Product Description

The philosophy of mind is unique among contemporary philosophical subjects, writes John Searle, "in that all of the most famous and influential theories are false." One of the world's most eminent thinkers, Searle dismantles these theories as he presents a vividly written, comprehensive introduction to the mind. He begins with a look at the twelve problems of philosophy of mind--which he calls "Descartes and Other Disasters"--problems which he returns to throughout the volume, as he illuminates such topics as materialism, consciousness, the mind-body problem, intentionality, mental causation, free will, and the self. The book offers a refreshingly direct and engaging introduction to one of the most intriguing areas of philosophy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #125986 in Books
• Published on: 2005-07-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With characteristic verve and wit, Univ. of California at Berkeley philosopher Searle (The Rediscovery of the Mind) dismantles various competing theories of mind—dualist, materialist, behaviorist and skepticist—in this opinionated overview of the philosophy of mind. His purview includes the relationship of the mind to the body, the role of perception in human understanding and the purported equivalence between mind and brain. On dualism, for example, Searle finds Descartes’s postulation of mind and body as separate spheres leaves no room for consciousness. Searle himself argues for a "biological naturalism" that holds that "conscious states are real phenomena in the real world." Although the language and theory surrounding the philosophy of mind is often technical and complex, Searle’s knack for presenting dense ideas in lively prose makes this book a fine starting point for an investigation into the contemporary philosophy of mind.
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From Scientific American
Many of the most time-honored questions in philosophy center on how to analyze and understand the essence of the mind. What motivates us? What makes us conscious? What makes us ourselves? In Mind: A Brief Introduction, Searle aims to introduce the reader to the historical aspects of the philosophy of mind, deconstruct existing theories, and offer new perspectives using logic, personal experiences and cases from neuroscience and psychology research. The opening chapters provide an engaging, easy-to-follow primer. Searle, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, discusses how the work of Descartes and dualism—the idea that mind and body are separate—have colored and discolored the way we define the mind. Searle also examines subsets of monism and materialism, disciplines of thinking that run counter to dualism and became increasingly influential in the 20th century. Searle explains such theories not merely to educate readers but to systematically point out problems in their arguments, then build his proposed philosophy of mind from the debris. He is even-handed, however, admitting that past theories have elements of truth. Searle then sets out to reconcile these beliefs by rethinking specific aspects of the mind, including consciousness, causation and free will. He sharply shows readers his method of analyzing these concepts by applying them to observations of everyday experiences, such as thoughts about his dog. Searle then guides the discussion toward deeper meaning, extrapolating his sensory experience to an internal reflection and logical argument of what his observation says about mental processes. These dialogues eventually flesh out his perspective on the brain versus mind debate. Along the way, Searle ties in examples from neuroscience and psychology to accentuate his ideas, but the book speaks best to readers who want to approach the mind from a primarily philosophical perspective. He fulfills his stated intent of aiding the reader in beginning his or her own reflections on the mind. The historical reviews, coupled with Searle’s own research and perspectives, provide an excellent starting point.

Nicole Garbarini

Review

"Searle has written a forceful, clear, accessible and fascinating introductory book that explains much more convincingly than anything else his iconoclastic view that both materialism and dualism are false. Searle vigorously explores the big issues in philosophy of mind, always keeping the deepest intuitions about the mind in focus."--Ned Block, New York University
"Mind finishes with a chapter whose title says it all, 'Philosophy and the Scientific World-View.' That masterful, three-page essay should top the required-reading list in every high school and college around the world. I believe that every thinking person concerned about the mind and its place in the world should own a copy. Easy to read, the book keeps philosophical jargon to a minimum. Pound per pound, you don't get much better value."--Science, Christof Koch, California Institute of Technology

Customer Reviews

Interesting and Controversial
This is a relatively short book by Searle devoted to the philosophy of mind. This book is something of a hybrid. It is intended as a short introduction to the major themes in the philosophy of mind and does contain an introductory material on this topic. It is, however, largely a presentation of Searle's thinking on this topic. Readers familiar with Searle's work will find repetition of ideas he has presented previously, notably his work on consciousness, the Mind-Body problem, and intentionality. These ideas, however, are presented on a background of other approaches to these problems. The core of the book is an explication of the Mind-Body problem and Searle's distinctive approach to this problem. Briefly, Searle claims to have 'solved' this problem, though like many clever solutions to difficult problems, the answer is a less a solution per se than a redefinition that makes the whole situation more tractable to analysis. Searle's central point is that the first person nature of consciousness is not reducible to material events but is part of the natural world in a causal sense. He finds the mind/body dichotomy to be false. As is true of all his work, this book is written clearly, is without a lot of technical language (though readers need to know the meanings of epistemic and ontologic), and he defends his position vigorously. Searle goes on to examine a number of other issues in the philosophy of mind, including intentionality, free will, the nature of self, and perception. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that Searle highlights certain issues, like the question of free will and the nature of the self, as poorly understood and as targets for future research.
In terms of explicating and defending Searle's point of view, this is an excellent book. It is less good on the historic background and alternative approaches to these questions. I suspect Searle's critics will find his discussion of alternatives unsatisfactory, and I suspect some of these complaints will be justified. In my amateur opinion, for example, I think Searle is not fair in his discussions of Hume's treatment of induction and perceptions. In a book that is supposed to be an introduction for a broad reading public, inadequate presentation of other prespectives is a drawback. There is some bibliography but it is not extensive or annotated. A better guide to further reading would have been worthwhile.

Clear and incisive
One of my favorite philosophical sayings is from Berkeley: "The philosophers kick up the dust and then complain they cannot see." John Searle is not this kind of philosopher. Rather, he draws on science and common sense to render ostensibly complex issues simple. The central issue of the book is the mind-body problem. He rejects dualism, materialism, epiphenomenological and functionalist approaches, among others. Rather, he argues that the mind is part of nature, a product of biological evolution, and hence part of the physical world. The mind, he says, is simply the operation of the brain from an organizational point higher than the neuron and synapse, the same as we might say that a computer is the operation of electronic devices, viewed at a level higher than the bit and the byte.

How very simple! Why is this pellucid view more acceptable today than a century or a millennium ago? The answer is that modern science has made Searle's answer credible. First, we now can chart the development of mind in animals, and we can be quite certain that many vertebrates are conscious beings. Therefore consciousness and mind are products of biological evolution. Second, modern science is quite at home with the stunning inscrutability of the natural world. Einstein, a Twentieth century scientist with a Nineteenth century aesthetic and morality, never accepted quantum mechanics, considering it just too, too weird. Complexity theory, revealed mathematically and through the power of the computer, allows us to understand the concept of emergence, in which a higher level of complexity supports the emergence of properties that cannot be predicted or analyzed completely from component parts.

It used to be thought that science is reductivist, but now we know that sciences is a dynamic tension between reducing wholes to their parts, and recognizing that at critical points, the whole is a complex, nonlinear, dynamical system that transcends it parts.

If you understand how profoundly weird the laws of nature are, and if you appreciate how stunningly beautiful and unexpected are the products of evolution, then you will have no trouble accepting Searle's thesis. The human mind is an entity of completely, utterly, overarchingly inscrutable functioning. But, for all that, there is no reason to cast mind out of the realm of the physical, into some other mysterious never-never land. This is Searle's message.

All of Searle's positions flow from the above insight. For instance, he resolves the issue of free will vs. determinism by asserting that since mind is part of the physical world, and since physical entities can cause physical events to occur (Searle rejects Humean skepticism concerning causation), then psychological causes are possible, and hence free will is possible, at least at our current level of understanding of mental events.

Searle replaces philosophical questions with scientific questions. If mind is part of physical reality, and if free will is possible, then there must be something radically missing from physics and chemistry, which cannot explain mind. But, of course, physics and chemistry cannot explain life, either in the deepest, most mysterious sense of ontological being, or in the most mundane sense of biological theory. It does not help to know the quantum state of a frog. Similarly, the fact that physics cannot explain consciousness in no way means that mind is something other than part of nature.

The last sentence of the book says it all. "There is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it."

Provocative but how real?
When Nietzsche said that every great philosophy is the "personal confession" of its author, he pointed to something which many philosophers would rather forget, and some would vehemently deny-the hidden subjectivity of so called rational arguments. If this is a characteristic of great philosophers, then how much more so of thinkers more modest in stature? I preface my review of Searle's book with this comment to point to a general trap in all philosophizing, with Searle's book another example. What are presented as rational arguments are often exemplars of the bewitching power of language, where words like "really" and "actually" slip unnoticed from one meaning to another, or seem to resolve the problem that is at the very core of the issue.

The central conundrum tackled by Searle is the mind-body problem, one which, despite the juggernaut of thinkers who have made their contribution over the centuries, has continued to leave camps divided. Searle argues against the dualist notions of mind and body, and deterministic notions reducing everything to matter. He proposes what he calls "biological naturalism," in which mental events are a higher level manifestation of systemic neurobiological processes. His thoughts regarding the mind-body problem are, I think, the most well laid out and forceful arguments in his book, but in the context of what I said at the beginning of this review, no amount of arm chair thinking, however "rational," can ever give us final answers, can ever solve the great questions of mind-body, free will, perception and causation. Searle's attempt to refute established notions regarding these problems only reinforces the unending back and forth cycling of arguments that typify philosophy, with the problems in question not subject to rational solution. All philosophy can do is bring to light the complexity of the issues, our false paths of thinking, and the errors in underlying assumptions.

Searle is least convincing in his views of causation and perception. He attempts to depose Hume's analysis of causation, and the absence of any "necessary connection" between cause and effect. Calling Hume's analysis "disastrously mistaken," he attempts to establish the existence of necessary connection by appealing to our first person experience of force, as for example, when someone bumps into us. Many of his arguments in his book are of this kind of appeal to common sense experience. I did not find Searle's argument against Hume persuasive-and I use the word "persuasive" in the same sense as that of being persuaded by a salesperson to purchase a car-there is always in philosophy a degree of manipulation in so called rational arguments. At times, Searle can be quite blatant in this regard. In attempting to show the shortcomings of Hume's conception of causation, he provokes the reader with this emotional outburst: "Is that right? Does that sound plausible to you?"

In his chapter on perception, Searle attempts to set right the mistaken thinking of philosophers like Hume and Locke pertaining to our experience of the world in terms of perceiving only sense data, arguing instead for a type of naïve realism. He calls the sense datum theory "hopelessly misconceived" and its arguments "fallacious." In his rejection of the sense datum theory, held by nearly all famous philosophers for the past 350 years, Searle's attitude is peremptory-an attitude that surfaces periodically throughout the book, as he goes against the grain of more generally accepted philosophical views. He bluntly states, "I do not believe they will bear a moment's scrutiny." Despite his self-assured delivery, I found his refutation of the sense datum theory completely unconvincing. One of his arguments against sense datum theory is that those advocating this theory are guilty of a flaw in reasoning, the "genetic fallacy." Searle is misappropriating the genetic fallacy to make his case, mixing up the science of perception with the genesis of a person's belief about what he or she "sees."

Considering his penchant for making rather peremptory statements, his humility regarding the puzzle of free will is refreshing. He concludes: "We really do not know how free will exists in the brain, if it exists at all."

Although Searle's introduction to mind has weaknesses, I recommend his book as a good introduction to those new to thinking about the great problems of philosophy. In chapters on the mind-body, self identity, causation, and free will Searle nicely lays out arguments and counterarguments. Searle writes in a vernacular that is engaging, though at times vague, or leaving too many gaps for the reader to fill in. For the academic philosopher his attempt to dispose of more widely accepted ideas regarding causation or perception provides plenty of grist for the mill.