernists.
Searle describes the mind as an emergent biological phenomenon arising out of the brain. Here he identifies a clash between two conflicting default positions. The first recognis the reality of the mind, and the cond the “obviousness” of materialism. His middle road between dualism and materialism admits the reality of the mind, but names it as an emergent biological property. He then centres on consciousness, which he describes as an inner, qualitative and subjective phenomenon, who properties he describes in some detail.
Next, Searle describes consciousness in terms of intentionality. The term los something in its translation from the German, where it has the general n of “aboutness”. This includes intention. Intentionality is meant to convey that our minds think about things in the real world. Mental function is not just abstract thinking, but perceiving, experiencing, thinking about, and changing that world. Such intentionality has about it certain ‘conditions of satisfaction’ which relate to how well the intentionality sits with the reality it is concerned about. Conditions of satisfaction is a broader term than truth, for intentionality deals also with desires, which strictly speaking do not fall into a truth/falhood category.sleep的过去式
Searle next identifies intentionality as a socially shared phenomenon. Hence intentionality has strong community and cultural elements. He thus identifies epistemically objective social and institutional realities like money, marriage, properties, languages, etc that are partially constituted by an ontologically subjective t of attitudes. The construction of institutional reality requires collective intentionality, the assignment of status functions and constitutive rules. By status functions Searle means that certain items acquire specific symbolic status which cannot be inferred from their basic structure. Nevertheless there is social agreement that the item has that function. He us the example of a line of stones which forms the boundary of a village. Clearly the line is not a barrier, but it defines where the village ends.
Searle focus his attention on the role of language in the development of institutional reality in the last chapter of his book. This chapter taxed me the most, as I am new to the philosophy of language. This is also the area where Searle cut his philosophical teeth with his mentor, JL Austin.
A whole lot of Searle’s earlier ideas come together here, and require a revision of the book to recall the details of his argument so far. Language conveys multiple meanings – the mantic meaning, the intended meaning and the meaning it invokes in the mind of the hearer. The meanings cannot be gleaned from the physics of the sounds, but are conveyed by the speaker’s mind to the hearer’s mind in perfectly understandable ways. Language provides the dominant way in which status functions can be conferred on symbols of speech, and by which institutional realities can be accepted.
adminiThus Searle identifies emergent realities like institutional realities and language, which have arin out of the physics and biology of the situation, without needing to invoke extra metaphysical entities like soul etc. He does however u the concept of the mind quite freely, and es it as an emergent entity which in turn allows further linguistic and social entities to emerge. He makes a very plausible ca.
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旋绕I wonder whether, as a philosopher steeped in words, he es words and language as the main way the mind works. In doing so, does he make the mind a far more logical, language dependent and structured entity than it actually is, and does he fail to e that there are other minds which might process thoughts spatially, pictorially and intuitively? For a more detailed discussion of this e my accompanying article on the mind.
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I was disappointed when Searle obrved that with the ri in science the world has become demystified. It is not that we have become atheists but that religion no longer matters in the public way. When presd on atheism, he stands behind Bertrand Rusll’s famous remark when asked what will he do when he comes face to face with the Almighty. Rusll intends to say, “You did not give us enough evidence.” I can imagine the reply, “You never humbled yourlf enough to listen to my Word”.
三年级上册英语跟读Searle’s final speculations about the relation between philosophy and science were intriguing. He suggests that philosophy rais questions whereas science answers them. He suggests that science has succeeded with the basic issues like physics, chemistry and biology, but has yet to crack the tough philosophical nuts of truth, justice, virtue and the good life. He us the nature of life as an example of where a philosophical question has become a scientific one. “This was once a philosophi
cal problem, but it cead to be so when advances in molecular biology enabled us to breakdown what emed a large mystery into a ries of smaller, manageable, specific biological questions and answers.” In doing this one of the major defenders of emergence has just committed the sin of ontological reductionism! Such a comment is a source for a rich riposte, and the ISCAST (Vic) minar on what is life might refute such a claim!
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Searle suggests that philosophical investigation has three features: tackling questions for which there is not an agreed method of answering, tackling “framework” questions like what is the nature of causation, and dealing with broad conceptual issues. He believes thus that philosophy ts the groundwork, which will then be taken over by science, and he es the issues of mind and consciousness starting to move from philosophy to science.
This book is a very worthwhile overview of a difficult area, and pays careful if critical study.
Alan Gijsbersmabelle
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