John Searle
Born in Denver, Colorado in 1932, John Searle is a Mills Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is most renowned for his work regarding issues in the sub-fields of philosophy of language, of mind and of consciousness. For good or for worse, Searle is known to take what might be called a common-sense approach to philosophy, often dismissing other views for their denying the obvious. He is best known for the philosophical position that he calls biological naturalism, which he thinks avoids the problems of both materialism and dualism (namely, certain category mistakes), while retaining the positive qualities of both views.
He rejects materialism for the simple fact that it diminishes and/or eliminates the rich subjective ontology of the first-person that we are all intimately aware of in favor of a mechanistic third-person ontology. For Searle, 1st person ontology is irreducible to a third-person material ontology. At the same time, Searle maintains mental-physical causal reducibility in order to preserve the causal closure thesis. Whether this causal vs. ontological distinction is defensible is questionable. Nonetheless, Searle thinks that his view respects the intuitions of dualism by preserving the distinctive ontology of subjective experience, without introducing distinct substances, and that he respects the intuitions of materialism by both retaining its monism and its causal thesis. For Searle, the key problem with both views is that they define the mental and physical as contrast classes. Instead, he sees the mental as a certain type of material thing (because it can meet a certain limited set of material criteria).
Perhaps his most famous philosophical argument is the one he developed to demonstrate his disagreement with the suggestion that computers will someday be able to think as a human does and be cognitive. It is an argument against strong artificial intelligence (AI) that has been dubbed the “Chinese room argument”, and has received a multitude of rebuttals. It tells the story of a man who is placed in a room, alone but for a book of Chinese characters. Once in a while a piece of paper is slipped under the door containing more Chinese characters. The man is tasked to match the characters on the paper with the characters in the book and write what he finds on a fresh piece of paper, not realizing since he does not speak Chinese that by doing so he is providing answers to questions written on the first piece of paper. Searle says this situation simulates the operations of a computer, since it is merely a set of rules that, given enough complexity, are able to imitate, but not replicate, true intelligence.
Web Resources On John Searle
Wikipedia: John Searle
IEP: Chinese Room
Book Resources On John SearleMind, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World by John Searle
John Searle by Barry Smith (Editor)
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