Searle: Inputs and outputs. And the science of psychology on the behaviorist model was you were going to correlate these stimulus inputs with the behavioral outputs. It's a ridiculous conception of the mind--the idea is that there's nothing going on in there, except you have the stimulus input and the behavioral output.
The best comment about behaviorism is the old joke about the two behaviorists after they just had sex. He says to her, "It was great for you, how was it for me?" (Laughter) If behaviorism were right, that ought to make perfectly good sense, because there's nothing going on in him except his behavior, and she's in a better position to observe his behavior than he is.
OK, so I thought, We're overcoming behaviorism. That's great. We're going to have a science of the mind that gets inside the brain. What I discovered was that all these people thought the mind was a computer program. So I had a big debate with them, and that's why I introduced the argument called the "Chinese Room" argument: I imagine myself carrying out this computer program for some cognitive capacity I don't have. I'm locked in a room shuffling Chinese symbols according to the program. Now, it turns out, in my thought experiment, that I can give answers in Chinese that are as good as Chinese speakers'. But I don't understand Chinese, I'm just a computer. And if I don't understand Chinese by being a computer, neither does any other computer. Just running a program isn't enough for the mind.
I have had plenty of debates about that, and that still goes on. A book about 20 years of the Chinese Room is going to come out.
Reason: A little sick of that argument, are you?
Searle: I'm kind of bored with it, to tell you the truth. I tell people, "Look, I got an A in Chinese Room. I took the course for credit, I got my term paper in on time--why do I have to keep taking it over and over?"
Reason: Do people continue to come up with new arguments, or is this becoming a ritualized debate, like gun control or abortion?
Searle: I'm familiar with most of the moves. Sometimes you see wrinkles on them. One common move is to say, "Well, you don't understand Chinese: It's the whole room that understands Chinese." That's no good, because the reason I don't understand Chinese is that I have no way of knowing what the words mean. But then neither does the room. The room has no way to get from the syntax to the semantics. You can see that by imagining that I get rid of the room and do all of it in my own head: memorize the rules, memorize the box of symbols, and do all the calculations in my head, memorize the program. But even still I don't understand Chinese, because I have no way to get from the syntax, the formal symbols, to what they mean.
As I said, part of the fun is when you get some questions solved, you get a whole bunch of others. There's a question that's always bothered me and that is, How can there be an objective reality that's only real because we think it's real? Take money. I mean, it's just bits of paper. But it works. People don't say, "Well, maybe you think that's money, but we don't." They accept it, and it works. And what goes for money goes for universities and property and marriage and journal interviews and language in general, and cocktail parties and tenure and a whole lot of other things that are socially constructed--they're socially created. And I wrote a book about how that works: How does the mind of an individual cooperating with other individual minds create or construct a social reality that can then have an objective existence? So, even if I stop thinking it's money, it has an institutionalized status, so it still remains money. It isn't just my opinion it's money.
But you still have a lot of problems left over. Right now I'm writing a book on rationality. That's a tough one. What makes behavior rational or irrational? What's the logical structure of the process of reasoning that results in a rational decision? And what kind of structure can do that? That's a hard question. And I think most of the accounts we have of that in decision theory and so on are really inadequate.
Reason: So you started out with language, then mind, then society, the whole set of bigger questions. Is there a relationship between language, mind, and society, and so forth that's inextricable?
Searle: If your theory isn't coherent, it's not a good theory. Now here's the overall picture: The world consists of entities that we find it convenient to call particles. That's it--there are just particles in fields of force, and everything else is consequences, or organizations, or effects of those particles.
Some of those particles are organized into systems, some of those systems are made largely of carbon-based atoms, and some of those carbon-based systems, especially the ones with lots of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, evolved into organic systems. And some of those organic systems now are alive, and those evolved by process of selection over long periods of time into living organisms.
Some of those living organisms have got neurons, and some of those neuron-based systems have got consciousness and intentionality. That's where I come in. I've got nothing to say about that other stuff. All the other stuff, from the quantum mechanical level right up through evolutionary biology, I just get out of undergraduate textbooks. I come in when we get to systems that have consciousness and intentionality.
Then it seems to me you've got a lot of fascinating questions, and that's what I'm interested in. How do consciousness and intentionality work in the brain? How is it they function logically--what are the logical structures of these phenomena? How does one organism relate to the consciousness and intentionality of other organisms? How do you get the structure of language? How does language give you the basis for the rest of society?
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Very good interview. Questions are well put and to the point, so that Searle is encouraged to explain his philosophy in the round. Interesting comments on Derrida, Focault and Rorty. The jokes are pretty good too!
More discussion of the gap (if any) between the deterministic world of physics and the free world of language, intentionality and action, would have been welcome. Freedom of action is surely essential to the creative use of language, which is in turn required to create all the social institutions which Searle analysed in Making the Social World. In this interview, and in the book, Searle seems to insist that the physical realm is all there is, while at the same time he says that consciousness and intentionality are irreducible. It is not clear to me how those comments can be reconciled.