Wednesday, June 29, 2005
A quote form John Searle
Any attempt to reduce intentionality to something nonmental will always fail because it leaves out intentionality. Suppose for example that you had a perfect causal account of the belief that water is wet. This account is given by stating the set of causal relations in which a system stands to water and to wetness and these relations are entirely specified without any mental component. The problem is obvious: a system could have all those relations and still not believe that water is wet. This is just an extension of the Chinese Room argument, but the moral it points to is general: You cannot reduce intentional content (or pains, or "qualia") to something else, because if you did they would be something else, and it is not something else." (Searle, Rediscovery p. 51).
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2 comments:
I think my Searle quote and yours are compatible with one another once you realize that Searle is a substance materialist and a property dualist. Intentional properties can't be reduced to physical properties, but we don't need a separate substance to explain this, according to him. Whether this leaves him with a coherent and defensible position is another matter. An anti-naturalist like, well, me for example, might very well argue that the logic of Searle's position leads him out of naturalism, but that he himself has not fully seen the implications of his own views. Nagel, a philosopher with similar views, has said we need something along the lines of a mentalistic metaphysics, but that theism is not the only alternative once mentalism is accepted.
Searle has a more recent interview on Machines Like Us:
http://machineslikeus.com/interviews/machines-us-interviews-john-searle
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