The Rediscovery of the Mind

by John Rogers Searle

In this major new work, John Searle launches a formidable attack on current orthodoxies in the philosophy of mind. More than anything else, he argues, it is the neglect of consciousness that results in so much barrenness and sterility in psychology, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive science: there can be no study of mind that leaves out consciousness. What is going on in the brain is neurophysiological processes and consciousness and nothing more -- no rule following, no mental information processing or mental models, no language of thought, and no universal grammar. Mental events are themselves features of the brain, "like liquidity is a feature of water."

Beginning with a spirited discussion of what's wrong with the philosophy of mind, Searle characterizes and refutes the philosophical tradition of materialism. But he does not embrace dualism. All these "isms" are mistaken, he insists. Once you start counting types of substance you are on the wrong track, whether you stop at one or two. In four chapters that constitute the heart of his argument, Searle elaborates a theory of consciousness and its relation to our overall scientific world view and to unconscious mental phenomena. He concludes with a criticism of cognitive science and a proposal for an approach to studying the mind that emphasizes the centrality of consciousness to any account of mental functioning.

In his characteristically direct style, punctuated with persuasive examples, Searle identifies the very terminology of the field as the main source of truth. He observes that it is a mistake to suppose that the ontology of the mental is objective and to suppose that the methodology of a science of the mind must concern itself only with objectively observable behavior; that it is also a mistake to suppose that we know of the existence of mental phenomena in others only by observing their behavior; that behavior or causal relations to behavior are not essential to the existence of mental phenomena; and that it is inconsistent with what we know about the universe and our place in it to suppose that everything is knowable by us.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Science, Neuroscience

286 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and was the Slusser Professor of Philosophy and Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

It covered all the ideas in Minds, Brains and Science, plus a little more. The additional information on already covered topics was useful at times and overly redundant at other times. I think his criticisms of contemporary philosophy of mind are great, but the more involved his theory gets, the more holes there are.

Overall, I really appreciate Searle because he stresses what so many other philosopher's of mind have left out: the Mind! He says that we all know we have one (with the colors and the pains...etc.), but materialists are so bent on removing it from existence. As a non-Christian, Searle feels the need to avoid dualism, but I think dualists should give him a wink and a nod for an amenable position.

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second Searle book I’ve listened to in quick succession. And there in lies the problem, I think. This really isn’t a book one can listen to. It requires much more focused attention than the Reith lectures. Even so it has had me thinking, even though I’ve only picked up a small percentage of all of its themes.

Wittgenstein has been coming up a lot this year – I’m not sure why, he just has been. Friends have been mentioning him at random and in various contexts, he has been making cameo appearances in various things I’ve been reading and then I was in a second hand bookshop and his Blue and Brown Books fell into my hands for only $16.

Well, him and Proust. I know I’m going to have to read both of them at some stage, but I was hoping to put them both off until my next life. Did I mention that I’ve decided to start believing in multiple lives? Well, if one can rightly call a necessity, a belief – as the bookcase beside my bed with the ‘next’ books I’ve got to read is no longer full, it is overflowing into a tottering stack by the chair and I’ve at least a dozen talking books to listen to as well. But does this stop me buying new books? Does this even make me prioritise the books on the shelf? Honestly, ‘had we but world enough and TIME’.

So, I’m going to have to actually read this one, actually get the book and cogitate over it at some stage – but the bits I’m going to be cogitating over are mostly Chapter Two (where he gives a series of bitch-slaps to Behaviourism – to a chorus of cheering from me) and Chapter Nine ‘The Critique of Cognitive Reason’.

Before he gets to Chapter Nine he mentions Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘the background’ in a way that left me ho-humming. But what this becomes later in the book really is something else. I am intensely interested in questions like, If someone is asleep do they still know that Paris is the capital of France? Are they still able to know how to speak German? Or even better, when I ask for a steak and chips how do we resolve all of the ‘assumptions’ that go into the waiter in the restaurant bringing me these items, appropriately cooked and on a plate? The answer is that there are many, many background assumptions that one just has to accept and know to understand just about any sentence of any language – and it is this background that is intensely interesting. I do like the philosophy of the commonplace.

My job sometimes allows me to be in the office at lunchtime – often not, as this is when people are most likely to want to meet with me, but often enough. When I do have lunch in the office lunchroom a group of us do the ‘daily quiz’ in two local newspapers. I am even prepared to admit that one of those local newspapers is owned by Rupert Murdoch – well, none of us is perfect. What I’ve been finding is that my last few years of disassociating myself from popular culture is having an effect. Questions are asked and I couldn’t for the life of me answer them. Photographs are shown to me of ‘super-models’ and the like and I’ve no idea who they are or what they do. There was a time when I thought it would be very difficult not to know what was going on in the life of Paris Hilton – I now know it is remarkably easy to know nothing of her at all. And I have to say that the phrase, ‘ignorance is bliss’ must have been coined for just this state of ignorance which I am currently enjoying.

That is the point, isn’t it? There are backgrounds and backgrounds. We can stuff our minds full of Law and Order or Madonna ™ or whatever other boring shite the mass culture puts in our way – or we can choose to learn other stories, other songs.

Searle talks quite a lot about Chomsky at the end of this book – about Chomsky’s universal grammar. His main problem with Chomsky is the idea of there being ‘rules’ in the brain that allow one to learn a language. I’m not sure what the outcome of all this was – but I think it was that in talking with Chomsky there actually was no difference of opinion between them. I would like to think this was the case, but I’m not sure. Searle would agree that there are human ‘potentialities’ that allow one to learn a language, but not that there are ‘rules’. Rules would sound far too much like ‘computer programmes’ and his thorough rejection of the mind as a computer (requiring both a program and a homunculus to operate it – or at least, to make semantic sense of the symbols and semiotics) really makes the idea of ‘rules’ impossible for him. This is another reason why I will need to read this book.

Searle grounds consciousness very firmly in biology – particularly Darwinian biology. He does not accept anthropomorphism (a thesis he overcomes quickly with reference to the age of the universe and by making the off-hand statement to the effect that it seems like an awfully long time to wait for such a little bit of consciousness” – and thus Hegel spins tumbling into the void.

I like Searle. He reminds me of Aristotle and therefore he reminds me once again of the fact that my mind is nothing like the minds that I am most impressed by. I really wish my mind was more systematic, in the way that Aristotle’s was when he was able to categorise the universe so beautifully and so comprehensively. My mind doesn’t work like that, but I love to watch a mind that does work like that. It is one of the most beautiful things there is. If you would like to see such a mind at work in the fullness of its beauty then Calvino’s Invisible Cities is yet another stunning product of just such a mind.

I need to read this one again, but at present that will mean reading it in my next life, or perhaps the one after that – but read it again I will. It also means I’m going to have to move Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books up closer to the top of the list – perhaps even off the shelf and onto the bedside table. That’s about as close to the foreground as I can manage at the moment, unfortunately.

[Error Theorist · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always enjoy reading Searle; he is a great writer and can make the driest of subjects easy to read. This is his most recent book, and it is essentially an all-out attack on contemporary philosophy of mind. Searle believes that the vocabulary being used in the field is a source of a whole lot of confusion. The dualism/monism dichotomy needs to be done away with to make room for what Searle calls, "Biological Naturalism". There was a problem I encountered throughout this book, though. He constantly refers to consciousness as a biological process of the brain with a first-person ontology. He then goes on to say that consciousness is irreducible (because he is convinced by the arguments from the existence of qualia). Other than claiming consciousness has a first-person ontology and is irreducible, he doesn't really have much to say in a positive sense. The rest of the book is an attack on computational theories of mind. I'm actually torn regarding the strength of his arguments against computation. The first time I read this book, the arguments seemed very strong (nearly decisive); but upon further reflection, I'm not certain that he really did the damage that he claims he did.

I recommend getting familiar with Searle's earlier works on the philosophy of mind before reading this book.

[Simon Lavoie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Positing unconscious causes and constraints to conscious thinking met with huge resistances back in Freud's time. But roughly half a decade later, the suspicion is inverted. Consciousness is scientifically disqualified and only uncouscious states and processes rank as mental and intentional. This ruinous turn, diverting from what there is to explain in the first place, is shown to amount to tentative exit that remain captive from Descarte's substance dualism and its basic equation (material ≠ mental). The dualism is shown to be still entrenched in contemporary naturalist thinking by way of a deeped conceptual scheme (dualism, monism, mind/body problem, and the like), and by way of the conviction for which adding qualitative and subjective (first-person) mental states to the world's furniture is inconsistent with any scientific worldview. A good part of the book, especially its first two chapters, concentrate on refuting this conviction and on opening the way to a new conceptual frame revolving around biological realism (consciousness consist in first-personal, qualitative and aspectual experiences caused by the brain, by certain neurophysiological processes of the brain), without resorting to a causally distinct, emergent or supervenient mind, nor to consciously inaccessible intentional/mental processes and states (the Connection Principle).

The most thrilling and stimulating moments of the book are Searle's critics of another, major source of the conscience's demise from scientific enquiry, that of taking computerized imitations of the brain as being model for explaning the actual brain working. Enlarging his Chinese Room argument (syntax by itself do not provide meaning or semantic), Searle now shows that syntax or computation are not intrinsic to physics as such, nor causally effective, but observer-relative, as the concept of information processing is. He notable addresses Chomsky's reliance on unconscious rules to explain linguistic behaviors as being no more scientifically consistent than positing rules like "Don't process ultraviolet wavelenghts" to explain our color vision.

The Rediscovery of the Mind covers Searle's extended, 50 years careers. It is lively, concise, largely jargon-free, sometimes funny, and overall, it feels crazy right - still. Definitely worth the read, even for newcomers to Searle (as I am).

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is mostly an expansion or re-working of the themes of Searle's work on the philosophy of mind. For those familiar with Searle's account of intentionality as a natural biological function, there isn't much new here. There are some re-workings of older arguments, notably the famous Chinese Room thought experiment, through which Searle argues that no merely formal, structural or syntactic systems can possess consciousness.

This is often understood as the claim that no machine can think, which is in a sense true. By "machine" Searle means a Turning machine, from which complex behaviors can be produced by comparatively simple sets of rules governing operations over inputs and outputs. The claim is not that no artifact could think, which Searle believes to be plainly false. Human beings are evolved organisms who happen to have evolved features of intentionality and conscious experience.

Always the antagonist to reductive theories of mental activity in human beings, Searle doesn't disappoint here. My main quibbles are minor. Searle has always struck me as too focused on the brain and its functions. Cognitive functioning is likely to have much more to do with the human body's, well, embodiment. Higher abstract forms of intellect emerge from and depend on the interaction between perception, emotion, and action.

This is a minor thing, really, and Searle's arguments need not be inconsistent with an embodied-enactive take. More to the point, his arguments against Cartesian dualism, materialism, and other creatures of the reductive impulse like cognitive science, are as potent as ever.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Searle attempts to criticize and overcome the dominant traditions in the study of mind. He argues that consciousness is the central mental phenomenon. In doing so, he argues against the idea that the mind is like a computer program. His discussions and arguments are exceptionally engaging and provide challenges to readers who may or may not agree with all of his conclusions. Through it all he provides lucid descriptions using a beautiful prose style. He is one of my favorite contemporary philosophers.

[kloppy · Rating 4 out of 5]

really cool, interesting book. Searle is a great writer. I'm not sure if there is anyone in modern analytic philosophy who is as consistently confused by the views of those with whom they disagree than Searle. On functionalism, he says "If you are tempted to functionalism, I believe you do not need refutation, you need help." On Freud, he says "I will also say something about the Freudian conception of the relation between consciousness and the unconscious, because I believe that at base it is incoherent." In the concluding paragraph looking forward to a better philosophy of mind he recommends "First. We ought to stop saying things that are obviously false. The serious acceptance of this maxim might revolutionize the study of the mind." Thankfully, he usually has very persuasive reasons for us to think that everyone else is full of it.

The first two chapters, dedicated to critiquing the physicalist/behaviorist orthodoxy that dominated academic philosophy and psychology in the 20th century, are genuinely outstanding. He argues that contemporary philosophy of mind is still conducted in the shadow of the Cartesian paradigm, i.e. that there are two substances, one of which is physical and the other mental; dualist accounts have consistently struggled to explain how exactly the two substances ought to interact. Descartes famously attributed their interaction to "animal spirits" which poured out of the brain's pineal gland. In our eagerness to escape dualism, we have unconsciously accepted it's base assumptions, namely that recognizing that mental and physical states are different kinds of things requires us to admit them as substances per se. This has motivated generations of philosophers to define mental things, e.g. consciousness, as dispositions to certain kinds of behavior (q.v. the Ramsey sentence, which strives to "represent" a mental state exclusively via dispositions), which simply isn't what consciousness is. The reader can appreciate Searle's fatherly disappointment with serious philosophers who have contorted themselves into subtracting consciousness from their philosophy of mind.

Searle's positive view (which he calls "biological naturalism") is that consciousness is a physical property produced by the neurophysiology of the brain. He's not a physicalist, because he doesn't think that mental states are physical (his argument is something to the effect of 'see that they aren't'). Nor is he a dualist, because he believes that conscious mental states are not a separate, ontologically independent kind of thing from physical stuff. He's not even a functionalist, because he doesn't think that the brain can simply be reduced to a syntactic causal structure (because syntax is observer-dependent, and not a physical quality). He doesn't give us any reasons to think this view is correct here (though I imagine they're rooted in its general conceptual parsimony, and well-researched associations between conscious mental states and brain states) and, when preempting the question of exactly what the source of that relation is, he is forced to tug on his shirt collar and say that that's an empirical question that neuroscience simply hasn't answered yet. Readers in 2025 will be disappointed to hear that we still don't know; hopefully we'll get to it before Christmas.

[Joshua Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

IT's easy to see what this is a seminal work for Searle. It's witty and thoughtful, and Searle makes all of the points that are at the core of his view of consciousness (which largely consists of why everyone else's view of consciousness is not reasonable) and so it's worth reading. Searle makes for a great critic, even if his own attempt at a theory is frustrating, as it postulates that phenomenal consciousness is not accessible in wany way that can be processed by third person, objective methods.

That's all fine, and the text is really worth the read for those who have a strong interest in the field. There are few who have more weight than Searle, or who come up more often in discussions of consciousness. While it's important that Searle is controversial (and he seems fully aware of which of his ideas receive popular dissent in the philosophical community and exactly why, or at least a version of why) Searle does a very, very good job at articulating his reasons for holding the positions that he does, and does not get defensive over the positions that are controversial.

This really is a text for those familiar with some of the terminology of consciousness, though Searle is more accessible than most of the writers in the field, so it is worth a try for those just getting an introduction. That said, it is worthwhile to be highly skeptical of Searle's presentation of the arguments of others, because while Searle admits that he doesn't always understand the arguments that he critiques (or, at least, that he feels his understandings are too absurd to be held by any rational, analytic philosopher) he does engage in those critiques as though he had a full understanding. What I mean by that is that he does not critique more than one interpretation of any particular view; he critiques what he feels is the interpretation of that theory, and that is the end of it.

All around, though, it is a great text and should be strongly recommended to those interested in contemporary philosophy of mind, as it does a pretty good job of dealing with the groundwork and addressing most of the problems thoroughly, albeit with considerable bias.

[yyy · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the summer of 2004, late August or early September, I was working full-time at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities bookstore. I was enjoying my summer making good money, preparing for my second year at the good ol' UofM. Every day that I worked I received a half-hour and a ten-minute break. I read John Searle's "The Rediscovery of the Mind" in one week, entirely during my breaks. It's not spectacular, but it's the only book I've ever read while on and only while on break from a job. Also, because it was a bookstore, I just grabbed the bookstore copy off the shelf and read that. After that week, I decided I didn't want to read books from the bookstore anymore (because I couldn't write in them and I wanted to eat lunch on my breaks sometimes), so I switched to doing the daily crossword. It didn't hurt that Searle is an extremely easy read -- he uses simple and often humurous language + builds a generally common-sense defense of various mind-related theses.

[Daniel Toker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book accomplished what not many philosophical books have accomplished: it got me to (sort of) change my mind about a philosophical issue. I've been largely sympathetic to property dualism - the idea that really there's just one substance that has both physical and phenomenal properties. That's the position defended by David Chalmers. I haven't fully abandoned property dualism, but I've become much more sympathetic to Searle's biological naturalism. Biological naturalism is certainly as good as, or perhaps better than, property dualism as a theory of consciousness.

[Mark Haag · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenges the mistaken presumptions behind most materialist views of the mind. Will we be able to talk about thinking by merely talking about brain processes? Can computers think like people? Searle does a good job cataloguing materialist ideas and showing their origins in mistaken philosophical premises. Technical, but combative, this is a good introduction for someone with a little familiarity with the issues.

Contains a very funny R rated behaviorist joke.

[Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

semantics is not entailed by syntax, and syntax is not inherent in physicality.

[Adam Gurri · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far Searle's best and most complete philosophy of mind book. Highly recommended.

[Bent Andreassen · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant book by one of the most famous philosophers of the mind-body problem. Not an introduction to this topic.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A MAJOR BOOK BY A MAJOR CONTEMPORARY "PHILOSOPHER OF MIND"

John Rogers Searle (born 1932) is an American philosopher at UC Berkeley. He has written many other books, such as 'The Mystery of Consciousness,' 'Mind: A Brief Introduction,' 'Mind, Language And Society: Philosophy In The Real Worl,' etc.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1992 book, "This book has several objectives... I want to criticize and overcome the dominant traditions in the study of mind, both 'materialist' and 'dualist.' Because I think consciousness is the central mental phenomenon, I want to begin a serious examination of consciousness on its own terms. I want to put the final nail in the coffin of the theory that the mind is a computer program. And I want to make some proposals for reforming our study of mental phenomena in a way that would justify the hope of rediscovering the mind." (Pg. xi)

He recalls that "I believe that the best-known argument against strong AI [Artificial Intelligence] was my Chinese Room argument... that showed that a system could instantiate a program so as to give a perfect simulation of some human cognitive capacity, such as the capacity to understand Chinese, even though that system had no understanding of Chinese whatever... Because the program is purely formal or syntactical and because minds have mental or semantical contents, any attempt to produce a mind purely with computer programs leaves out the essential features of the mind." (Pg. 45)

He asserts, "Consciousness, in short, is a biological feature of human and certain animal brains. It is caused by neurobiological processes and is as much a part of the natural biological order as any other biological features such as photosynthesis, digestion, or mitosis. This principle is the first stage in understanding the place of consciousness within our world view." (Pg. 90)

More controversially, he contends, "once you see that atomic and evolutionary theories are central to the contemporary scientific world view, then consciousness falls into place naturally as an evolved phenotypical trait of certain types of organisms... I am not in this chapter concerned to defend this world view... But, like it or not, it is the world view we have... this world view is not an option... Our problem is not that somehow we have failed to come up with a convincing proof for the existence of God or that the hypothesis of an afterlife remains in doubt, it is rather that in our deepest reflections we cannot take such opinions seriously. When we encounter people who claim to believe such things, we may envy them the comfort and security they claim to derive from those beliefs, but at bottom we remain convinced that either they have not heard the news or they are in the grip of faith." (Pg. 90-91)

He suggests, "If we had an adequate science of the brain, an account of the brain that would give causal explanations of consciousness in all its forms and varieties... no mind-body problem would remain." (Pg. 100) He states, "I now want to make a very strong claim...: Only a being that could have conscious intentional states could have intentional states at all, and every conscious intentional state is at least potentially conscious. This thesis has enormous consequences for the study of the mind." (Pg. 132)

Searle's books are "must reading" for any serious student of the philosophy of mind.

[Randy Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early in this book the following quote forced its way on my whiteboard.

"That an object has a certain mass is an intrinsic aspect of the object. That the object is a bathtub exits only in relation to observers who assign that function."

In essence, this quote explains how Searle sees the difference between the brain which can determine the mass by itself and the mind which needs the observer to take a bath. On the surface as in that quote, this book is readable by lay folks such as myself. However, while I grasped his points about the weakness of materialism as a philosophy, my understanding of the nuances is extremely shallow.

Here is the heart of his argument. Philosophers such as materialists find human consciousness inconvenient and have gone to great lengths to make it either a trivial matter or one to be glossed over without exploration. Searle believes our consciousness is completely a matter of brain function but because it's necessarily evidenced subjectively, it can't be neatly folded into current analytical frameworks about how the brain functions. The study of consciousness, our minds requires a completely different framework. Ironically, in this book entitled, 'rediscovery' the only attempt at doing exactly that comes with the last sentence of his book. Perhaps his next book is about what he finally proposes for rediscovery which is to explore the social character of the mind.

'The Rediscovery of the Mind' is like witnessing a great mind at work tackling a big subject for nonspecialists. Searle states how much he is against gobbledygook and it shows. Frequently, he lays out his thinking explicitly for how he reached his conclusions. For example, he looks at arguments about brain function in three ways; via ontology - how do you describe the thing, epistemologically - how the thing works and causation - what is its function, what does it make happen. Then subjects specific arguments to that criteria and shows in real time how the arguments fall apart.

Do I recommend intelligent people who know nothing about philosophy wars read this book? Yes! I feel that knowing that the brain and the mind aren't really synonyms should be pretty basic but before reading this book, I didn't know it.

[Malika Oubilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book for those who like discussing methaphysics, here's a summary of the main ideas of the book:
In his book, "The Rediscovery of the Mind", Searle tries to rediscover the nature of consciousness, as the mainstream philosophies could not deal with it, he judges.
He rejected the dualistic view of the world as matter and soul, considering it unscientific and isn't based on reason. Yet that doesn't mean he adopted the materialistic view of consciousness as something physical, but rather as a "subjective" experience on the ontological level, that cannot be reduced to observable behaviors (as claim the behaviorists) nor can it be observed by any means, thus he rejects the idea of introspection: the ability to observe the mental/internal/subjective phenomenon of others or of one's self, since the observer cannot be object of observation.
Another important idea is whether we can interpret the brain as a computational computer; if we do so we'd have problems in our theory: 1. A computational computer can be made of anything, thus anything can become a mind; 2. The syntax isn't intrinsic to the physics, it's assigned and is observer-dependent, thus assigning a syntax to a physics makes it a computational computer. His argument is that syntax is not the same as semantics, therefore an algorithm of a computer is not the same as the mind. Or rather if the brain is a computational computer, as Searle says, "who is the user?" He left the problem open!

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

When venturing out onto the topic of AI, I strongly feel that it is vital to understand the concept of consciousness. And Searle 'The Rediscovery of the MInd' provides a myriad of compelling conjectures on the mind ranging from intentionality to identity.

[Leonardo]

En el capítulo 9 se encuentra una exposición completa del argumento de la habitación china.

La mente Pág.122

[Bogdan Stefan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is harder than I expected. I heard Searle has a reputation for short arguments which he passes over quickly and it shows. But still, I am giving it 5 stars because the book deserves a better rating than it currently has.