This book has had an unusual publication history, and in this introduction I am going to explain its history and attempt to locate its two chapters within the larger research project of which they are a part.
In late Spring of 2001, I gave a series of lectures at the Sorbonne, one a large public lecture in French on the general topic of language and political power, and some presentations in English to smaller groups, ranging from lectures to seminar discussions, under various auspices and on topics ranging from the freedom of the will to the semiotics of wine tasting. I was asked if I would allow two of these presentations, the lecture I had given in French on political power and one of the lectures in English on the problem of free will, to be published in France. I agreed, on the natural supposition that the two lectures would appear in a journal, or some such venue. To my surprise, my editor, Patrick Savidan, published the two lectures as a rather elegant, though small, book in French called Liberté et neurobiologie.2 I knew nothing of the publication plans until a boxful of books arrived at my home in Berkeley. It is the first time in my life that I published a book I did not know that I had written. Savidan did an excellent job translating the English lecture into French, and I was immensely helped in the preparation of the French text of the other lecture by Anne Hénault and especially by Natalie van Bockstaele.
Just as I was surprised by the publication of the French book I was equally surprised by swift publications of translations of the book from the French into German and Spanish, and, subsequently, Italian and Chinese. By coincidence, the publication in Germany came out while a great public debate was going on there about the status of free will, and the possibility of genuine free will, given contemporary neurobiology. In Germany, the book received several reviews, some quite negative, in daily newspapers of the sort that do not normally review philosophical works.
After all of this, I was approached by Columbia University Press with the proposal to produce an “English translation.” I had the original English texts on which the viva voce lectures in Paris were based, so it was not necessary to translate the French text. Furthermore, in the intervening years, I had revised “Language and Power,” and this revised version, called “Social Ontology and Political Power,”3 is presented here, because it comes closer to my current views than does the original 2001 text.
The two lectures published here, one about the problem of free will and neurobiology and the other about language, social ontology and political power, do not appear to have any connection with each other. And at one level, the level of authorial intent, they really do not have any connection. It would never have occurred to me while I was preparing them that they would one day be published together. However, they are both parts of a much larger philosophical enterprise and it is worth explaining that enterprise, as it will deepen the reader’s understanding of what I am trying to do in these lectures. Because I discuss some important philosophical issues in a rather brief and compressed fashion in what follows, I will provide references to some of the works in which I have discussed these same issues at greater length.
There is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy and each of these lectures is an attempt to answer a part of that question. As a preliminary succinct formulation we could put it in this form: How do we fit in? In the longer version, it goes as follows: We now have a reasonably well-established conception of the basic structure of the universe. We have plausible theories about the origin of the universe in the Big Bang, and we understand quite a number of things about the structure of the universe in atomic physics and chemistry. We have even come to understand the nature of the chemical bond. We know a fair amount about our own development on this little Earth during the past five billion years of evolution. We understand that the universe consists entirely of particles (or whatever entities the ultimately true physics arrives at), and these exist in fields of force and are typically organized into systems. On our Earth, carbon-based systems made of molecules that also contain a lot of hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen have provided the substrate of human, animal and plant evolution. These and other such facts about the basic structure of the universe, I will call, for short, the “basic facts.” The most important sets of basic facts, for our present purposes, are given in the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology.
There is, however, an interesting tension. It is not at all easy to reconcile the basic facts with a certain conception we have of ourselves. Our self-conception derives in part from our cultural inheritance, but mostly it derives from our own experience. We have a conception of ourselves as conscious, intentionalistic, rational, social, institutional, political, speech-act performing, ethical and free will possessing agents. Now, the question is, How can we square this self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, rational, etc., agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles? In the end, perhaps we will have to give up on certain features of our self conception, such as free will. I see this family of questions as setting the agenda not only for my own work, but for the subject of philosophy for the foreseeable future. There are several specific questions, some of which I have dealt with elsewhere, that are part of the larger single question.
1) Consciousness. What exactly is consciousness and how does it fit in with the basic facts? I define “consciousness” as subjective, qualitative states of sentience or feeling or awareness. Waking experiences are typically conscious, but dreams are also a form of consciousness. Conscious states typically, but not always, have intentionality. The short answer to the question of how consciousness fits in with the basic facts is that conscious states are entirely caused by neuronal processes in the brain and are realized in the brain. This approach to the mind-body problem, however, leaves us with a number of philosophical problems such as, for example: What are the relations between consciousness and intentionality and how does consciousness function causally to move our bodies? It also leaves us with very difficult neurobiological problems: How exactly does the brain cause conscious experiences, and how are those experiences realized in the brain? One of the tasks of the philosopher is to get the problem into such a shape that it can be subject to experimental testing in neurobiology. I believe that, to some extent, that is already happening, and this research is in fact now in progress in neurobiology, where the question of consciousness is vigorously pursued.4
2) Intentionality. There are similar questions about intentionality. “Intentionality” as used by philosophers and psychologists refers not only to cases of intending, in the ordinary sense in which I intend to go to the movies, but to any form of directedness or aboutness. Beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, loves, hates and perceptions are all cases of intentional phenomena, along with intending to go to the movies. Many philosophers think that the special problem of intentionality is the mystery of how ordinary cell structures in the brain could be about something, how they could refer beyond themselves. In my view, intentionality only seems mysterious if we think of it as a very big problem, instead of breaking it down into a series of specific questions about how particular forms of intentionality, such as thirst and hunger, perception and intentional action, function in our lives and in the universe at large. We can separate the logical/ philosophical questions (for example, What exactly is the logical structure of intentionality?) from the biological questions (for example, How exactly are intentional states caused by brain processes? How are they realized in the brain? How do they function? How has intentionality evolved in humans and other animals?).5
A special form of intentionality, common to humans and other social animals, is what I call “collective intentionality,” cases where humans and other animals are capable of cooperating and thus sharing common forms of intentionality, where the intentionality is not just in the first-person singular (I intend, I believe, I want, etc.), but would be expressed in the first-person plural (we intend, we believe, we want, etc.).
3) Language. In addition to having consciousness and intentionality, traits that humans share with many other species of animals, humans have the special ability to form derived intentionality, i.e. meaning, in sentences and speech acts. What exactly is meaning, and how does meaning enable words—which are, after all, merely sounds that come out of our mouths or marks we make on paper—to refer to objects, events and states of affairs in the world? This has been the main topic in the philosophy of language for the past century and I think that many, perhaps most, of the great achievements of philosophy in the past one hundred years have been in the philosophy of language. However, if there has been one flaw in the philosophy of language over the past century, it is that it is insufficiently naturalistic. The general approach that I am advocating is that we need to think of language as a manifestation and extension of more biologically primitive forms of intentionality. It is a mistake to treat language as if it were not part of human biology.6
4) Rationality. An animal that has consciousness, intentionality and language already has constraints of rationality. These are built into the structure of intentionally and language. An animal that does not have consciousness cannot have intentionality or language. Rationality, on my view, is not a separate faculty, something added to language and mind. It is an internal structural feature of intentionality and of language that intentional states and speech acts are subject to internal constraints of rationality. I will say more about this point later.
An account of rationality becomes essential in building an answer to our questions of how we fit into the basic facts. The standard accounts of rationality in our tradition, accounts that receive their finest mathematical expression in decision theory, seem to me in various ways defective. Specifically, they fail to see the special features of human rationality that come from having a human language. The use of language enables us to create desire-independent reasons for action. All sorts of speech acts, for example statement making and promise making, create commitments and obligations of various kinds. The structure of society also reveals all sorts of commitments, requirements, obligations, etc., and each of these is typically treated by rational agents as creating desire-independent reasons for action.7
Think what it means to find a parking ticket on your car’s windshield, to accept an invitation to a party, or to be called for jury duty. In all of these cases, society works only because you and others recognize these phenomena as creating desire-independent reasons for action. It is tempting, though mistaken, to think that all of these are maintained only by a system of sanctions. People who think that the sanctions are the only things that matter fail to recognize that the collective acceptance of the sanctions typically depends on the recognition of a prior system of desire-independent reasons for action.
5) Free will. Human rationality presupposes free will. The reason is that rationality must be able to make a difference. There must be a difference between rational and irrational behavior, but this is only possible if there is a space in which rationality can operate. The presupposition, in short, of rationality is that not all of our actions have antecedent conditions that are causally sufficient to determine the action. Unless we presuppose a certain room for maneuver, we cannot make sense of the notion of rationality and consequently we cannot make sense of the notion of obligations, speech acts and a whole lot of other things.
The problem of free will, in short, is how can such a thing exist? How can there exist genuinely free actions in a world where all events, at least at the macro level, apparently have causally sufficient antecedent conditions? Every event at that level appears to be determined by causes that preceded it. Why should acts performed during the apparent human consciousness of freedom be an exception? It is true that there is an indeterminacy in nature at the quantum level, but that indeterminacy is pure randomness and randomness is not by itself sufficient to give us free will.
The problem of free will is unusual among contemporary philosophical issues in that we are nowhere remotely near to having a solution. I can give you a pretty good account of consciousness, intentionality, speech acts and of the ontology of society but I do not know how to solve the problem of free will.
Well, why is that important? There are lots of problems we do not have solutions to. The special problem of free will is that we cannot get on with our lives without presupposing free will. Whenever we are in a decision-making situation, or indeed, in any situation that calls for voluntary action, we have to presuppose our own freedom. Suppose you are given a choice in a restaurant between steak and veal. The waiter asks you “And sir, which would you prefer, the steak or the veal?” You cannot say to the waiter, “Look, I am a determinist. I will just wait and see what I order because I know that my order is determined.” The refusal, i.e. the conscious, intentional speech act of refusing to place an order, is only intelligible to you if you understand it as an exercise of your own free will. The point that I am making now is not that free will is a fact. We don’t know if it is a fact. The point is that given the structure of our consciousness, we cannot proceed except on the presupposition of free will.
6) Society and institutions. What exactly is the ontology of society? In particular, how is it possible that there can be a class of facts that are perfectly objective, yet exist only because we believe that they exist? I am thinking of such facts as that George W. Bush is now President of the United States, or that the object in my wallet is a twenty-dollar bill. This is another project which I have worked on.8 Here too I insist on a resolutely naturalistic account. We must see human institutional structures such as money, property, marriage, universities, income tax, cocktail parties, summer vacations, lawyers, licensed drivers, and professional football players as extensions of our capacity for collective intentionality and our capacity for language. Once you have language and social cooperation, you already have the possibility of creating institutional reality in the form of money, property, government, marriage, etc.
7) Politics. Once we see that consciousness, language, rationality and society are all expressions of a more fundamental underlying biology, then it seems to me that we can have a more naturalistic ethical and political philosophy than has been traditional in our society. Oddly enough, it seems to me that the very possibility of this was created by Rawls’s theory of justice.9 In my philosophical childhood, it was widely accepted that substantive first-order theories in political philosophy and ethics were impossible because claims in those areas could not have objective truth. This was supposed to be shown by Hume’s famous claim that you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” If philosophy is concerned with stating truths, and there are no truths about how we ought to behave, or what sort of political society we ought to have, then philosophy can have nothing to say about how we ought to behave in ethics or politics. When I was an undergraduate, it was widely believed that political philosophy was dead10 and that ethics, as a subject matter in philosophy, was the same thing as “metaethics,” which consisted of analyses of the use of ethical terms such as “good” and “ought.” The study of politics was thought to be an empirical discipline, and hence if there was to be something called “political philosophy,” this would have to be on all fours with, for example, a subject we might invent, geological philosophy. One might examine the use of political vocabulary to study its conceptual nature as one might study the use of geological vocabulary. But the idea of substantive political theory was regarded as obsolete. I fought against this conception as early as 1964, in my article “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’.”11 But I have to say the most effective disproof of the prevailing orthodoxy was provided by the publication of Rawls’s book in which he simply did what was supposed to be impossible to do, that is, to provide rational justifications for substantive claims about justice.
8) Ethics. What would a “naturalistic” ethics look like? It would be based on two other completely natural phenomena, first, our basic biological needs, and second, our biologically given capacity for rationality, which is itself a constitutive and structural feature of both intentionality and language.
I have listed eight areas of subject matter where it seems to me there is now enormous scope for a different type of philosophical investigation. I would not wish to suggest that these are the only such areas. On the contrary, there are many I have not listed. One area in which I wish I had more to say is aesthetics, another is mathematics. I think there is an aesthetic dimension to all conscious experiences. Why do we not have a satisfactory theoretical account of this? Again, what sorts of facts are mathematical facts, and what sorts of entities are mathematical entities such as numbers?
Notice that the eight topics I have listed and the associated questions are logically ordered in a very basic way. The phenomena in one topic area presuppose the existence of phenomena in another topic area. Let me go through the steps. Intentionality (2) requires consciousness (1). Most of our intentional states are unconscious at any given moment, and many conscious states lack intentionality. But all the same, only a being capable of consciousness is capable of having intentional states. Again, language (3) presupposes intentionality (2). Only a being that is capable of mental representation is capable of the special type of second-level representation that exists in the performance of a speech act. Unless you are capable of belief, desire and intention, you are not capable of performing intentional speech acts that are expressions of your beliefs and desires. Rationality (4) is a constitutive structural feature of both language (3) and intentionality (2). When I say that it is constitutive and structural, I do not mean that we always, or even in general, speak and think rationally, but rather that the constraints set by rationality are built in as intrinsic features of intentional states and speech acts. Thus, if we hold inconsistent beliefs, it is part of our concept of belief that there is something defective about our beliefs. Similarly, if we perform inconsistent speech acts, this too is a structural defect. It is not some outside consideration that is imposed on the intentional state or the speech act. Rationality is a structural feature in the sense that you cannot have a language and intentionality without having rational constraints as constitutive of the phenomena in question. Though the concept of rationality (4) is different from the concept of free will (5), their extension is the same. This, as I mentioned before, is because actions are assessable as rational or irrational only where there is the possibility of alternative courses of action, only where there is free will. Again, institutional ontology (6) presupposes language (3). You cannot have property, money, marriage or government without language. But you can have language without having property, money, marriage, or government.
I think it should be obvious that politics (7) and ethics (8) as domains of human activity presuppose the existence of all six of the preceding phenomena, that is they presuppose (1) consciousness, (2) intentionality, (3) language, (4) rationality, (5) free will, and (6) society and institutions. Only conscious and intentionalistic, rational, free will-having social and institutional animals, such as we are, can engage in those activities that we think are distinctly political and be subject to those constraints and reasons that we think of as distinctly ethical.
When I say that these subjects and questions are hierarchically ordered, I am not saying that we cannot give an answer to any of the questions regarding the dependent phenomena until we have answered the questions regarding the more fundamental phenomena. It would be a very depressing result if we could not answer questions about the dependent phenomena until we had answered questions about the more fundamental phenomena, because for many of the most fundamental subjects we do not know the answers to either the philosophical or the scientific questions. I mentioned consciousness as an obvious case where we still do not have an adequate account of how exactly the brain causes consciousness or how consciousness is realized in the brain. Another obvious example is the freedom of the will. We have to presuppose free will whenever we engage in voluntary action, but the presupposition is not self-guaranteeing. Perhaps we are mistaken in supposing that we have free will, but mistaken or not, we still do not have an account of free will that will make it consistent with both our experiences and what we know about the rest of the universe. Rationality presupposes free will but we can develop a theory of rationality whether or not we give an account of free will. So, the solutions that we develop are in a sense hypothetical or contingent: Assuming that we have free will, a theory of rationality can be given. Again, it is possible to develop a theory of intentionality without having a well worked out account of consciousness, specifically, it is possible to have a theory of the logical structure of belief, desire, intention, etc. without an account of how brain processes cause conscious states in the first place and how those states are realized in the brain.
In a sense, we are in the usual situation in philosophy where at some deep level we feel we cannot solve one problem until we have solved them all. But all the same, in order to make any progress, we have to divide the huge problem, as I have done, into sets of smaller problems, and those indeed into even smaller problems so that we can answer them in a piecemeal fashion. Our strategy is to divide and conquer: divide these questions into questions of a more manageable form, and then work on them one at a time. That at least is the method that I have followed all my life and the method that I am pursuing in this book.
At first sight, it may seem puzzling that I say there have been major changes in philosophy and then, by way of describing these changes, list eight sets of questions all of which seem very traditional. Consciousness, intentionality, language, rationality, free will, human society, politics, and ethics—all of these are very much part of the history of traditional philosophy. What is so special about the present period? I am arguing that it is now possible to treat all of these issues “naturalistically”, that is, in a way that makes them consistent with, and indeed a natural outgrowth from, what I call the basic facts. It is now possible to recognize the real and sometimes irreducible character of the phenomena that I have been describing while at the same time acknowledging that we live in exactly one world and not two or thirty-seven. Often when philosophers talk about “naturalizing intentionality” or “naturalizing consciousness” they take “naturalizing” to mean denying the existence of the phenomena in question. So, for example, naturalizing intentionality would consist in showing that there really is no such thing as irreducible, ineliminable intentionality. Ditto for consciousness. Naturalizing consciousness would be showing that consciousness does not really exist as an irreducible phenomenon. That is not the sense of naturalization that I am talking about. I am claiming that it is possible to recognize the real intrinsic character of consciousness, rationality, language, etc., and at the same time see them as part of the natural world. That has now become possible in a way that it was not obviously possible before. This is due to several changes in philosophy that I will shortly attempt to describe.
First I need to make exactly clear what philosophical movements and tendencies I am explicitly rejecting. I am rejecting both: on the one hand, materialism (as it is usually understood), with its attendant reductionism and eliminativism, and, on the other hand, any form of dualism, or the three world theory, or any form of mystification that denies the basic nature, or the universality of the basic facts. Materialism is usually taken to be a denial of the irreducible and ineliminable character of consciousness and intentionality. According to the materialist what we think of as consciousness and intentionality either do not exist at all (eliminativism) or if they do, they are really something else, they are reducible to some third-person material phenomena such as behavior, brain states neurophysiologically described, functional states of the organism, or computer programs (reductionism). All of these efforts at elimination and reduction fail because they all end up denying the data of our own experience, they all end up denying that we really do have conscious, intentionalistic experiences such as feeling thirsty or thinking about the weather. These data have a first-person ontology, in that they only exist as experienced by a human or animal agent and consequently cannot be reduced to something that has a third-person ontology, such as behavior or brain states. Reductionism pretends to be different from eliminativism because it claims to grant the existence of mental states, not to eliminate them. But in the end it is a form of eliminativism, because the proposed reductions invariably eliminate the subjective first-person character of consciousness and intentionality in favor of some objective third-person ontology. I have attempted to refute these views at length elsewhere and will not repeat the refutations here.12
Dualism is usually defined as the view that we live in two distinct realms, the mental and the physical. The three world view, espoused by Popper, Eccles, Habermas and Penrose, among others, is that we live in three distinct worlds, the physical, the mental, and the world of cultural products such as poetry and scientific theories, “the world of civilization and culture”13 in all its manifestations (Popper and Eccles), or the world of abstract Platonic entities such as numbers (Penrose,14 following Frege). It ought to worry us, and the three world partisans, that they cannot agree on the population of World 3, as it is grandly called. The problem with dualism is that it amounts to giving up on a central enterprise of philosophy. It might turn out that consciousness and intentionality are not a part of the real “physical” world of biology as I have claimed. It might, for example, turn out that after our bodies are destroyed, our souls or conscious states will float about in a disembodied fashion. But it would be giving up on the philosophical (not to mention, scientific) enterprise of trying to explain what we know to be real phenomena if we simply say they defy explanation because they inhabit a separate realm. I offer a solution to the philosophical mind-body problem and we are on the way to having a neurobiological account that may substantiate and exemplify my philosophical solution. We now have more than three centuries of scientific results that overwhelmingly support the idea that we live in exactly one world, not two or three or any other larger number.
If dualism is bad, the three world view, “trialism” as it is sometimes called,15 is worse. Just as human biology is an expression of the underlying physics and chemistry, so human culture, in all of its manifestations, is an expression of our underlying biological capacity for language, rationality, etc. It is a kind of mystification to suppose that because we can write poems and develop scientific theories, somehow or other these inhabit a separate realm and are not part of the one real world we all live in.
The Popper-Eccles version of trialism fails because the world of culture is a part of the one real world that we all inhabit and indeed involves applications of biological capacities for consciousness and intentionality. The postulation of a third world of abstract Platonic entities is also unsatisfactory. Properties, numbers and “universals” generally do indeed exist and they are not human creations in the way that poems and scientific theories are human creations, but their existence is a trivial consequence of something that is a human creation, namely, the introduction of general terms, adjectives and verbs. These are human creations. The existence of numbers and abstract entities does not require us to postulate a separate ontological realm. In order to make that clear I have to account for the existence of such abstract entities, and for the truth of statements about them, especially statements in mathematics. I do not believe that the Frege-Penrose view, that there is a third Platonic world of abstract universals such as numbers, can be given a coherent formulation. The Frege-Penrose postulation of a third realm is not the solution to an ontological problem, but it does indeed present us with a challenge. How do we account for the objective truth of statements in mathematics and about abstract universals generally without postulating a third realm?
This is not the place to give a detailed philosophy of mathematics, but at least I can give a bare bones outline of a solution that will meet the challenge that I just mentioned. In order to state how things are in the world we have to introduce general terms to describe how they are. Thus we say, “That is a horse,” or “That is green.” The introduction of general terms immediately allows us to form corresponding noun phrases and to use these expressions referentially. Instead of saying, “This is green,” we can say, “This object has the property of greenness” or “exemplifies the color green”; instead of saying, “That is a horse,” we can say, “That object has the property of being a horse.” The introduction of these abstract entities—the property of being green or the property of being a horse—does not introduce a new ontological realm but is just a manner of speaking. Notice that the fact in the world that makes it true that this object is green is exactly the same fact that makes it true that this object has the property of greenness. There is no difference in the world and consequently no difference in our “ontological commitments” in the two cases. I cannot in this brief space tell you how much confusion has been generated over the centuries ranging from the Platonic doctrine of the universal forms right up to Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment.16 The point for the present purpose is to see that any meaningful predicate, whether verb or adjective or other form, immediately allows us to form a corresponding noun phrase, which refers to the property expressed by the original predicate. Hence the existence of the objects named by these noun phrases is automatically guaranteed by the meaningfulness of the predicates. This is a large part of the solution to the great so-called “Problem of Universals.” There is no separate realm of universals, but rather there are alternative ways of talking about the single realm in which we all live, the real world. Universals do indeed exist, in fact their existence is a trivial consequence of the meaningfulness of the corresponding predicates, but their existence introduces no new facts and no new ontological realms. To talk of such universals is just an alternative way of speaking. Such entities exist in our system of representing horses and green objects, etc. This account, by the way, works as much for universals that are not exemplified as for those that are. We can say either, “No one is a saint” or “The property of saintliness is possessed by no one.”
But what about numbers? Suppose there are three horses in the field. Then each of the objects in the field has the property of being a horse. But none of the horses in the field has the property of being three. To what does the property of threeness attach? It is the set of horses-in-the-field that has the property of three. Indeed, we can say in colloquial English, the number of the horses in the field is three. And we can generalize this point. Numbers are properties of sets (they are not sets of sets, nor properties of properties. They are properties of sets). I have to apologize for the swiftness of this discussion, but in order to state my general position about the basicness of the basic facts I had to answer some alternative conceptions of ontology and of philosophy.
The conclusion of this section is that in developing a naturalistic philosophy we can begin by rejecting both the reductionism and the eliminativism of traditional materialism as well as the postulation of several onto-logical realms by dualists and trialists.
If we escape both the Scylla of materialism and the Charybdis of dualism and trialism, then given certain changes in philosophy over the past several decades, I think the time has now come when we can pursue a type of philosophy, which, though not impossible, was at least more difficult to pursue fifty or a hundred years ago. Here are some of the changes that have occurred.
First, epistemology is no longer at the center of philosophy. For three centuries after Descartes, the epistemological questions, especially the skeptical questions, formed the center of philosophical interest. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the question, “How do you know?” was transformed by Wittgenstein, Russell and Moore into “What do you mean?” This is the famous “linguistic turn” that took place in philosophy in the first part of the twentieth century. But, at least in part, the linguistic turn was still directed at the traditional philosophical epistemic agenda. A large part of the aim of switching to the philosophy of language was to try to show that linguistic methods would enable us to answer skeptical, as well as other traditional, philosophical problems.
There are a number of reasons why we do not take skepticism as seriously as we did fifty years ago. Many philosophers, and I am one of them, think that the investigations of Wittgenstein and Austin have to some extent answered skepticism by showing that it rests, in part, on certain misuses of language. I realize that this claim is controversial, and I do not suppose that it is universally accepted that the methods of linguistic philosophy have shown skepticism to rest on misuses of language. There is a second and more important reason why we do not take skepticism as seriously as we used to and that is: We simply know too much. We have a prodigious amount of knowledge that is known with objectivity, certainty and universality. Claims such as that the Earth is round or that hydrogen atoms have one electron are objective in the sense that their truth does not depend on the feelings or attitudes of the participants in the discussion. They are known with certainty, in the sense that the evidence is now so great that it is irrational to doubt them. And they are universal in the sense that they are as true in Vladivostok or Pretoria as they are in Berkeley or London. Half a century ago many people thought that there could be no empirical truths known with certainty, because they believed that certainty implied incorrigibility. They thought that a claim to know something with certainty would imply that we could not imagine a circumstance in which the statement could turn out to be false. I think this is a deep mistake. There are a lot of things that we know with certainty in the ordinary sense of the word that, given the evidence, it is simply irrational to doubt the truth of these claims. But this does not imply that we could not imagine circumstances, massive scientific revolutions, let us say, which would lead us to revise these claims. “Certain” is similar to “know,” in this respect. “It is certain that p” implies “p”, hence “not p” implies “it is not certain that p”. Similarly “It is known that p” implies “p”, hence “not p” implies “it is not known that p.” In both cases the fact that we can imagine circumstances that would force us to revise our claims to knowledge and certainty does not show that nothing is known or that nothing is certain. To repeat, certainty does not imply incorrigibility.
Go to any university bookstore and look at the section on, for example, molecular biology or mechanical engineering, and you will find an accumulation of knowledge, the sheer volume and power of which would have taken Descartes’s breath away. It is hard to send men to the moon and bring them back and then take seriously the problem, for example, of whether the external world really exists. This is not to say that there is no room for skeptical epistemology in philosophy, but I regard the epistemic puzzles as like Zeno’s paradoxes about space and time. It is an interesting paradox how it is possible for me to move across the room. First I have to go halfway, and then prior to that, half of that half, and prior to that half of that half, and so on. And similarly, it is an interesting puzzle as to how I can have certain, objective and universal knowledge given the various skeptical possibilities that one can raise. But, all the same, we do not seriously think that Zeno’s paradoxes show that space and time do not exist, nor do most of us suppose that the skeptical paradoxes cast any doubt on the existence of knowledge. We now regard knowledge as no longer in question, in the way that it was very much in question in the seventeenth century, and, in consequence, we can now start philosophy on the assumption of the basic facts.
Second, just as skepticism is no longer at the center of philosophy, I think it is fair to say that the philosophy of language is no longer at the center of philosophy. It was the center of philosophy for nearly a century, partly because many people felt that other philosophical problems could only be resolved by using linguistic methods, but also because it was widely accepted among analytic philosophers that all thought requires language. This is a mistake. Human language is an extension of more biologically fundamental forms of intentionality such as perception and action, as well as belief and desire, and we need to see language as derivative from these more basic, biological forms of intentionality. I think that this is actually a major change in analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy was originally invented as a form of the philosophy of language, employing Frege’s mathematical logic both as a tool and as exhibiting the underlying logical structure of real languages. I am proposing that we should treat language not as the foundational subject matter of philosophy but as itself the expression of more biologically fundamental forms of intentionality. We need to base our analysis of language on analyses of prelinguistic forms of intentionality.
Third, philosophy in my intellectual childhood was pursued in a piecemeal fashion. The idea was that it was a mistake to pursue general theories. First we need to get clear about a number of small, specific issues. We need to make a whole lot of distinctions and clarifications by way of clearing the ground before we would be in a position to state general theories. I think much of this groundwork has been successful and we now are in a position to advance very general accounts of mind, language, rationality, society, etc., and, in fact, I have attempted to do that. Systematic large-scale philosophy is now possible in a way that, though it was not impossible, it was certainly discouraged a half century ago.
Fourth, there is now no sharp distinction between philosophy and other disciplines. In my intellectual childhood it was regarded as essential to understand that philosophy consisted in conceptual analysis and that this is quite different from any sort of empirical investigation. Now, many philosophers, and I am one, think it is not always possible to make a sharp distinction between conceptual and empirical issues, and indeed, in my own work I rely heavily on all sorts of empirical results.
With this all-too-brief presentation of eight major problem areas in philosophy, a discussion of some of the relations between them, and a few remarks about the current situation in philosophy that I think makes a different approach to these problems possible, I am now at last in a position to say something about the two chapters that form the main substance of this book. The first, “Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology,” which inspired the title of the book, attempts to give an account of the free will problem which would show how it could, in principle at least, achieve an empirical, scientific solution. I cannot give you a solution to the problem of free will, but I hope to be at least able to state the problem in a precise enough form so that we can see what possible solutions would look like. What would the world, specifically our brains, be like if determinism were true, and what would the world, specifically our brains, be like if determinism were false? In the nature of the case, anything we say is very provisional. We don’t know enough about how the brain works, specifically, how it produces consciousness, which it definitely does, and how it gives us the experience of free will, which it definitely does, to enable us to know how the experience of free action could be other than an illusion. We do not know how our conscious experiences of freedom could correspond to an actual fact of freedom.
Some philosophical problems, but unfortunately not very many, can receive scientific solutions. The problem of life is a famous case. We can no longer take seriously the great debates between vitalists and mechanists because we now know enough about the nature of life to understand its biochemical character. I think it is reasonable to suppose that the problem of consciousness will find a similar scientific resolution. If we knew exactly how brain processes cause conscious states, and how those conscious states exist in the brain and how they function causally in our lives, then the traditional mind-body problem would go the way of the traditional vitalism-mechanism problem. The task of the philosopher is to get the problem into a precise enough form, to state the problem carefully enough, so that it admits of a scientific resolution. I have tried to do that with the problem of consciousness in a number of books, and I am trying, in chapter one, to take at least the first steps of doing it with the problem of the freedom of the will.
Some interesting results of the investigation are worth calling attention to. One is, to my surprise, I found that I could not give a satisfactory account of decision making without presupposing the existence of the self. The notion of the self has for centuries been something of a scandal in philosophy, and we are right to think that Hume, with his skeptical account, destroyed any possibility of the conception of the self as some sort of substantive entity that could be the object of experiences. But there are certain formal features of conscious decision making that force us to recognize that one and the same entity is conscious, rational, capable of reflection and capable of decision and action, and therefore of assuming responsibility. This purely formal entity I call the self.
The first chapter in this book is primarily about two of my subject areas, consciousness (1) and free will (5). But of course, it is impossible to discuss consciousness and free will without discussing intentionality (2) and rationality (4). The second chapter also fits into the problematic I have attempted to describe. Society and institutions (6), and their relations to politics (7), can only be properly understood in light of a theory of the constitutive role of language (3) in the construction of social and therefore political reality. Essentially, chapter two is an attempt to apply my account of institutional reality, originally stated in The Construction of Social Reality, to the special problem of political power. It rests on the claim that human power relations have a feature not found in the relations of other animals, namely, that we create institutional structures which are, above all, enabling. Institutional structures, such as money, property and government, increase our power enormously, and they also enable us to regulate and organize our lives within the institutional structures that we have created. It is characteristic of these structures that they give agents reasons for action. They provide them with motivation for acting within an institutional system, whether it is a university, a church, a state or a ski club. The institutional structure gives us deontic powers, that is to say, powers that involve rights, duties, obligations, requirements, permissions, authorizations, etc. And all of these are essentially constituted by language in that only a creature that has language can create, recognize, and act on such powers.
The key notion in the analysis of institutional reality is the notion of a status function. Many objects and people, such as knives and bicyclists, can perform certain functions, such as cutting or riding a bicycle, strictly in virtue of their physical structure and the powers that result from the physical structure. But humans differ from other animals in that we have a large number of powers that derive from institutional structures, where the powers derive from the fact that the object or person in question is assigned a certain status and with that status a function that can only be performed in virtue of the collective acceptance of that status. Being President of the United States, being a twenty-dollar bill and being private property are all forms of status functions because the objects in question do not derive their capacity to perform their functions in virtue of their physical structure, but rather in virtue of the fact that there is collective acceptance of these sorts of objects as having a certain status and with that status a function that derives from the collective acceptance of that status. I hope it is clear that there is an implicit conception of the political in this conception even though I have stated it very briefly here. Political power in general differs from simple sheer brute physical power in that it rests on a system of status functions and with those status functions a set of deontic powers of the sorts that I have just mentioned. This is, incidentally, why the question of legitimation is crucial in all modern political societies. There has to be an answer to the question: Why should we accept the system of deontic powers?
While the second chapter is very much provisional, and work in progress, I see it as opening the way to a vastly more extended investigation that I have begun but not yet completed.
1. I am indebted to Romelia Drager and Dagmar Searle for comments on earlier versions of this introduction. I thank Jennifer Hudin for preparing the index.
2. John R. Searle, Liberté et neurobiologie: Réflexions sur le libre arbitre, le langage et le pouvoir politique, ed. and trans. Patrick Savidan (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2004).
3. First published in English in F. Schmitt, ed., Socializing Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 195-210.
4. I have discussed these problems about consciousness and the related problems about intentionality in a number of works, especially:
Minds, Brains and Science, The 1984 Reith Lectures (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1984); (London: Penguin, 1989); (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).
The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: A New York Review Book, 1997); (London: Granta Books, 1997).
Mind: A Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
5. For more details, see John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
6. Some of the books in which I have discussed the philosophy of language are:
Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind.
7. For further discussion of rationality, see Rationality in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).
8. Especially in The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995).
9. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971).
10. P. Laslett in Philosophy, Politics and Society wrote “For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.” See Peter Laslett, ed., introduction to Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1956), vii.
11. “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’“ Philosophical Review 73 (January 1964).
12. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind.
The Mystery of Consciousness.
Mind: A Brief Introduction.
“Minds, Brains and Programs,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1980).
13. Sir John Eccles, “Culture: The Creation of Man and the Creator of Man,” in Mind and Brain: The Many-Faceted Problem, ed. Sir John Eccles (Washington, D.C.: Paragon House, 1982), 66. See also Sir Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), chaps. 3 and 4.
14. Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of Nature (London: Jonathon Cape, 2004).
15. Eccles, “Culture,” 65.
16. W. V. O. Quine, “On What There Is,” reprinted in From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper and Row, 1953).