Review: Consciousness, the Brain and the Connection Principle: A Reply

John R. Searle

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 55, No. 1. (Mar., 1995), pp. 217-232.

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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Vol. LV,NO. 1, March 1995

Consciousness, the Brain and the

Connection Principle: A Reply
.
JOHN R SEARLE
University of Califarnia at Berkeley

I am very grateful for these thoughtful and intelligent comments and I will
try to answer every main objection. Discussions like this typically have a
disjointed quality because the author is expected to answer a series of appar-
ently unrelated objections coming from commentators with different and often
inconsistent points of view. So it is a good idea to remind ourselves at the
beginning that The Rediscovery of the Mind attempts to offer a single coher-
ent vision of the mind and its relations to other natural phenomena.

Reply to Jaegwon Kim

Kim's paper raises a very large number of points. I believe that our views are
close enough and he is a sympathetic enough reader that it should be possible
to reach agreement. In my experience, whenever you have a philosophical
problem that just seems impossible to solve, it is usually because you are
making some unnoticed mistaken assumption elsewhere. In the case of the so
called mind-body problem part of our difficulty is that we were assuming that
in their most naive and pretheoretical sense, "mental" and "physical," whether
used to name properties or substances, name metaphysically exclusive cate-
gories. Other assumptions have to do with causation and reduction and these
are especially important to Kim's paper, as we will see.
There are two misunderstandings that I want to clear up at the beginning.
First, he thinks that the model of different levels or layers of description of a
system (call it "levelism" for short) is generated by the relation "being a
part," that levelism is an instance of the part-whole relation. But this is at
best misleading. As Kim is aware, solidity and liquidity are features of physi-
cal systems at a level higher than that of molecules, but solidity and liquidity
are not parts of the molecules nor are they parts of the system composed of
molecules. If levelism amounted to the part-whole relation then it would be
quite superiluous. It is precisely because there are higher level features of sys-
tems that are not parts of the system that we need levelism in the first place.

SEARLE SYMPOSIUM 217

 Second, and more important, he thinks that levelism is an alternative to
Cartesianism. He cannot see why I claim that current debates are wedded to
the Cartesian model given that the layer model is widely accepted: "It's a
mystery why Searle claims.. .that current debates on the mind-body problems
are still inextricably wedded to the Cartesian model of a bifurcated world." But
the layer model, i.e. levelism, is perfectly consistent with Cartesianism.
They are answers to two quite different questions. Cartesianism is an answer
to the question, "How many metaphysical categories are there?' Levelism is
an answer to the question, "How is physical reality organized?" It is perfectly
consistent for someone who accepts levelism to accept or reject Cartesianism.
For example, I reject dualism but accept levelism; Sir John Eccles accepts
dualism and also accepts levelism. So there is no mystery about how I can at
one and the same time be aware that sane people accept levelism, but I also
lament the fact that some otherwise sane people take the Cartesian categories
of "mental" and "physical" quite seriously.
I now turn to his main worry: How can I have causally efficacious con-
sciousness, given the rest of my commitments? If all mental states are caused
by brain processes, but some mental states cause other mental states then
aren't some mental states causally overdetermined? If M causes M* but B*
also causes M*, then we seem to have overdetermination. Furthermore how
can we have downward causation where the higher level conscious state
causes a lower level brain state? Surely downward causation exists; but, says
Kim, "Downward causation prima facie implies failure of causal closure at
the lower level." He sums up his questions as follows: "How can we make
sense of the relation of these three causal relations at the same time?"
I think Kim is in the grip of the traditional philosopher's Humean billiard
ball conception of causation whereby eausation is always a relation among
discrete events, and causes must temporally precede effects. He says almost as
much: "Causation suggests causal mechanism and a time gap between cause
and effect." Well, some cause and effect relations fit the billiard ball model,
but not all. Kim's paper suffers from a lack of discussion of examples, so
let's get some examples out to make the relations clear. Consider a block of
ice. The solidity of the ice is causally explained by the behavior of the
molecules (crudely, it's because the molecules make vibratory motions in lat-
tice structures). Now consider water in a liquid state. The liquidity of the wa-
ter is causally explained by the behavior of the molecules (crudely, it's be-
cause the molecules are rolling over each other in a random fashion). Neither
causal relation involves a time gap nor a mechanism. In fact, the solidity and
liquidity are just features of the system made up of the molecules. Liquidity
and solidity are caused by the behavior of micro-elements while realized in the
system made up of these micro-elements. Now suppose I cause a block of ice
to go into a liquid state by heating it. What is the causal explanation of the

218 JOHN R . SEARLE

subsequent liquid state of the water? There are (at least) three consistent an-
swers, each given at a different level
1. I heated the ice. (top level, left to right across time)
2. An increase in energy caused an increase in molecule movement.
(bottom level, left to right across time)
3. The molecules are moving over each other in a random fashion.
(bottom up, no time gap).
Does this imply overdetermination? Not at all. The same system is being
described at different levels. Furthermore my heating the ice causes the change
in molecule movements. Does this downward causation imply "failure of
causal closure at the lower level?" Not at all. Top down causation always
works across time, and it works because the top level is grounded in the
lower levels. In short, the same system admits of different causal descriptions
at different levels all of which are consistent and none of which implies either
overdetermination or failure of causal closure. Nor, by the way, does anything
here imply that heat, liquidity and solidity are epiphenomenal. Much of the
point of levelism is to recognize causally real levels of description where, in
some cases at least, the higher levels are both caused by the behavior of ele-
ments at the lower levels and realized in the system composed of those ele-
ments.
Now let's apply all these lessons to the brain and consciousness. I now,
let us suppose, have a conscious feeling of pain. This is caused by patterns of
neuron firings and is realized in the system of neurons. Suppose the pain
causes a desire to take an aspirin. The desire is also caused by patterns of neu-
ron firings and is realized in the system of neurons. These relations are ex-
actly parallel to the case of the ice and the water. I can truly say both that my
pain caused my desire and that sequences of neuron firings caused other se-
quences. These are two different but consistent descriptions of the same sys-
tem given at different levels.
But what about downward causation and causal closure? If someone says
to me "Secrete acetylcholine at the axon end plates of your motorneurons or I
will blow your brains out!" I will swiftly do some downward causation, e.g.
by trying to raise my arm, which I know will cause the secretion of the
acetylcholine. Here the higher order mental state causes the lower order phys-
iological event. This does not imply failure of causal closure, overdetermina-
tion, epiphenomenalism or any other paradoxes; and this is because the top
level, though causally real, is realized in the lower levels and, to repeat, top
down causation works across time.'

These parallelograms of causation at different levels are described in more detail in

Chapter 10 of Searle, Intentionality, An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

SEARLE SYMPOSIUM 219

 Of course, we do not know in detail how brain processes cause mental
states; and except in a few cases, we do not have clear evidence for the exact
localization in the brain of mental phenomena. But the mysteries are empiri-
cal mysteries about how exactly the system works, not metaphysical myster-
ies about how consciousness could have the relations I claim it has.
Now what about reduction? Doesn't the irreducibility of consciousness
force us to "property dualism"? I devote a whole chapter to this issue in the
Rediscovery and I will not repeat the arguments except to say two things.
First, the failure of reduction of consciousness is not so much a problem
about consciousness as it is about the ambiguities in the notion of reduction.
Consciousness is "irreducible" for trivial reasons having to do with our
definitional practices. Second, a related point, we need to distinguish those
forms of reduction that are eliminative, that show that there was really noth-
ing there in the first place, and those that are not eliminative, that "reduce" an
"emergent" property such as solidity to its causal bases by redefinition. For
the first sort of case you can't reduce anything that really exists, and since
consciousness really exists it is irreducible. It is "reducible" in the second
sense, like any other "emergent" property, but for reasons I try to explain in
detail, if you make the reduction you lose most of the point of having the
concept in the first place. So because of the pragmatics of our definitional
practices, we refuse to make the second sort of reduction.
One last point: Kim asks rhetorically, "Can we seriously think that bio-
logical theories must include references to mental phenomena as causal
agents?" The answer is: of course we can, and indeed we must. Biology has to
appeal to consciousness to explain all sorts of animal phenomena. Look at
any textbook of ethology for countless examples. The famous four F's of an-
imal behavior, fighting, fleeing, feeding and fornicating, are all conscious in-
tentional forms of behavior and you could not begin to describe their role in
animal life without thinking of them as "causal agents."
There are some lessons to be drawn from this discussion. If we can just
forget about what Descartes -andlots of others said about res cogitans and res
extensa and forget about what Hume said about causation and actually try to
describe the facts from close up, then many-not a l l - o f our problems disap-
pear. Property dualism, reductionism, epiphenomenalism, causal overdeter-
mination, etc, were not really philosophical results, but symptoms of the fact
that we were making some basic mistakes.

Reply to Pierre Jacob

I think that most of Jacob's objections to my views rest on certain misunder-
standings, and consequently most of my response will be devoted to clarify-
ing my views.

220 JOHN R . SEARLE

 1. He says my view of the mind body relation is "fairly standard physical-
ism." As a matter of recent history, I do not believe this, is true, because I
can't find very many "fairly standard physicalists" who accept it. Most stan-
dard physicalists want some form of reduction of the mental to the physical
and this is precisely a view I reject. They want this because they think that to
accept the existence of irreducible first person, subjective, qualitative mental
phenomena is inconsistent with the contemporary scientific view that the
world consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force. I also reject the
claim that these views are inconsistent: I believe you can consistently accept
physics and chemistry, while also accepting that the world contains subjec-
tive, qualitative, first person, mental phenomena. Furthermore most standard
physicalists think that if we accept that mental states are caused by brain pro-
cesses then we are forced to some kind of dualism. I also reject this.
I believe that the arguments I provide show that it is at least possible that
mental states are higher level features of the brain and that at the same time
brain processes cause mental states. This runs counter to the standard views,
physicalist or otherwise. In fact many physicalists mistakenly accuse me of
property dualism. See the article by Kim for example. But given their
other-to my mind also mistaken-assumptions, it is easy to see why fairly
standard physicalists think I must be a property dualist. They think, with
Kim, that the irreducibility of consciousness to something else just is prop-
erty dualism. They are wrong about that. Property dualism is the view that
the universe contains two and only two distinct types of properties, mental
properties and physical properties. The irreducibility of the mental to the
physical is supposed to follow from this distinction. I reject property dual-
ism.
2. Jacob misunderstands the consequences of the claim that functions are
always observer-relative. He thinks it would have the consequence that you
could not discover functions in nature. But that does not follow. Harvey did
indeed discover that the function of the heart is to pump blood, but he made
that discovery by discovering a whole lot of facts about the heart and these
facts are situated relative to a teleology which is more or less universally ac-
cepted. Thus the discovery that the heart does in fact pump blood and that the
pumping of blood is essential to the survival of the organism are constitutive
of the discovery that the function of the heart is to pump blood, but only
within an observer-relative teleology that values life and survival.
On my account there are at least two forms that the discovery of functions
can take. First, one can discover biological functions within a presupposed
teleology that values life and survival, as well as such related teleologies as
accurate vision, growth, digestion, etc. Second, one can discover functions
that others have imposed on phenomena. One can discover for example, that
such and such marks functioned as symbols for the Mayans. Thus, on my

SEARLE SYMPOSIUM 221

view and contrary to his interpretation of me, linguists can indeed discover
that languages have certain syntactical properties.
3. But, asks Jacob, what about the argument that functions are observer-
relative?
Actually, I develop the argument in more detail in The Construction of
Social Reality (forthcoming) but for present purposes the basic point can be
stated simply: The notion of a function, unlike the notion of cause, is a nor-
mative notion. This is shown by the fact that the terminology of "functions"
automatically introduces normative criteria of assessment. Thus we speak of
malfunctioning hearts, heart disease, better and worse hearts, etc. We do not
speak of better and worse stones, unless we have already assigned a function
by, for example, deciding to use the stone as a paperweight, or a projectile, or
an objet d'art trouve. But apart from conscious agents who assign norms, na-
ture knows nothing of norms.
Suppose somebody got an analysis of functions that was purely naturalis-
tic and intrinsic. Then they would have left out the normative component.
The analyses by Wright and Millikan that Jacob appeals to are subject to ob-
vious counterexamples based on the normative character of functional attribu-
tions. Millikan denies that she is trying to analyze the ordinary notion of
function, but on her and Wright's analysis (if I understand her), we would
have to say that the function of colds is to spread cold germs. Colds do in fact
spread cold germs. One of the reasons they exist is that they spread cold
germs. They are reproductions of previous cold germ spreaders, etc. But on
the ordinary notion of function, this is absurd; because colds do not have a
function, or if they do it is not to spread cold germs.
4. Jacob's main worry is about the Connection Principle. On my view an
essential prerequisite for successful research in cognitive science is to keep a
clear distinction between those processes that are genuinely cognitive, hence
mental, from those that are not. Where conscious thought processes are con-
cerned there is no problem. These are paradigmatically mental. But what
about unconscious thought processes? What is the criterion that distinguishes
them from all the other "information processing" events in the brain and in
the rest of nature that have no psychological reality at all? I have never seen
anything like a satisfactory answer to this question in mainstream cognitive
science literature. My main argument is in the form of a challenge: what fact
about a state makes it mental when it is unconscious? Furthermore a mini-
mal condition on any adequate answer is that it must show how unconscious
mental states admit the ascription of determinate aspectual shapes. Thinking
about a rabbit is not the same as thinking about undetached rabbit parts even
though the external stimulus may be the same for producing both sorts of
thoughts. Any theory that can't make the distinction is thereby refuted. The
only answer I can come up with to this question is this: the very intentional
state which is ascribed to the unconscious agent must be consciously think-

222 .
JOHN R SEARLE
able with that content by the agent. Of course, actual accessibility to con-
sciousness may be blocked by brain lesions, repression, drunkenness, sleep,
inattention, forgetfulness, etc.; but this does not alter the fact that if an un-
conscious mental state is intrinsically mental and not just "as-if' or observer-
relative, it must be the sort of intentional state that in principle is accessible
to consciousness.
Jacob objects to this view by citing the examples of blindsight and sub-
liminal perception. But these are not really objections, indeed I thought I had
dealt with these sorts of cases in the text: There is nothing in principle inac-
cessible to consciousness about the blind sight intentional content or the sub-
liminal perception. Rather, in the former case, the patient has a deficit, a
pathology that prevents these contents from being conscious; he has a hole in
his brain. In the latter case the intentional content is precisely the sort of con-
tent that is typically conscious but in these cases the stimulus does not get
over the threshold of conscious perception.
But, asks Jacob, since any unconscious process could similarly be acces-
sible to consciousness, doesn't this render the Connection Principle vacuous?
No, the CP is not vacuous. It is meant, inter alia, to challenge the forms of
explanation in cognitive science which cite deep unconscious mental pro-
cesses that are not even the sorts of things that could be the contents of con-
sciousness. When, for example, the linguist tells us that the child follows the
rule, move alpha, the expression "move alpha" does not repeat an intentional
content that might have been conscious. The case is not like that of Freud
telling us that the child has an unconscious hatred of his father. Rather "move
alpha" is the theorists' characterization of a process which is itself not even a
possible conscious content. So even if you had a genius child who said over
and over to himself "move alpha," ybu still haven't got the right content.
Now my argument is in part a challenge: tell me what makes these processes
mental.
Jacob's discussion of the the Connection Principle rests on two further
misunderstandings that I would like to correct.
First, he confuses intentionality-with-a-t and intentionality-with-an-s. In-
tentionality-with-an-s is a property of sentences by which they fail certain
tests for extensionality, such as Leibniz's Law. Intentionality-with-a-t is the
property of the mind by which it is capable of representing objects and states
of affairs in the world. Intentional-with-a-t states always have aspectual
shapes, and because of this, sentences about intentional-with-a-t states are
typically intentional-with-an-s sentences. But it is a kind of use-mention con-
fusion to think that aspectual shape is thereby a form of intensionality-with-
an-s. I have elsewhere tried to give a detailed explanation of the relations of
intentionality-with-an-s and intentionality-with-a-t.2

Intentionality, ch. 7.

SEARLE SYMPOSIUM 223

 Second, 1 think that Jacob manifests a very deep misunderstanding of my
view when he takes the Connection Principle as implying that the only
ground for discriminating different aspectual shapes is conscious perceptual
experiences. And in general he seems to think that when I talk about con-
sciousness I am only talking about perceptual experiences. This misunder-
standing is the source of his "deep puzzlement." He points out that just hav-
ing a visual experience will not necessarily serve to discriminate thinking
about something as a rabbit or as undetached rabbit parts, and just drinking
and looking at a liquid may not serve to distinguish thinking about it as wa-
ter and thinking about it as H20. He asks, "How on earth could my conscious
gustatory or visual experience of a glass of water account for the above differ-
ences in aspectual shape?" (between wanting water and wanting H20). He is
right about this, but it has no bearing whatever on my views. Conscious per-
ceptual experiences are only one form of consciousness. The distinction be-
tween the thought that this is water and the thought that it is H20 comes out
trivially and sufficiently in the difference between consciously thinking that it
is water and consciously thinking that it is H20. To paraphrase his question,
why on earth does he think the only form-of consciousness is conscious per-
ceptual experiences? Consciously thinking about something is also a form of
consciousness. In fact, since William James sequences of such thoughts have
typically been called the "the stream of consciousness."
When these misunderstandings are cleared up I really do not believe there
is a serious disagreement between Jacob and me.

Reply to Robert Van Gulick

Whereas I think I could come to complete agreement with Jacob and Kim, the
situation with Van Gulick is different. Tie writes "from a functionalist per-
spective," and thus he writes from a set of assumptions that are totally at
odds with mine. The chapter in The Rediscovery that he is criticizing was not
designed to refute functionalism, but I believe that I and many others have
advanced arguments sufficient to refute it. The general form of these refuta-
tions is that something could satisfy the functionalist criteria for mentality
but still not have the relevant mental states. It could satisfy the functionalist
criteria for understanding Chinese and still not understand Chinese, for exam-
ple. From his point of view it seems that I am begging the question by as-
suming that functionalism is wrong. But from my point of view his argu-
ment is a bit like saying, "Suppose 2+2=7. Couldn't we get some exciting
results?'Well, I suppose we could, but 2+2 does not equal 7. Is this begging
the question?
The basic difference between us comes out when he cheerfully accepts re-
sults that I regard as a reductio ad absurdum of his position. It is an objection
I have frequently made to functionalism that on this view the mind is more or
 less everywhere. Functionalism of his sort would have the result, for exam-
ple, that stomachs really do have intentionality, real mental contents, and not
just as-if intentionality. It is just that the mental contents in the digestive
tract are not in every respect like the mental contents in the brain. He is a bit
bashful about saying straight out that stomachs have a mental life of their
own, but it is clear that if the account of the stomach I quote from Pharma-
cology is correct, then it is, in Van Gulick's words, "acquiring and respond-
ing to information in a genuinely intentional sense." So he has to say that
stomachs literally have a mental life. I think this is an absurd result. As far
as we know anything at all about how the world works, stomachs don't think
consciously and they don't think unconsciously either. Nor will it do to say
that they do a kind of thinking that is sort of like our thinking but not quite
like it in every respect. Stomachs are not in the mental line of business at
all.
The standard answer to this objection, the one to which Van Gulick im-
plicitly appeals is to say that they do "information processing," as he puts it,
they are "responding to information in a genuinely intentional sense." But the
same problem arises with "information" that already arose for "mental" and
"intentional." Either we are talking about intrinsic information processing, of
the sort which occurs, for example, when I consciously figure out how to get
from my house to the airport, or we are talking about observer-relative or as-
if forms of information processing of the sort which occurs in commercial
computers. There is indeed as-if information processing in the stomach, but it
is of no psychological interest whatever, because there are no real psycholog-
ical states in the stomach. I really don't know what to say to someone who
thinks that the stomach really has a mental life of its own. It is not even a
candidate for mental states. I am somewhat embarrassed to point out that he
feels it necessary to deny these obvious points but the plain fact is that he
does.
Van Gulick thinks that I am tacitly conceding his point that mental life is
all a matter of degree when I say that we might not know what to say about
the mental life of grasshoppers and fleas. But he misunderstands my claim
here. The point is that we do not know enough about fleas and grasshoppers
to know whether they really do have consciousness, and if so, whether they
have the sort of consciousness that admits of intrinsic intentionality. The
problem is epistemic, it is a matter of our ignorance. I am emphatically not
claiming that mental life is spread around the world more or less generally,
but that we are not sure how much we should attribute to fleas and grasshop-
pers, and perhaps they are only entitled to marginal amounts.
Van Gulick says "the real issue of contention ...is how much can a state
differ from our paradigm examples of conscious mentality and still be gen-
uinely mental." I don't think that is the real issue of contention, or rather it
can only become an issue if the real issue is already made clear: what are the

SEARLE SYMPOSIUM 225

essential features which make it the case that something is mental in the first
place. I try to provide an answer to this question. Van Gulick has a function-
alist answer which, as I said, has the absurd result that he is forced to say of
all sorts of things that have no mental life whatever, that they have real men-
tal states, even if their mental states are not in every respect iike our con-
scious mental states. He thinks he can draw the line between the mental and
the nonmental in some fairly plausible place, but he does not tell us how he
could do it. If it turns out that stomachs and totally nonconscious processes
in the visual system (he gives no examples) have real mental states, then
what is to prevent us from attributing mental states to the grass growing in
my yard? He thinks he can give an account that includes the one but not the
other but he does not tell us how. My view is that for any information pro-
cessing story that he can tell that shows that stomachs have a mental life I
can construct a parallel story about information processing in grass. But since
his whole account is promissory and programmatic we do not know where to
go with it.
It might seem there is nothing more to be said, but I think in fact there is
a discussable issue between us over my step 4, which as he correctly sees is a
crucial, perhaps the crucial, step. However the debates about functionalism in
general turn out, this is still an interesting issue.
On my account, because the ontology of the mental is essentially a first
person ontology, no third person account can capture the fully determinate
aspectual shapes in the mind of the agent. You might give neurobiological
causes sufficient to determine the aspectual shape, but the identification of the
causes is still not an identification of the effect. You might give the behav-
ioral or functional correlates of aspectual shape, but this still leaves you with
an underdetermination in the characterization of the aspectual shape in the
mind of the agent. Van Gulick's response to this is as follows:
Searle seems to assume that if one bases one's account of content on facts about behavior
and its causation one must individuate mental states in a fully transparent way; he implies
that such an account lacks any basis for distinguishing among alternative ways in which an
agent might conceptualize the object of his attitudes. But surely this is false. One can for ex-
ample be a functionalist and appeal to facts about the overall organization of the agent's be-
havior and the internal causal structure that produces it to draw just such distinctions.

But this answer is not good enough, because it still attempts to describe
first person phenomena from a third person point of view. The problem that
his argument does not meet is that the characterization of the intentionality
from the third person point of view must match the actual subjective inten-
tional content in the mind of the agent. But any such account solely in terms
of behavior and causation fails, because it leaves a slack, an underdetermina-
tion, since alternative hypotheses about intentional content are consistent

226 JOHN R . SEARLE

with any and all causal and behavioral evidence. Any description in purely
third person terms always leaves the first person ontology underdetermined.
The most revealing passage in his article comes right after this where he
tries to support the claim with the example of his daughter:
The reason why it is appropriate to say my six year old daughter wants a glass of water and
not that she wants a glass of H20, is that she lacks the many relevant capacities and tenden-
cies for behavior (both linguistic and nonlinguistic) and for internal processing that would
constitute understanding the concepts of "hydrogen," "oxygen," and "molecular compound-
ing."

I am sure that this passage seems perfectly reasonable to Van Gulick, but
I want to call attention to how extremely counterintuitive it is. Indeed, I be-
lieve it is exactly wrong. Notice that he is trying to give an account of the
girl's first person mental life solely in terms of third person facts. But the
facts we are trying to describe are matters of how it seems to the girl, not
matters of her "tendencies for behavior." I think it is obvious that the reason
why it is "appropriate" to say she wants water and not H20 is that the one
claim is true and the other false. That is, on the relevant assumptions, it is
just a plain intrinsicfirst person fact about her psychology that she has one
desire and not the other. Furthermore we know that she couldn't have the sec-
ond desire unless she had a lot of other first person intrinsic intentional states
involving the concepts of hydrogen, etc. These intrinsic intentional facts will
have causal consequences, but they are certainly not constituted by any third
person ontology consisting of "capacities and tendencies for behavior." Hav-
ing the actual intentional thought processes is one thing, the behavior is
something else, and this distinction gets lost in the behaviorist and function-
alist accounts. And the mistake is always the same: You cannot reduce the
first person ontology to the third person facts.
The causal relations and the behavior will be evidence for the presence of
intrinsic intentionality, but as is generally the case with evidence, the hy-
pothesis of the intentional states is underdetermined by the evidence. The
same underdetermination that we had for water and Hz0 will come up again
for hydrogen, oxygen and chemical compounding. The point is that to my
knowledge no one has ever given an adequate behaviorist or functionalist ac-
count of any intentional content and I am suggesting reasons why they will
not succeed in their efforts. Van Gulick points out that I do not prove that it
is impossible, but contrary to what he says I do give reasons, and the correct
reply to me would be to provide such an account-something neither Van
Gulick nor anyone else has done.
Since the argument was unclear to him let me spell it out in more detail.
If somebody tries to give you a theory about the mind, always try it out first
on your own case. If somebody tells you that they can give a functionalist
account of mental content which gives the same determinate aspectual shape

SEARLE SYMPOSIUM 227

that you in fact have, you will notice an interesting result: The description of
the third person facts about behavior and causal relations is consistent with
different and inconsistent attributions of intentionality. So, to take a famous
example, suppose you think the thing in front of you is a rabbit. Now some-
one observing your behavior and causal relations will be able reasonably to
come up with an enormous amount of evidence that you think it is a rabbit.
But if she were a functionalist and mistakenly thought the evidence was con-
stitutive of the thought, she would find that the evidence was not only con-
sistent with the hypothesis that you were thinking about a rabbit, but that it
was also consistent with and equally supportive of a lot of inconsistent hy-
potheses, such as that you were thinking of the thing as stage in the life his-
tory of a rabbit, an instantiation of rabbithood, or a collection of undetached
rabbit parts. And as a functionalist committed to an attempt to provide a third
person account of your intrinsic first person intentionality, she would have to
conclude that there was simply no fact of the matter about which you were
thinking. But you, from your first person point of view know for a fact that
you were thinking about the thing under the aspectual shape "rabbit" and not
under such bizarre shapes as "undetached rabbit parts," etc. And this point can
be generalized: the third person evidence always underdetermines a first person
ontology. There is nothing wrong with that; it is the usual underdetermina-
tion of hypothesis by evidence. But if someone tried to take the third person
phenomena as constitutive of the first person intentionality, the underdeter-
mination would result in indeterminacy, and the indeterminacy is inconsistent
with the actual first person facts. Therefore, any such account of aspectual
shape is false.
There is also a confusion in Van Gulick about the determinacy of content.
He thinks that because cats and small children cannot conceptualize in as fine
grained a manner as we can that their intentional states are thereby indetermi-
nate. He thinks in short that lack of specificity in the fixing conditions of
satisfaction is the same as indeterminacy. But it is not. In the case of inde-
terminacy, there is simply no fact of the matter about what the intentional
content is, in the case of lack of specificity there is just a large range of pos-
sible conditions of satisfaction within the fully determinate intentional con-
tent. If I want a red shirt there may be a range of possible shades of red that
will satisfy me, but that does not prove that there is no fact of the matter
about what my desire is, that my desire is indeterminate. Vagueness is not
indeterminacy. So it is no answer to my account to say that some intentional
contents are vague. It is beside the point.
He concludes by presenting me with a dilemma: either "aspectual shape"
implies phenomenal representation and fully determinate content or it does
not. If the former then the account is "question-begging," if the latter then
there is still room for functionalists to do their thing. Well, normal aspectual
shape does imply (modulo the Network and the Background and ignoring var-

228 JOHN R . SEARLE

ious pathological cases) determinate content, which of course may be more or
less vague. But there is nothing question begging there. What about
"phenomenal representation"? If he means consciousness, then in the end as-
pectual shape does imply accessibility to consciousness but not without extra
steps in the argument, so there is nothing question begging there either. The
crucial extra step is that aspectual shape is not constituted by third person
facts about behavior, neurophysiology, etc. To refute that step you would
need to provide me with a proof that aspectual shape is so constituted, or at
least provide me with some examples of how aspectual shape could be so
constituted or at least provide an answer to the argument I stated above. Van
Gulick has not done any of this, nor has anyone else.

Reply to Brian Garrett

I will be relatively brief in answering Garrett's paper because many of the is-
sues he raises were raised by the other authors and I feel I have already an-
swered them. Like Kim he accepts the Humean tradition that sees causation
only as a relation between events ordered sequentially in time, and like Jacob
he confuses intentionality-with-an-s and intentionality-with-a-t. And like
most other philosophers he accepts a set of categories that I am arguing
against. At least some, though by no means all, of his points rest on misun-
derstandings.
His paper divides into two parts, the first about reducibility the second
about the Connection Principle. My main misgiving about his discussion of
reducibility is that he accepts uncritically precisely the set of categories that I
am trying to challenge. He uses expressions such as "reducible,"
"supervenience," "the unity of science" with neither embarrassment nor irony;
and he contrasts property identity theories with property dualism. He mistak-
enly takes me as trying to reconcile the irreducibility of consciousness with
"the unity of science." But I do not use the expression "the unity of science"
nor do I believe in anything that could reasonably be called by that name. I
believe we live in one world (not two or three or seventeen), but that what we
call the "sciences" approach that world with many different interests and from
different directions. Both mathematical physics and mathematical economics
are about the same world, but they are not two parts of some "unified sci-
ence." In that one world there are lots of different features: biological, electri-
cal, economic, geographical, mental, moral, esthetic, etc. In some sense, all
of these are "physical," because the world consists entirely of physical enti-
ties.
He wonders why I object to the identity theorists since they also claim
that mental states are brain states. But the typical identity theorist who as-
serts that mental states are brain states makes that claim in order to deny that
mental states are irreducible, subjective, phenomenological, inner, qualitative,

SEARLE SYMPOSIUM 229

etc. That is, the traditional identity theorist thinks that to acknowledge the
obvious facts of our inner mental life would be inconsistent with this thor-
oughgoing "materialism." The traditional identity theorist therefore accepts
what I call conceptual dualism.
Perhaps the best way I can answer Garrett's queries is by stating my views
in a way I hope will address both his objections and his misunderstandings.
First, what about the irreducibility of consciousness? In my view the
problem of the irreducibility of consciousness is not a problem about con-
sciousness but about reducibility. I point out several ambiguities in the no-
tion of reducibility. The sense in which consciousness is irreducible to
physics is the sense in which money is irreducible to physics. The irre-
ducibility of money does not commit us to money-body dualism and the irre-
ducibility of consciousness does not commit us to mind-body dualism.
As I said in reply to Kim, among the many ambiguities in the notion of
reduction we need to distinguish those for& of reductions that are elimina-
tive from those that are not. You cannot perform an eliminative reduction on
anything that really exists. Since consciousness really exists you cannot per-
form an eliminative reduction on it and similarly you cannot perform an
eliminative reduction on five dollars, six points scored by a touchdown in a
football game, or Congressional elections in the state of Kansas. Now the
fact that six points, five dollars, and Congressional elections really exist and
are irreducible is not inconsistent with the fact that the world consists entirely
of physical particles in fields of force. The irreducibility of consciousness is
not an argument for "property dualism," any more than the additional irre-
ducibility of points, dollars, and elections is an argument for property quintu-
plism. What I am trying to get across: this whole vocabulary of "mind" and
"body," "dualism," "monism," "materialism," etc. is hopelessly confused and
out of date.
Garrett's deep commitment to the tradition I am challenging comes out
when he says that if we causally explain the solidity of the piston in terms of
the behavior of the molecules in the alloys, "we are committed to saying that
this particular molecular configuration is a distinct existent from the solidity
of that configuration." I don't know what is meant by "distinct existent" here
but I am precisely challenging the Humean tradition according to which
causes and effects must be discrete events sequentially ordered in time and the
cause must precede the effect. Some causes are like that but by no means all.
Here is an obvious, and I hope uncontroversial, counter example. Look
around you, wherever you are, and you will see a lot of effects of which the
force of gravity is the cause. The fact that the table over there exerts pressure
on the floor is due to the force of gravity, for example. But "gravity" does not
name an event. And it is an enduring feature of the universe, not something
that always happens just before its effects.

230 .
JOHN R SEARLE
 I turn now to Garrett's discussion of the Connection Principle. He is puz-
zled about the notion of aspectual shape, and as I mentioned above, he makes
the all too common confusion of intensionality-with-a-t and intentionality-
with-an-s. Perhaps the best way to explain aspectual shape to analytic
philosophers is to say that it is what Frege was talking about when he used
the notion of a "mode of presentation," it is the aspect under which some-
thing is represented when it is represented.
Garrett has three objections to my account of the Connection Principle.
1. Like van Gulick, he thinks that my claim that there is no constitutive
characterization of aspectual shape in third person terms may "beg the ques-
tion."
I answered this charge in my response to Van Gulick, so I won't repeat
my answer here except to say this: Think of my claim as a challenge: show
me how in my own first person case third person facts about my behavior and
causal relations could be constitutive of my own first person determinate as-
pectual shapes. I claim any such attempt will fail because the third person
facts will be consistent with alternative and inconsistent hypotheses about
my intentionality. Hence since the intentionality is underdetermined by the
third person facts, any attempt to identify the intentionality with those facts
will yield an indeterminacy which my actual first person intentionality does
not have.
My citation of Quine was not as innocent as he took it to be. He thinks I
am endorsing Quine's argument, but I am not. I have argued at length that
Quine's arguments are best viewed as a reductio ad absurdum of his
premise^.^ Quine inadvertently showed that behavioristic analyses of meaning
must fail, because they cannot in principle make the type of discrimination
which we as thinkers about rabbits; undetached rabbit parts and sundry
passing gavagais cheerfully and easily make.
2. He also questions my premise 5, that the ontology of the unconscious
when it is totally unconscious is purely neurophysiological.
Actually, this is for me the crucial premise. I would be convinced that I
was wrong if someone could give me both a clear sense and clear evidence for
the claim that there are inner qualitative subjective mental states going on in
me which are totally unconscious, that consciousness could be pealed off
from mental states, leaving everything else intact. Freud tried mightily to do
this but I think the attempt failed. Take any conscious thought, say "Bill
Clinton is in Europe today," now subtract all consciousness from that
thought. What is left? Well, we do have unconscious thoughts so there must
be something left. My discussion of the Connection Principle is designed to
answer the question about the ontology of the unconscious given that when

Searle, "Indeterminacy, Empiricism and the First Person," Journal of Philosophy

LXXXIV, 3:123-46, 1983.

SEARLE SYMPOSIUM 23 1
you subtract consciousness you subtract the occurrent reality of the mental
with it. My objection to the current cognitive science models of the uncon-
scious is that they do not have an answer to the question, nor do they even
see the difficulties.
3. Finally, he challenges premise 2, that all intentional states have aspec-
tual shape.
This premise is simply an application of the general principle that all rep-
resentation is under some aspect or other, that whenever we represent any ob-
ject or state of affairs, it must be represented as such and such. As I noted ear-
lier, I have expounded this and related ideas in Intentionality, so I did not
think an extensive argument was necessary in this subsequent book.

232 JOHN R. SEARLE