Mind, Language and Society by John R Searle

[Kevin Beal]

I just finished reading a fantastic little book called Mind, Language and Society by Berkeley philosopher John R Searle. It's an introductory work to philosophy focusing on epistemology and ontology. Not that I'm some great philosopher or anything, but I was super surprised by how much I learned reading a 161 page introductory work.

 

John Searle focuses on the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language and is a controversial figure in academia (apparently). I just heard about him a few months ago. And I would say that he takes a very different, but complementary, approach to metaphysics as Stef.

 

The value I see in this and the other material I've consumed of John's is the focus on distinguishing different senses of the word "objective", in that something can be objectively real (ontology) or can be objective knowledge (epistemology). Like how you've heard Stef talk about how the state and the collective doesn't exist, John offers an interesting framework for thinking about how something can not exist, but still be objectively true, and how, if you think about it, that's actually a pretty trippy thing to think about.

 

How can it be the case that a collection of fibers and inks can constitute a 100 dollar bill. It's almost completely identical with a one dollar bill, or a sheet of printer paper for that matter, and yet we recognize collectively a significant amount of value that it represents, and objective ways that we know it's valuable, because counterfeits aren't and not all paper is. How can an electronic signature like a bitcoin be worth $580 to us?

 

Money is an interesting example, but there are a ton more, like how is it that we can collectively agree that carrying a football across the opposing team's in-zone constitutes a field goal in american football, and that a field goal is worth 6 points, and that these "institutional facts" be objectively true?

 

And how that can seem arbitrary yet objective, but math not at all arbitrary and objective in the same sense (epistemically speaking).

 

How might we confuse this sense of the word "objective" with objective statements about the physical constitution of a dollar bill in terms of mass, and volume and chemistry, etc? It turns out that this confusion happens all the time and it gets us in trouble. The ways you are familiar already with are that we can say outrageous things like the state has opposite moral rights, or that we need to give our lives for the collective like how Stef talks about.

 

Another way is in confusing simulations with the things they are meant to simulate. For example, we tend to think that if we can get a robot programmed well enough that it's "machine learning" causes it to gain new capabilities or accept new inputs, that this is actually real learning, real intelligence, and that the difference between ourselves and the robot is merely a difference in sophistication, that we have a better "program" in our brains. This, as it turns out, is a categorical error.

 

The Turing test is for computer simulations of human beings, where Alan Turing says that if you can have a chat with a computer and not know that it's a computer, it's responses so well programmed, that this means that you have achieved true "artificial intelligence". And there are a lot of people who've been trying to do this and succeeding to different degrees, but even if this was accomplished, it's still worlds away from actual intelligence, and this is because the program doesn't actually understand any of the meaning of the responses it gives.

 

Consider the following thought experiment: you are asked to go into a small room with no view or contact with the outside world except one slit in the wall where sheets of paper with questions written in chinese symbols are pushed in. You are tasked with sending out an answer sheet of paper with chinese symbols so that the person outside thinks that there is a native chinese speaker inside of this room. You have a manual that says that if you get X symbols, respond with Y symbols. The manual is very good and you succeed in getting the person outside to believe that they are communicating with a chinese speaker. This is called the "Chinese Room" argument.

 

At no point in this process do you actually understand what the questions are or what the answers mean. A computer is the same way. A computer has no mind at all to think or know anything. It's just a very very very sophisticated symbol manipulation machine. The only meaning that is gotten out of a computer is by human observers, placed there by other users, or at a more dynamic and lower level the developers of the many symbol manipulation subsystems.

 

John focuses a lot on consciousness, language and institutional facts like I described above, and the importance in understanding these topics seems to me now to be of massive importance.

 

I consider finding out how much I don't know, what I just take for granted without really understanding the implications, to be an awesome opportunity, and for me, this book accomplishes that very well.

 

And he's a really good communicator and writer and makes some seriously heavy philosophy accessible to laymen.

 

 

If you buy it on amazon, make sure to use the amazon affiliate link for FDR: http://www.fdrurl.com/amazon

[TheMatrixHasMe]

Very cool, thanks for posting. There was a point not too long ago when I was back in school considering a second undergrad degree. I took an intro to phil class, but the prof was a boot licking statist. None-the-less I did a short paper on Searle's Chinese room. I'd like to get more info on his work, and this looks like a great primer.

[Kevin Beal]

Making the Social World by Searle (which I'm reading currently) is also really good

 

It's mostly about language, intentionality and how they create power structures (for better or worse).

[cynicist]

Nice, absolutely necessary information for philosophers. Your enthusiasm for his work caused me to look for some of his material on the web and I came across 3 full philosophy courses of his on Youtube called Philosophy of the Mind, Philosophy of Society, and Philosophy of Language.  Apparently UC Berkeley broadcasts a lot of their courses. (Unfortunately without video)

[Kevin Beal]

Nice, absolutely necessary information for philosophers. Your enthusiasm for his work caused me to look for some of his material on the web and I came across 3 full philosophy courses of his on Youtube called Philosophy of the Mind, Philosophy of Society, and Philosophy of Language.  Apparently UC Berkeley broadcasts a lot of their courses. (Unfortunately without video)

Yea, I've checked out that series too. I didn't finish it, but it's really good stuff