"Neuroscience and Philosophy" begins with an excerpt from "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience," in which Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker question the ...

We discuss our surgical philosophy concerning the subtle interplay between the size of the surgical margin taken and the resultant morbidity from ablative oncological. procedures, which is ever more evident in the treatment of head and neck malignancy. The extent of tissue resection is determined by the "trade off" between cancer control and the perioperative, functional and aesthetic morbidity and mortality of the surgery. We also discuss our dilemmas concerning recent minimally invasive endoscopic microsurgical. techniques for the trans-oral laser removal. (...) or co-ablation of aero-digestive tract tumours, which result in a minimal. surgical margin of oncological clearance. By a process of inductive argument as to the nature of the surgical margin, we consider whether the risks of taking a lesser margin with adjuvant therapy is justified by the attendant gain in reduced surgical morbidity and the possible costs in tumour control. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This unique bibliography offers a scholarly listing of Schiller materials, with mention in the preface of special works. An introductory essay discusses Schiller's pragmatic humanism and features a list of biographical references.

This paper discusses the surprising resurgence in the fortunes of the British eugenics movement in the 1930s. It is argued that although mass unemployment may in the long run have discredited that version of eugenics in which social dependence and destitution were attributed to genetic defect, in the short run the Depression was often perceived as a vindication of the eugenical creed. In particular, the attempt to reduce the fertility of the unemployed by popularising birth control techniques, and the voluntary (...) sterilization campaign aimed at preventing the propagation of defectives from the so-called Social Problem Group, satisfied the urge felt by many conservative members from the professional classes to respond creatively to the country's crisis, without endangering existing social and economic institutions. It is also shown that not until 1938 did events in Germany cause substantial damage to the cause of eugenics in Britain. In fact, the ‘German experiment’ was actually greeted with approval by certain British eugenists of an authoritarian cast of mind. However, the Society as a whole never identified with these right-wing extremists, thanks in part to the moderating influence exercised by its General Secretary, Dr. C. P. Blacker, whose prime concern was with psycho-medical problems likely to concern people of all party persuasions. (shrink)

Pour Searle, parler une langue, c'est adopter un comportement, accomplir des actes de langage selon des règles complexes dont l'étude rejoint une théorie de l'action. Cette recherche est complémentaire des travaux de Chomsky, dans la mesure où ce dernier écarte de sa description de la langue le contexte extra-linguistique et même la fonction de communication, essentielle pour Searle : ignorer l'emploi des mots, c'est ignorer le langage lui-même.

The basic elements in the ontology of human civilization are status functions. Those are functions that can be performed not in virtue of physical structure alone but only in virtue of collective acceptance by the community of a certain status. Money, property, government and marriage are all examples of status functions. Status functions are all created by repeated applications of the same logical operation, in a preliminary formulation: X counts as Y in context C.On examination it emerges that all status (...) functions are created by a certain kind of representation that has a logical form of a speech act that I call a “Status Function Declaration.” These are explained.This lecture was delivered without notes and the current publication is very informal. I hope the reader will forgive the informality. (shrink)

The basic elements in the ontology of human civilization are status functions. Those are functions that can be performed not in virtue of physical structure alone but only in virtue of collective acceptance by the community of a certain status. Money, property, government and marriage are all examples of status functions. Status functions are all created by repeated applications of the same logical operation, in a preliminary formulation: X counts as Y in context C.On examination it emerges that all status (...) functions are created by a certain kind of representation that has a logical form of a speech act that I call a “Status Function Declaration.” These are explained.This lecture was delivered without notes and the current publication is very informal. I hope the reader will forgive the informality. (shrink)

Felsefenin durumu ve geleceği üzerine genel bir derin düşünme çoğu kez yüzeysellik ve entelektüel bir tatminkârlık ile sonuçlanmaktadır. Üstelik takvimde rastgele bir an olan yeni yüzyılın başlamasının kendisi bile, bu tür düşünmeler ile meşgul olmaya karşı genel bir varsayımı geçersiz kılmak için yeterli gibi görünmüyor. Bununla birlikte ciddi bir risk olmasına rağmen, felsefenin şimdiki ve gelecek durumu üzerine bir şeyler söyleme riskini kabul edeceğim. Konu içerisindeki önemli kapsamlı değişimlerin birkaçı, benim yaşam sürecimde ortaya çıktı ve ben onların, konunun geleceği açısından (...) yol açtıkları olanaklılıkları ve önemlerini tartışmak istiyorum. (shrink)

Part 1 of this exchange consists in a critique by Smith of Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality focusing on Searle’s use of the formula ‘X counts as Y in context C’. Smith argues that this formula works well for social objects such as dollar bills and presidents where the corresponding X terms (pieces of paper, human beings) are easy to identify. In cases such as debts and prices and money in a bank's computers, however, the formula fails, (...) because these are cases of what he calls ‘free-standing Y terms’, since there is here no X which can count as the corresponding Y. In his response in Part 2, Searle argues that Smith’s critique rests on three misunderstandings: 1. in wrongly presupposing that Searle is trying to analyze the nature of what he calls “social objects”, rather than of social facts; 2. in thinking that the counts as formula is intended as a definition, rather than as a mere mnemonic; and 3. in neglecting the naturalism of Searle’s account. (shrink)

This book compares John Searle and Michel Foucault's radically opposed views on truth in order to demonstrate the need for invigorating cross-fertilization between the analytic and Continental philosophical traditions. By pressing beyond familiar clichés about analytic philosophy and postmodernism, a surprising convergence of Searle and Foucault's thought on truth emerge. The analytic impression of Foucault is of a radical relativist whose views on truth entail linguistic idealism. Searle himself has contributed to this impression through his aggressive critique (...) of postmodern thinkers, especially Derrida. Prado lays this misperception to rest, showing analytic philosophers that Foucault's ideas about truth are defensible and merit serious attention, while also demonstrating to Continental philosophers that Searle's cannot be ignored. (shrink)

IT IS SHOWN IN DETAIL THAT RECENT ACCOUNTS FAIL TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN INTENTIONALITY AND MERELY CAUSALLY DISPOSITIONAL STATES OF INORGANIC PHYSICAL OBJECTS—A QUICK ROAD TO PANPSYCHISM. THE CLEAR NEED TO MAKE SUCH A DISTINCTION GIVES DIRECTION FOR FUTURE WORK. A BEGINNING IS MADE TOWARD PROVIDING SUCH AN ACCOUNT.

These papers treat those issues involved in formulating a logic of propositional attitutudes and consider the relevance of the attitudes to the continuing study of both the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Table of Contents: Introduction, by C. Anthony Anderson and Joseph Owens Quine on Quantifying In, by Kit Fine Prolegomena to a Structural Theory of Belief and Other Attitudes, by Hans Kemp A Study in Comparitive Semantics, by Ernest LePore and Barry Loewer Wherein is Language Social?, (...) by Tyler Burge Narrow Content, by Robert Stalnaker Cognitive Access and Semantic Puzzles, by Joseph Owens On Some Thought-Experiments About Mind and Meaning, by John Wallace and H. E. Mason Belief and the Indentity of Reference, by Keith S. Dennellan A Millian Heir Rejects the Wages of Sinn, by Nathan Salmon The Mode-of-Presentation Problem, by Stephen Schiffer Consciousness and Intentionality: Robots With and Without the Right Stuff, by Keith Gunderson Consciousness, Unconsciousness, and Intentionality, by John R. Searle. (shrink)

Part 1 of this exchange consists in a critique by Smith of Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality focusing on Searle’s use of the formula ‘X counts as Y in context C’. Smith argues that this formula works well for social objects such as dollar bills and presidents where the corresponding X terms (pieces of paper, human beings) are easy to identify. In cases such as debts and prices and money in a banks computers, however, the formula fails, (...) because these are cases of what he calls ‘free-standing Y terms’, since there is here no X which can count as the corresponding Y. In his response in Part 2, Searle argues that Smith’s critique rests on three misunderstandings: 1. in wrongly presupposing that Searle is trying to analyze the nature of what he calls “social objects”, rather than of social facts; 2. in thinking that the counts as formula is intended as a definition, rather than as a mere mnemonic; and 3. in neglecting the naturalism of Searle’s account. (shrink)

I argue that John Searle's (1980) influential Chinese room argument (CRA) against computationalism and strong AI survives existing objections, including Block's (1998) internalized systems reply, Fodor's (1991b) deviant causal chain reply, and Hauser's (1997) unconscious content reply. However, a new ``essentialist'' reply I construct shows that the CRA as presented by Searle is an unsound argument that relies on a question-begging appeal to intuition. My diagnosis of the CRA relies on an interpretation of computationalism as a scientific theory (...) about the essential nature of intentional content; such theories often yield non-intuitive results in non-standard cases, and so cannot be judged by such intuitions. However, I further argue that the CRA can be transformed into a potentially valid argument against computationalism simply by reinterpreting it as an indeterminacy argument that shows that computationalism cannot explain the ordinary distinction between semantic content and sheer syntactic manipulation, and thus cannot be an adequate account of content. This conclusion admittedly rests on the arguable but plausible assumption that thought content is interestingly determinate. I conclude that the viability of computationalism and strong AI depends on their addressing the indeterminacy objection, but that it is currently unclear how this objection can be successfully addressed. (shrink)

The Chinese room thought experiment of John Searle militates against strong artificial intelligence, illustrating his claim that syntactical knowledge by itself is neither constitutive nor sufficient for semantic understanding as found in human minds. This thought experiment was put to a behavioural test, concerning the syntax of a finite algebraic field. Input, rules and output were presented with letters instead of numbers. The set of rules was first presented as a table but finally internalized by the participants. Quite in (...) line with Searle's argument, uninformed participants mastered the syntax but did not explicitly report semantic knowledge. In order to test the virtual mind reply to the Chinese room argument, the reaction time pattern of the participants was compared to that of an informed control group. The correlation was quite high but could be traced back to memory load and response priming, i.e. to syntactical factors. No trace of tacit semantic knowledge of the task could be found in the experimental group. (shrink)

This paper explores the truism that people think about what they say. It proposes that, to satisfy their own goals, people often plan their speech acts to affect their listeners' beliefs, goals, and emotional states. Such language use can be modelled by viewing speech acts as operators in a planning system, thus allowing both physical and speech acts to be integrated into plans. Methodological issues of how speech acts should be defined in a planbased theory are illustrated by defining operators (...) for requesting and informing. Plans containing those operators are presented and comparisons are drawn with Searle's formulation. The operators are shown to be inadequate since they cannot be composed to form questions (requests to inform) and multiparty requests (requests to request). By refining the operator definitions and by identifying some of the side effects of requesting, compositional adequacy is achieved.The solution leads to a metatheoretical principle for modelling speech acts as planning operators. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an ecological-enactive perspective on the role rules play in linguistic behaviour. I formulate and motivate the hypothesis that metalinguistic reflexivity – our ability to talk about talking – is constitutive of linguistic normativity. On first sight, this hypothesis might seem to fall prey to a regress objection. By discussing the work of Searle, I show that this regress objection originates in the idea that learning language involves learning to follow rules from the very start. (...) I propose an ecological-enactive response to the regress objection. The key move is to deny that language learning consists initially in learning rules. A child first engages in regular communicative behaviour, by learning first-order linguistic skills, and then retroactively interprets her own behaviour in normative metalinguistic terms, i.e., as being guided by rules by relying on reflexive or second-order linguistic skills. On this view, metalinguistic reflexivity enables regulation of already regular communicative behaviour, and thereby constitutes linguistic normativity. Finally, I argue that linguistic rules are resources: they are available to participants in order to (re)negotiate properties of situated language behaviour and thereby reorganize linguistic practices. The account developed in this paper thus allows us to understand the constitutive role of metalinguistic reflexivity for linguistic normativity without falling prey to the regress objection. (shrink)

Bennett and Hacker’s _Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience_ (Blackwell, 2003), a collaboration between a philosopher (Hacker) and a neuroscientist (Bennett), is an ambitious attempt to reformulate the research agenda of cognitive neuroscience by demonstrating that cognitive scientists and other theorists, myself among them, have been bewitching each other by misusing language in a systematically “incoherent” and conceptually “confused” way. In both style and substance, the book harks back to Oxford in the early 1960's, when Ordinary Language Philosophy ruled, and Ryle and (...) Wittgenstein were the authorities on the meanings of our everyday mentalistic or psychological terms. I myself am a product of that time and place (as is Searle, for that matter), and I find much to agree with in their goals and presuppositions, and before turning to my criticisms, which will be severe, I want to highlight what I think is exactly right in their approach–the oft-forgotten lessons of Ordinary Language Philosophy. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that consciousness is a very special phenomenon, unique in several ways, but there is scant agreement on just how special it is, and whether or not an explanation of it can be accommodated within normal science. John Searle's view, defended with passion in this book, is highly idiosyncratic: what is special about consciousness is its "subjective ontology," but normal science can accommodate subjective ontology alongside (not within) its otherwise objective ontology. Once we clear away some widespread confusions (...) about what science requires, and dismiss the misbegotten field of cognitive science that has been engendered by those confusions, the subjective ontology of the mind, he claims, will lose its aura of unacceptable mystery. (shrink)

Floridi and Taddeo propose a condition of “zero semantic commitment” for solutions to the grounding problem, and a solution to it. I argue briefly that their condition cannot be fulfilled, not even by their own solution. After a look at Luc Steels' very different competing suggestion, I suggest that we need to re-think what the problem is and what role the ‘goals’ in a system play in formulating the problem. On the basis of a proper understanding of computing, I come (...) to the conclusion that the only sensible ground-ing problem is how we can explain and re-produce the behavioral ability and function of meaning in artificial computational agents. (shrink)

In this article, I articulate and defend an account of corporations motivated by John Searle’s discussion of them in his Making the Social World. According to this account, corporations are abstract entities that are the products of status function Declarations. They are also connected with, though not reducible to, various people and certain of the power relations among them. Moreover, these connections are responsible for corporations having features that stereotypical abstract entities lack (e.g., the abilities to take actions and (...) make profits). (shrink)

Realism about computation is the view that whether or not a particular physical system is performing a particular computation is at least sometimes a mindindependent feature of reality. The caveat ’at least sometimes’ is necessary here because a realist about computation need not believe that all instances of computation should be realistically construed. The computational theory of mind presupposes realism about computation. If whether or not the human nervous system implements particular computations is not a natural fact about the world (...) that is independent of whether we represent it as doing so, then the computational theory of mind fails to naturalise the mind. Realism about computation is also presupposed by attempts to use computational principles such as Landauer’s Principle to dispel Maxwell’s Demon. Realism about computation has been challenged by Hilary Putnam and John Searle among others. Various arguments have been put forward purporting to show that any physical system of sufficient complexity trivially implements all computations. Ladyman et al. offer a precisification and general proof Landauer’s Principle. In order to do this they present an analysis of what it is for a physical process to implement a logical transformation. In this paper, their analysis is explained and its implications for realism about computation and the use of Landauer’s Principle in foundational debates is assessed. (shrink)

Several recent attempts to isolate the fallacy in the view that I am committed to particular moral principles merely by describing a man as having promised seem to me to have erred through excess of zeal. The argument which commits the fallacy is at its most explicit in an article by Professor Searle, and the attempted refutations with which I am concerned fasten upon the first step in his ‘deduction’, which moves from Jones uttered the words ‘I hereby promise (...) to pay you, Smith, five dollars’ to Jones promised to pay Smith five dollars by way of the ‘fact about English usage’ which Searle states as: Under certain conditions C anyone who utters the words ‘I hereby promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars’ promises to pay Smith five dollars. (shrink)

What is money? Paraphrasing Goodman, I say that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, When is money? And to get the answer, Searle’s general formula for social objects (X couns as Y in context C) is fine, as long as you give it a different reading.

This is a sequel to my paper "Il denaro è un’opera d’arte", focusing on the metaphysics of those peculiar social objects that play an increasingly central role in the financial world—derivatives. On the analysis I offer, they appear to run afoul of Searle’s theory of social objects (or of the theory outlined in my earlier paper), and I put forward some suggestions on where to look for the necessary adjustments.

I've been looking forward to seeing Jerry Fodor's reaction to my book, since his candidly avowed antipathy toward evolutionary arguments was one of the spurs for writing it. For instance, it was his brusque comment to me in 1985 to the effect that Searle was right about robots lacking original intentionality that set me to writing "Evolution, Error and Intentionality" (1987), and that contributed in turn to some of his recent outbursts against evolutionary approaches to these issues. Nothing clears (...) the air quite so briskly as one of Jerry's jaunty tantrums. He is a master of blithe self-exposure, and on this occasion he is true to form. (shrink)