John R. Searle

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues that there are two kinds of facts--some that are independent of human observers, and some that require human agreement.

The Construction of Social Reality

'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 illuminates the problems within topics such 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.

A Brief Introduction

Mind

Willis S and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy John R Searle

Six lectures discuss the mind-body problem, artificial intelligence, the workings of the brain, the mental aspect of human action, prediction of human behavior, and free will

Minds, Brains, and Science

the structure of human civilization

Making the social world

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. John R. Searle is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Rediscovery of the Mind

John Rogers Searle

'This small but tightly packed volume is easily the most substantial discussion of speech acts since John Austin's How To Do Things With Words and one of the most important contributions to the philosophy of language in recent decades.'--Philosophical Quarterly

An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

Speech Acts

İÇİNDEKİLER GİRİŞ 7 1. TEMEL METAFİZİK: Gerçeklik ve Doğruluk 9 Aydınlanma Vizyonu: Gerçeklik ve Akledilirliği 9 Felsefeye Giriş 15 Mevcut Durumlar 18 Gerçeklik ve Doğruluk 21 Realizme Dört Meydan Okuyuş 3° Kuşkuculuk, Bilgi ve Gerçeklik 37 Dışsal Realizm için Herhangi Bir İspat Var Mıdır? 42 Ateizmin ötesi 45 2. EVRENLE NASIL UYUM SAĞLARIZ: Biyolojik Bir Görüngü Olarak Zihin 49 Bilincin Üç özelliği 49 Bir Mevcut Durumlar Çatışması: Zihin-Beden Problemi 55 Bilincin İndirgenemezliği 66 Üst-Görüngücülük Tehlikesi 69 Bilincin İşlevi 74 Bilinç, Niyetlilik ve Nedensellik 76 3. ZİIINİN ÖZÜ: Bilinç ve Yapısı 79 Bilinç Hakkında Üç Hata 8l Bilincin Yapısal Özellikleri 86 Bilinç Alanı ve Bağlama Problemi 93 Bilinç ve Değer 97 6 Zihin Dil ve Toplum 4. BİLİNÇ NASIL ÇALIŞIR: Niyetlilik 99 Bilinç ve Niyetlilik 100 Niyetliliği Doğallaştırma 103 Biyolojik Bir Görüngü Olarak Doğallaştırılmış Niyetlilik IIO Niyetli Durumların Yapısı 114 Niyetli Durumların Türü ve İçeriği Arasındaki Ayrım 115 Uygunluk Yönü 116 Yerine Getirilme Şartları 119 Niyetli Nedensellik 120 Niyetliliğin Arkaplanı 124 5. TOPLUMSAL EVRENİN YAPISI: Zihin Nesnel Bir Toplumsal Gerçekliği Nasıl Yaratır? 127 Toplumsal ve Kurumsal Gerçeklik 128 Gözlemci Bağımlılık ve Toplumsal Gerçekliğin Yapı Taşları 132 Gözlemci Bağımlı ve Gözlemci Bağımsız Arasındaki Ayrım 132 Kolektif Niyetlilik 134 işlev Yükleme 138 Kurucu Kurallar 140 Kurumsal Gerçekliğin inşası için Basit Bir Model 141 Para Örneği 143 Kurumsal Gerçeklik Nasıl Bu Kadar Güçlü Olabilmektedir? 146 Soruna ve Güçlüklere Çözümler 149 6. DİL NASIL İŞLER: Bir İnsan Edimi Türü Olarak Söz Söyleme 155 Söz Edimleri: Edimsöz ve Etkisöz Edimleri 156 ‘Anlam’ın Anlamları 159 Anlam ve iletişim 164 Söz Edimlerinin Farklı Türleri 167 Kurucu Kurallar ve Sembolizm 173 DİZİN 185 SON NOTLAR 189

Gercek Dünyada Felsefe

Zihin Dil ve Toplum

Umberto Eco

Maurizio Ferraris

Massimo Recalcati

Akeel Bilgrami

Hilary Putnam

Mario De Caro

Carol Rovane

Diego Marconi

Michele Di Francesco

«In particolare, il nuovo realismo dice che la decostruzione e la critica non sono affatto equilibrismi da funamboli. In filosofia occorre saper riconoscere che cosa è culturalmente e socialmente costruito e cosa non lo è, oltre a tutte le infinite posizioni intermedie. Il vero lavoro del filosofo incomincia da qui, le tessere, siano esse quelle dell'antirealismo o del realismo, da sole non bastano, e ci auguriamo che questo volume testimoni non solo di un desiderio politico-culturale, ma anche di un lavoro». Bentornata realtà. Il nuovo realismo in discussione (a cura di Mario De Caro e Maurizio Ferraris) *** La questione filosofica oggi piú dibattuta negli interventi di dieci protagonisti.

Bentornata realtà

It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body? In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain. Only when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings.

The Mystery of Consciousness

Daniel Clement Dennett

David John Chalmers

In what began as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books, Searle discusses the arguments of such well-known thinkers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, Israel Rosenfield and David Chalmers. These appear here together with a new essay of his own.

A direct successor to Searle's Speech Acts (C.U.P. 1969), Expression and Meaning refines earlier analyses and extends speech-act theory to new areas including indirect and figurative discourse, metaphor and fiction.

Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts

Expression and Meaning

This book provides a comprehensive account of the intentionality of perceptual experience. With special emphasis on vision Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience. The central question concerns the relation between the subjective conscious perceptual field and the objective perceptual field. Everything in the objective field is either perceived or can be perceived. Nothing in the subjective field is perceived nor can be perceived precisely because the events in the subjective field consist of the perceivings , whether veridical or not, of the events in the objective field. Searle begins by criticizing the classical theories of perception and identifies a single fallacy, what he calls the Bad Argument, as the source of nearly all of the confusions in the history of the philosophy of perception. He next justifies the claim that perceptual experiences have presentational intentionality and shows how this justifies the direct realism of his account. In the central theoretical chapters, he shows how it is possible that the raw phenomenology must necessarily determine certain form of intentionality. Searle introduces, in detail, the distinction between different levels of perception from the basic level to the higher levels and shows the internal relation between the features of the experience and the states of affairs presented by the experience. The account applies not just to language possessing human beings but to infants and conscious animals. He also discusses how the account relates to certain traditional puzzles about spectrum inversion, color and size constancy and the brain-in-the-vat thought experiments. In the final chapters he explains and refutes Disjunctivist theories of perception, explains the role of unconscious perception, and concludes by discussing traditional problems of perception such as skepticism.

A Theory of Perception

Seeing Things as They are

This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a ‘five-pound note’ with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch. In The Construction of Social Reality, eminent philosopher John Searle examines the structure of social reality (or those portions of the world that are facts only by human agreement, such as money, marriage, property, and government), and contrasts it to a brute reality that is independent of human agreement. Searle shows that brute reality provides the indisputable foundation for all social reality, and that social reality, while very real, is maintained by nothing more than custom and habit.

Daniel Vanderveken

This is a formal and systematic study of the logical foundations of speech act theory. The study of speech acts has been a flourishing branch of the philosophy of language and linguistics over the last two decades, and John Searle has of course himself made some of the most notable contributions to that study in the sequence of books Speech Acts (1969), Expression and Meaning (1979) and Intentionality (1983). In collaboration with Daniel Vanderveken he now presents the first formalised logic of a general theory of speech acts, dealing with such things as the nature of an illocutionary force, the logical form of its components, and the conditions of success of elementary illocutionary acts. The central chapters present a systematic exposition of the axioms and general laws of illocutionary logic.

Foundations of Illocutionary Logic

"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.

"In the second half of the book, Searle applies his theory of social reality to the problem of political power, explaining the role of language in the formation of our political reality. The institutional structures that organize, empower, and regulate our lives - money, property, marriage, government - consist in the assignment and collective acceptance of certain statuses to objects and people. Whether it is the president of the United States, a twenty-dollar bill, or private property, these entities perform functions as determined by their status in our institutional reality. Searle focuses on the political powers that exist within these systems of status functions and the way in which language constitutes them."--BOOK JACKET.

Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power

Freedom and Neurobiology

A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony

The Campus War

In Freedom and Neurobiology, John Searle discusses the possibility of free will within the context of contemporary neurobiology. He begins by explaining the relationship between human reality and the more fundamental reality as described by physics and chemistry. Then he proposes a neurobiological resolution to the problem by demonstrating how various conceptions of free will have different consequences for the neurobiology of consciousness. In the second half of the book, Searle applies his theory of social reality to the problem of political power, explaining the role of language in the formation of our political reality. Searle focuses on the institutional structures that organize, empower, and regulate our lives-money, property, marriage, government-and the way in which language constitutes them. He argues that consciousness and rationality are crucial to our existence and that they are the result of the biological evolution of our species. In conclusion, he addresses the problem of free will within the context of a neurobiological conception of consciousness and rationality, and he addresses the problem of political power within the context of this analysis.

Searle John R.

Consciousness and Language

The study of rationality and practical reason, or rationality in action, has been central to Western intellectual culture. In this invigorating book, John Searle lays out six claims of what he calls the Classical Model of rationality and shows why they are false. He then presents an alternative theory of the role of rationality in thought and action. A central point of Searle's theory is that only irrational actions are directly caused by beliefs and desires—for example, the actions of a person in the grip of an obsession or addiction. In most cases of rational action, there is a gap between the motivating desire and the actual decision making. The traditional name for this gap is "freedom of the will." According to Searle, all rational activity presupposes free will. For rationality is possible only where one has a choice among various rational as well as irrational options. Unlike many philosophical tracts, Rationality in Action invites the reader to apply the author's ideas to everyday life. Searle shows, for example, that contrary to the traditional philosophical view, weakness of will is very common. He also points out the absurdity of the claim that rational decision making always starts from a consistent set of desires. Rational decision making, he argues, is often about choosing between conflicting reasons for action. In fact, humans are distinguished by their ability to be rationally motivated by desire-independent reasons for action. Extending his theory of rationality to the self, Searle shows how rational deliberation presupposes an irreducible notion of the self. He also reveals the idea of free will to be essentially a thesis of how the brain works.

John R. Searle

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