The Language of the Mind

Abstract

While the daily practice of science is clearly swayed by rhetorical skills, special interests and power politics, it works so well because at base it strives for empirical objectivity, reliable replication, and honest reporting. But can this be extended to the study of consciousness?

How can we have a unified and theoretically satisfactory account of ourselves and of our relations to other people and to the natural world? How can we reconcile our commonsense conception of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, speech-act performing, rational agents in a world that we believe consists entirely of brute, unconscious, mindless, meaningless, mute physical particles in fields of force? How, in short, can we make our conception of ourselves consistent and coherent with the account of the world that we have acquired from the natural sciences, especially physics, chemistry, and biology?… I think this problem—or set of problems—is the most important problem in philosophy, and indeed there is a sense in which, in our particular epoch, it is the only major problem in philosophy.

John R. Searle , Consciousness and Language , p. 1