Abstract

We shall see that both these projects are deeply misguided. The first suffers from Searle’s misrepresentation, en masse and individually, of the various materialist theories. To show this, I will focus on the basic claims of token identity specifically, and draw out the inaccuracy of Searle’s straw materialism. This is a shortcut; by showing one conjunct to be false, we may show the conjunction of Searle’s summaries to be false. And, after all, token identity is the most widely held current view. Searle’s second project, I will argue, is characterized by two unfortunate traits: it makes some confused and unsupported claims about supervenience and causality, and, when interpreted most charitably, it is fundamentally indistinguishable from a prevalent account of token identity augmented by supervenience.