I recently read the book Mind, Language, and Society : Philosophy in the Real World by John Searle, and I highly recommend it! It is a small book, easy to read since he aimed it at a lay audience, but that tiny little book packs a huge information content. Read it, you’ll be glad you did!

The book attempts to summarize all of Searle’s thought on philosophy, in the context of other philosophic thought. Searle puts his cards on the table right away, stating his position in major areas of philosophy, and then he proceeds to demonstrate the validity of his positions and to refute the main arguments against them.

In the first chapter, Searle dives into metaphysics, talking about the nature of reality and truth. He defends the renaissance vision that the universe is an intelligible place, and that the human mind is quite capable of understanding the universe by using reason. He refutes the main arguments that attack the reality of the universe, the validity of the senses, and the validity of causality. After eating postmodernists, skeptics, and subjectivists for lunch in the first chapter, he moves onto consciousness.

Searle rejects the false dichotomy between dualism and materialism with respect to consciousness, putting the mind-body problem in a new light, where it is not a problem any more. Mind is a property of the brain just like wetness is a property of water, so talking about a mind-body problem makes as much sense as talking about a wetness-water problem. Searle refutes the argument that science is not fit to study the mind because it is a subjective phenomenon, while rejecting the arguments against the reality of the subjective states of the mind (what is it like to experience the color red, for example).

After establishing the reality of the mind and its subjective states, he goes on to establish its causal powers, refuting the claim that free will and the ability to act are just illusions of perception. In explaining the mechanism of the causal effectiveness of the mind, Searle goes into language, and the representation of beliefs and intentions.

After analyzing the role of language within one individual, he goes into the role of language for society at large, and the creation of social reality. By “social reality”, Searle means the creation of symbols, such as the institution of government, marriage, money, the declaration of war, etc. Things that do not exist in nature as such, but that exist because human societies exist.

Those of you who are familiar with Objectivism will find it interesting that Searle’s ideas are very similar to those of Ayn Rand, even though neither of them had any knowledge of the work of the other. I have been a fan of Ayn Rand for a long time, and I have always wished that she had written more on epistemology, since that is directly relevant to my work in Artificial Intelligence. Her book Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is an excellent treatise on the nature of concepts, but as the title warns, it is only an introduction, and if you read it you will be left wanting a lot more. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to write anything else on epistemology before she died. Because of this, it was a very nice surprise for me to find John Searle, since he is a philosopher of mind that attacks the problem from the same perspective as Ayn Rand, but with a lot more depth. I plan to read many more of his books!