Cerebro Y Mente

It was a splendid honour for me to be invited to be the Chairman of Gordon Wolstenholme’s 200th and final symposium at the Ciba Foundation. My other motive for accepting the invitation was that this is a fascinating subject. I thought that the best way for me to introduce the conference would be to say why I am interested in this subject and why I think it is an important one to discuss.

When I was an undergraduate in Oxford it was commonly believed that philosophy and the sciences were hermetically sealed off from each other. There were very nice philosophical arguments designed to show that no scientific conclusion could affect any philosophical thesis. As so often happens, those arguments didn’t get refuted: they just became irrelevant. One found that one’s own work and the work of one’s colleagues was constantly rubbing up against empirical research. Although I could give you a theoretical argument showing why philosophy and linguistics are two separate disciplines, I am constantly finding myself in discussion with my colleagues in linguistics, and they are as constantly referring to work in the philosophy of language. When it comes to the philosophy of mind the situation seems if anything even more pressing. There is an even greater need for interaction, but there have SO far been rather few contacts between philosophers and what (for want of a better word) I’ll continue to call neuroscientists, or brain scientists. There have been many contacts between mathematicians and philosophical logicians and between philosophers and linguists but very few contacts, as far as I know, between philosophers and neuroscientists. On the principle of grabbing whatever weaponry one needs wherever one can find it, I have dipped into some of the neuroscientific literature in a layman’s sort of way, and I want to give you a few examples of why I think it is important for philosophical work.

From my point of view the two most important problems in contemporary philosophy are the relationship between language and reality, and the nature

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J. R.SEARLE

of human action. The second problem is more urgent than the problem of language, because the social sciences have proved to be a disappointment.

The methods of the natural sciences have not produced results in the social sciences that are at all comparable with the kinds of results that we have had in the natural sciences. There are more insistent ways of putting that

second problem, such as why have the social sciences been so disappointing? Indeed, why are the social sciences such a bore? For reasons that I won’t

try to expound in detail I am convinced that the problem about the nature of language and the problem about the nature of human behaviour both have to do with problems in the philosophy of mind, in particular with the nature of intentionality.

As ‘intentionality’ is my first piece of jargon and as it may not be familiar to everybody I must say a little about it. Some of our most interesting mental states are directed at objects and states of affairs in the world: beliefs, hopes, fears, desires, motives are directed at or about objects and states of affairs. That property of being directed at or about is called intentionality by philosophers and psychologists. Not all of our mental states are like that. Pains, tickles and itches are all conscious states, and indeed in some cases more terrifyingly so than our intentional states, but they are not directed at or about objects or states of affairs. What one wants to know is what is the nature of this directedness, the nature of this intentionality? It doesn’t seem possible to answer that in purely apriori conceptual terms. We seem constantly to be forced to take account of the empirical substructure-the physical basis or, if you like, the plumbing of intentionality.

IwillgiveyouafewexamplesofthesortofthingIhaveinmind.

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