Update TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.9 No.8 August 2005 365

Book Review

Challenging philosophical assumptions about mindMind: A Brief Introduction by John Searle. Oxford University Press, 2004. $26/£14.99 (hbk). (viiiC326 pp.) ISBN 0 19 515733 8

Thomas C. Dalton

Office of the Dean, College of Liberal Arts, Cal Poly State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407, USA

The UC Berkeley philosopher JohnSearle is well known for his provocativewritings about the mind, most notably,The Rediscovery of Mind [1]. Searle takesseriously the relationship between mindand brain, and has aroused interest inthe phenomena of consciousness in hiscritical reviews of nobel laureates Francis

Crick and Gerald Edelman’s neuroscien-

tific studies of the brain and mind, among others [2].Described on the book cover as ‘a dragonslayer bytemperament’, Searle possesses the unrivaled ability topenetrate forbiddingly complex ideas with wit and incisive-ness that rewards the non-expert but attentive reader.Searle has devoted decades to describing what is specialabout human cognition, such as how we acquire knowl-edge of the world, act intentionally, fulfill our desires, anduse language to communicate our ideas. This book doesnot really chart new territory but further elaborates onthemes presented in his previous books [3,4]. Here Searleprovides readers a concise historical analysis about whythe subject of mind has become encumbered by assump-tions that present a misleading conception of the relationbetween physical, neurobiological processes and mental,psychological phenomena.

Searle’s book was motivated by his concern that the‘Philosophy of language has reached a period of stagnationbecause of certain common mistakes that surround theso-called doctrine of externalism’ (pp. 11–12). Searlecomplains that the notion that our ‘words, and byextension, the contents of our minds, are not inside ourheads, but are matters of causal relations between what isin our heads and the external world’, has ‘led to a fallowperiod in the philosophy of language’ (p. 12). Searle seeksto rectify this error by furnishing cognitive science with aconstructive foundation in the philosophy of mind.

Dualism’s defects and materialist responses

The dichotomy between mental and physical is traced bySearle back to Rene Descartes, who saddled us withdualism, the thesis that mind and body are separate andirreducible entities. Descartes famous dictum: ‘I think,therefore I am’, involves an ontological leap of faith thatpersonal identity is established by thoughts that cannot begrounded in brain processes. This view that only I possessknowledge of my own mental states leads paradoxically towhat Searle calls ‘epistemic solipsism’, and the crucialinability to know whether other persons have mental

Corresponding author: Dalton, T.C. (tdalton@calpoly.edu).Available online 13 June 2005

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states like mine other than to infer it from their behavior.Descartes left unanswered two important questionshaving to do with intentionality, that Searle addresses,regarding how events in the brain refer beyond them-selves, and how brains and minds acquire specific content.

Searle consumes two chapters describing the material-ist reaction to dualism, via behaviorism, physicalism andfunctionalism and their philosophical offshoots, to clarifythe neural basis and strengthen the causal underpinningsof mental phenomena. Although concisely presented,Searle’s lengthy historical discussion and summary ofthe arguments for and against materialism is tendentiousand of less interest to cognitive neuroscientists who willwant to get to Searle’s original contributions to theanalysis of consciousness. Suffice it to say that Searle isnot persuaded that materialism avoids reductionism oreliminativism, and may even reintroduce dualism.

Intentionality, ontology and brain science

The materialist mistake, Searle observes, is to equatecausal reduction with ontological reduction. First-personconsciousness cannot be reduced to or substituted by athird-person perspective, because it is ‘observer depen-dent’. The point of consciousness is not ‘to carve off thesurface feature’, Searle argues, and reduce it to lower levelprocesses, but to retain the first-person characteristic thatgives it an ontological uniqueness (p. 118). Searle believesthat the key to preserving this ontological integrity is toshow that the condition of satisfaction of some mentalevents involves causal self-reference whereby the contentof the event is caused by the intention. Searle believes thatby tracing the complex pathways through networks ofbeliefs in which intentional states are embedded, we willidentify the non-intentional capacities that caused theoriginal intentional state.

This cumbersome strategy seems unnecessary. First-person consciousness appears to emerge from the momen-tary and irreproducible interaction and integration ofevents taking place at different levels of neural, psycho-logical and experiential complexity [5,6]. Searle says heprefers unified field theories to building block approachesbecause the former take seriously the qualitative, unifiedsubjectivity of consciousness, whereas the latter seekneural correlates of discrete perceptions. But Searle’srejection of emergence puts him closer to monism,whereby intentions are simply a continuation, at a higherlevel, of neuron firings. This is a bottom-up conceptionof mind that lacks the dynamic, reciprocally interactivefeatures of connectionist and network theories [7].

Update TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.9 No.8 August 2005366

Internalism, externalism and the self

Searle’s colleague, Alva Noe questions whether internal-ism can completely ignore how the neural substrata ofconscious states are affected differently by multimodalstimulation [8]. Noe persuasively advances an ‘enactive’,temporally extended conception of consciousness inwhich experience plays a vital role. Moreover, there ispersuasive neuroscientific evidence that intentional beha-vior is recognized in other persons and simulated by‘mirror neurons’ in the absence of explicit goals. Metzingerand Gallese contend that the brain makes an ontologicalcommitment that does not involve self-reference [9].Accordingly, the experience of agency follows rather thanprecedes enactment of intentions. This marks the closureof the physical and psychological gap between simulatingor imagining doing something and actually doing it.

Searle’s attempt to convince us that representationalrealism is the most appropriate epistemological stance toadopt acknowledges just how much language and socialconvention permeates individual perception. This explainsSearle’s Hume-like skepticism about an entity we call theself, because much of our language used to describe ourbehavior imparts the illusion of voluntarism and the con-tinuity of identity despite the discontinuity of experience.Nevertheless, Searle sees the need for a formal or legalconception of the self who is capable of choice and delibe-ration, and who can be held responsible for one’s actions.

Neurophilosophers who seek creative ways to incor-porate first-person perspectives in the analysis of con-sciousness will find Searle’s book of primary interest, aswill those cognitive neuroscientists who seek ontological

DOI of original article: 10.1016/j.tics.2005.04.003Available online 5 July 2005

www.sciencedirect.com

realism in their models of brain processes. Socialcognitive neuroscientists may find that Searle fallsshort of providing a convincing first-person account ofintentionality that squares with extensive evidence ofthe simulated and imitative origins of human percep-tion. But perhaps Searle’s book will attract the strongestinterest among fellow philosophers of mind who aredissatisfied with historically traditional approaches andseek novel ways to bridge the gap between mental andphysical events, which has thus far prevented the develop-ment of a neurobiologically sustainable conception of theconscious mind.

References

1 Searle, J. (1992) Rediscovery of Mind, MIT Press2 Searle, J. (1995) The mystery of consciousness. New York Review of

Books, November 23 Searle, J. (1998) Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real

World, Basic Books4 Searle, J. (2002) Consciousness and Language, Cambridge University

Press5 Edelman, G.M. (2003) Naturalizing consciousness: a theoretical frame-

work. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 100, 5520–55246 Crick, F. and Koch, C. (2003) A framework for consciousness. Nat.

Neurosci. 6, 119–1267 McIntosh, A. (2000) Towards a network theory of cognition. Neural

Netw. 13, 861–8708 Noe, A. (2004) Action in Perception, MIT Press9 Metzinger, T. and Gallese, V. (2003) The emergence of a shared action

ontology: building blocks for a theory. Conscious. Cogn. 15, 549–571

1364-6613/$ - see front matter Q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.05.005

Erratum

Erratum: Evolutionary psychology: the emperor’s newparadigmDavid J. Buller (2005) Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9, 277–283. Available online 04 May 2005

In the article by D.J. Buller, on p. 278, the y-axis label toFig. IIb was incorrect. Instead of

Percentage choosing ‘Eats cassava root’ and ‘Tattoo’it should have read:Percentage choosing ‘Eats cassava root’ and ‘No tattoo’

We apologise to readers for this error.

1364-6613/$ - see front matter Q 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2005.06.006