sign in sign up
<<
Home , Biological naturalism, Direction of fit, Intentionality

Four

HOLISM AND MENTAL CAUSATION IN THE THEORY OF

The historical development of of went, in modern philosophy, from Cartesian substantialism to the desubstantialization of mind. Philosophers and scientists began to see mind as a set of irreducible processes driving the interac- tions with the environment. They tried to overcome the traditional -dualism dilemma, and conceived mind as part of the biological make-up of living beings. But the traditional monism-dualism dilemma returned, even within the de- substantialization of mind in its contemporary version (functionalism), giving rise to the return of the traditional problems of and mental causation. Daniel C. Dennett and David J. Chalmers’s theories of consciousness, and Jaegwon Kim’s causal exclusion dilemma are examples of the traditional concep- tual pattern with its related problems. On the materialist side, philosophers offer models the conclusions of which eliminate the subjective dimension of living creatures like us and other non-human animals from the scope of the natural world. On the dualistic side, philosophers transform the existence in nature of this subjective aspect into a mystery. John R. Searle construes conceptual dualism as the premise underlying these problems. The implicit acceptance of a mutual ontological exclusion be- tween the mental and the physical shapes our discussions of the mind-body prob- lem determining its dilemmatic structure. On the contrary, Searle’s starts with the critique of conceptual dualism, justifies its non-reductive embodiment of mind with an analysis of the explanatory structure of natural sciences, and gives a version of the desubstantialization of mind that is immune from the problems of positions like those worked out by Dennett, Chalmers, and Kim. My analysis of biological naturalism outlines some core theses of Searle’s approach. First, we have the logical interdependence between subjectivity, quali- tativeness, and holistic structure of the unified field of consciousness: We cannot have qualitative states if these states are not subjective (they exist only because the subject having experiences exists) and we cannot have this qualitative subjec- tivity if it does not structure its states in a unified field. Every state has its iden- tity only within a unified field of other mental states. Second, the non-reductive embodiment of mind involves the identification of a causal-evolutionary role for mind and consciousness, which Searle sees as systems devoted to the creative structure of the relationships between organism and environment (Searle, 1992, pp. 107–109). 102 BEYOND CONCEPTUAL DUALISM

In sum Searle’s theory of intentionality provides a ground for these theses through the of Network, Background, and causal Self-referentiality. Next, I will discuss the objection that Searle’s theory of intentionality would im- ply , which is the position that the structure and existence of mental states is independent of the embodiment of the agent in a body and in a physical and (for human beings) cultural environment. To answer this critique, I will ana- lyze the extension of Searle’s theory to collective actions and I will compare the results of the analysis with the discovery of mirror neurons. The analysis of these concepts will prepare the ground for the critical com- parison between Searle’s and contemporary research in neu- rosciences. I will just sketch these here and develop them in more detail in the next chapter.

1. The Logical Structure of Intentional Representations: Psychological Mode, Representational Content, , and Conditions of Satisfaction

The analysis of the logical structure underlying the functioning of intentional rep- resentations is a crucial step in Searle’s philosophy of mind for which we can of- fer two main reasons. The analysis grounds Searle’s speech acts theory, worked out in Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979a). In these essays, Searle states two theses concerning the functioning of , which commit the philosopher to give an account of the intentionality of mind underlying the performance of speech acts. First, every performance of a commits the speaker to a sincerity condition with respect to the expressed by the speech act (Searle, 1969, pp. 60, 65). Second, we can give a complete analysis of the ways we can do things with words through a taxonomy of five classes of illocutionary acts: assertives (we commit ourselves to tell how the world is), directives (we tell others how to change the world), commissives (we commit ourselves how to change the world), expressives (we express our psychological state), and declarations (we create a new saying that it exists). The reason is that the classes express the more fundamental ways through which mind can represent the world (Searle, 1979b). In addition, according to Searle, the structure of intentionality is the struc- ture of all conscious life (cf. Searle, 2004, p. 174). To these two main reasons, we can add a third: Conscious mental represen- tations have a causal role (the management of the organism-environment rela- tions) and the analysis of the formal structure of intentionality reconstructs the mechanisms allowing these representations to exercise their role. The development of a theory requires a conceptual apparatus, which in the case of intentionality, is borrowed from the theory of speech acts. We are talking about the concepts of direction of fit, conditions of satisfaction, and the notions of mode and content of a mental state. Taken together, these concepts define the