John R. Searle (1932–2025)

Searle at his crankiest. It tells you something about book that he starts off by trash talking centuries of philosophical work on epistemology and perception by diagnosing its preoccupation with reflective analysis of perception and representation as indicative of "The Bad Argument." According to Searle, The Bad Argument is the mistaken belief that when we examine how we look at the world that we can never look past our representative perceptions and, further, that our perceptions are show more themselves accessible for study as objects. He finds the whole enterprise of suggesting that we can perceive ourselves perceiving and take the perception of the perceiving itself as an object of study.

Searle's alternative is a refreshingly simple one: we perceive the world as we do because that is how it is. He is careful to maintain a strict division between the ontologically objective world (and its various states of affairs) that exist whether we are perceiving it or not and the ontologically subjective world of experiences that exists independently of the objective world. The clever thing about Searle's argument is that he says that our perception of the world is always aspective (i.e., seen from a particular vantage point) and intentional (i.e., our perception asserts an understanding). The objects in the world, if they are capable of doing so, will confirm intentions by meeting their conditions of satisfaction. To borrow one of Searle's examples, if I look outside with the intention of awareness (i.e., it is raining) or belief (i.e., I believe it is raining) and the conditions of satisfaction are present (i.e., rain falls from the sky) and can be understood as causal to my experience then that is real. No messing around with a layer of perception between us and reality. Even hallucinations fail the test because a hallucination is just a subjective intention with no object to satisfy the conditions. There are some interesting "brain in a vat" arguments that offer some resistance, but not much.

I find the argument compelling because it is highly pragmatic, but to me Searle's argument really works best when examining the base perceptual experiences at which more complex perceptual experiences "bottom out." I understand why he does this; it's a central point in his other work as well, that there must be a world of objects out there to which all other perceptions and intentions belong.

The parts of argument that I think are more problematic in Searle's formulation are:
1. Complex forms of intentionality. Belief, awareness, and desire are fine but what about more complex forms of perception like hypothesizing or perception with the intention of action. Is he proposing an additive form of perception where base intentional experiences come together? I think so because he mentions that perceptions are hierarchically organized, but I never found his treatment of this as full or rich or satisfying.

2. Where do our intentions come from? I get those that may be based in the body and our qualitative experiences, but we are social beings and it seems unlikely that our perception intentions are not connected in some way to our identities and interpersonal, political, and professional affiliations. If I'm a climate scientist or a flat earther or a free mason are my intentions wholly my own or are they coming from elsewhere? Maybe the base perceptions are but then we are back at my previous complaint.

3. How strict do conditions of satisfaction need to be? Searle seems to present them as zero/sum (with the nod to aspective ways of seeing them) and when conditions of satisfaction fail to obtain, the experience ... does what? Goes away? Fails? Changes? And are conditions of satisfaction ever ambiguous? Is our awareness of the objective visual field from which we find these conditions of satisfaction ever prejudiced, biased, or in some way partial to finding the evidence that we seek?

But this is what I love about such books. There are open questions here that I will continue to think about.

As for the writing, it's solid and clear and engaging in Searle's typical manner. However, I can see how it would be tough for someone who had not read Searle's other work to start here. show less

John Searle's 'The Construction of Social Reality' (1995) is that rare thing - a work of fairly detailed analytical philosophy that is (mostly) accessible to the intelligent general reader. This is because Searle can write well when he is not 'analysing' and his subject is about how we make sense of things.

I write 'mostly' because it is also engaged in a polemic with his profession and so significant tracts of the book are really only for professionals in philosophy. The section on the show more 'Slingshot Argument' for example can be skimmed and either not understood or cared about by mere mortals.

The argument that matters is neatly summarised by Searle in a page and a half at the very end and really, really lazy readers can just go to that. On the other hand, really, really lazy readers are missing the point of philosophy if they do so.

The core is that, just as mind and body cannot be separated as in the Cartesian fantasy, so our species-biology and our emergent culture cannot be separated. There is an underlying biological structure to culture much as there is an underlying brain structure to the mind.

This meets a socio-political prejudice of mine that humanity is a paradox - a 'hive' species constructing its reality through species-conformity up to a point but with individuals within it having sufficiently independent minds to adapt it creatively to new needs through struggle or persuasion.

Individual consciousness (my view not necessarily Searle's) is genetically adaptive to different degrees in different humans. Creative tension between this individuality and the instinct for social conformity within our many 'hives' (cultures and societies) makes us evolutionarily adaptive.

Without being overly 'Darwinian' (because consciousness has enabled us to move beyond simple genetic competition), individual and social competition in real time creates the thing - humanity - that has become impossible to model or fully control especially by itself.

Searle argues that there is no ontological break between biological and social reality and that consciousness and 'intentionality' are the bridges between them. He puts forward the existence of a collective intentionality that creates social facts that are 'bigger' than their physical baselines.

Examples might be money, religious architecture, sports or nation states. These involve things (such as bits of paper or built things) that have a meaning as a social fact within the collective. It requires the collective to accept them (believe in them) as facts.

Are they facts in the way that the atoms that define the periodic table are facts? No, but Searle argues that they are still facts because they make up a shared social reality that operates as the background to social functionality. The rules of a game are necessary to a game in order for it to be a game.

Here I am more cautious because of the contingency of these facts although Searle argues his case (as you would expect) extremely well and logically. It keeps nagging at me that more of social reality is contingent and liable to collapse than he or we might think or even hope.

Searle recognises that philosophical choices have something to do with personality. For all the sharp logic within its professional framework, there is the American pragmatic liberal wanting social cohesion lurking underneath the analytical scholasticism.

The truth values apparently aligned to the social - shared belief systems - certainly look a lot more contingent in the third decade of the twenty first century than they did to the liberal community of the penultimate decade of the twentieth century.

Searle is protecting something but while his assault on post-modernist philosophical destruction of truth is well-timed and definitely works on its own terms, perhaps he failed to see that the destruction of social truth and so of a shared social reality would emerge from below.

He cannot be blamed for this. The book seems to be partly a rearguard action against philosophy as a out-rider for what was to come. Certainly 'continental philosophy' contributed to the process by which the 'Left' sought to manipulate social reality for political and cultural ends.

It would have been interesting to have his views today on one bio-cultural conflict that might be highly relevant to the 'construction of social reality' - the idea that a human can change gender by an act of conscious will regardless of biological 'facts' previously accepted as absolute.

In fact, the post-modern-cultural Left struggle to change social reality is only part of the picture. The resistance to it also appears to have 'decided' on its own account in a hive-like manner to construct itself around the invention of 'facts' that are mere instruments of political struggle.

As we write, we are reaching perhaps the most interesting stage where geo-political struggle is conducted as 'narrative war' where the combatants not only challenge each other in material terms (physical war) but in terms of culture wars so that telling half-truths and non-truths is normal.

The changes in mass media since the 1990s have unravelled socially shared assumptions imposed by the worker bees of the hive on the drones at the orders of the Queen Bee and have created a new type of drone war where winning is more important at every stage than 'truth'.

Of course, everyone has always lied in war, struggle or competition but the lies are told and repeated despite being known widely to be lies in a completely new way. 'My' lie has become a truth because it strikes at the lies and truth of the opponent. It simply works as expression of sentiment.

This is not a moral complaint at all. The narratives of the Queen Bees were generally fairly shaky as truths in any case. They merely represented the pragmatic consensus that we could call social reality but they worked for cohesion as well as promoting sclerosis and protecting elites.

We are into a new age where it is hard to see where there can be a bridge between Searle's undoubtedly philosophically persuasive account of how social reality is constructed and the fact that the social reality of which he is writing is collapsing around us.

Are we seeing an equivalent in terms of 'meaning' to the feared collapse of physical reality in some form of 'vacuum bubble'? Things are not that bad simply because Searle's point about the biological structures underpinning social reality stand regardless and may be the saving of the system.

The probability is that 'hives' (evolved into new forms) will re-emerge from the current struggle. War regrettably may be the crucible. However, people today might not recognise the world to come any more than Puritan divines or Roman orators would recognise our world.

The central issue for Searle and for us becomes consciousness - that is, the mental states that emerge out of our being human (which is nothing to do with other philosophical concerns like relations with Being or God). He emphasises the symbolism inherent in our institutional structures.

So, perhaps this is where we have to look hardest for clues to both survival and the future , especially of institutions, many of which are going to crash and burn or have to adapt in ways that would may be unthinkable today. After all, a female Archbishop of Canterbury would certainly surprise Victorians.

Searle puts the construction of our social reality down to a biological capacity to engage in symbolisation as the underpinning of language and institutional reality. The university Left's war on 'normal' or common sense use of language is a form of reverse engineering in this respect.

By capturing institutions and language, the hope and intent is to control symbolisation and so make biology irrelevant. To the radical Enlightenment, biology is embarrassing and restrictive, the source of inherent injustice and inequity. It must be overcome.

It is interesting here that, as an unintended consequence of this attempt to reconstruct social reality, the New Right (or at least the 'Tech' elements) have sought to subvert this by enhancing biology through transhumanist lines in order to promote inequity as a sort of Nietzschean elite.

Searle (as an analytical philosopher) is particularly concerned with language as an institutional structure that imposes "a special kind of function on brute physical entities that have no natural relation to that function".

All the normal functions of society - marital states, property relations, ownership and transactions, administration and institutions - require agreement on linguistic terms relating to some shared position on social truth. This shared position is ultimately relating to our biological being.

Again, we see a struggle over language to have become central to the apparent collapse of cultural cohesion and as weapon in struggle between interests and nations although (we might be pleased or alarmed according to our politics) institutional structures still remain fairly solid regardless.

The 'hive(s)' are in ferment but they are still hives. Searle's book is worth reading three decades on as an analytical framework for critiquing the collapse of 'truth'. There may be no truth in an absolute sense but our hives depend on their having an (admittedly flexible) shared truth of some kind. show less

Although almost thirty years old, Searle's (relatively) easy to read popular classic of analytical philosophy still stands up as a corrective to the exuberant claims of non-philosophers about the nature of the mind and of the world.

The book is the slightly adapted text of six radio lectures for the BBC and, like Merleau-Ponty before him, Searle rose well to the challenge of concision and clarity for an educated lay audience.

The book should be seen as a strike back by the Anglo-Saxon show more analytical tradition at failures to use terms (such as science) correctly and logically in the enthusiasm to promote the (then) new cognitive sciences.

In general, Searle make his case and the book was influential in forcing cognitive scientists and social scientists to stop and start to 'think' about how they thought.

Philosophy is now much more integrated into the technological projects surrounding machine intelligence and neuroscience, albeit with sloppy thinking still rife amongst the more excitable transhumanist element.

Nevertheless, the text is not a Bible and things move on. Analytical philosophy is a primary tool for removing obfuscations and defining possible meanings but it often comes to a halt in making the world meaningful.

Searle himself expresses something of this in his inconclusive approach to the hoary old determinism and free will debate.

He successfully (in my view) explains why the equally hoary old mind-body problem was a non-problem but analytical approaches that work so well here seem to fail him on free will which we will come to again towards the end of this review.

Nevertheless, his criticisms of assumptions that were then popular about artificial intelligence and the applicability of the term 'scientific' to the social sciences still, broadly, stand up.

But there are comments and criticisms to be made, if only that analytical philosophy takes us a long way in removing stupidity and obscurantism from debate but that it can get stuck in its own logic.

For example, Searle is very assertive that his claims that artificial intelligence cannot become conscious stand regardless of exponential growth in computing power.

His analysis of the difference between the syntactical and the semantic strike me as sensible but his famous Chinese Locked Room thought experiment is not as conclusive as first appears.

He describes the actuality of intelligence based on formal processes but what he does not take into account is the emergence of self-reflexion by artificial intelligence that has access to a different but equal range of (sensory) inputs and can evolve into a mode of being based on a determination to exist for itself.

Now, before we go too far, this is not to accept the nonsense of much of the singularity brigade who continue to misunderstand what consciousness is (much as Searle pointed out) but it is to suggest that, just as we evolved into consciousness from a material substrate so might a technological invention of ours.

Similarly, his rather sharp negative view of the social sciences as science is also unanswerable as it stands but we should not confuse a terminological problem with an actual problem in the world.

Writing thirty years ago, Searle was still dealing with the false claims of such analogical and magical thinking as Freudianism which constructed vast edifices and lucrative careers on a bed of sand.

Indeed, the twin intellectual absurdities of behaviourism and Freudianism implicitly underpin the very Anglo-Saxon determination of Searle to find a middle way that actually works.

Today, we are more critical but we are also in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water insofar as the social sciences are not credibly scientific but they are still useful.

The question becomes now almost a political one - how are they useful and to whom are they useful and a dash of Foucault might help us here alongside our 'analysis'.

Perhaps we need a new term for what the social sciences are, based on their probabilistic and contingent nature and (certainly and unlike the hard sciences) they need to be placed under much more aggressive individual and social scrutiny in regard to their claims.

The problem area today is something that Searle might not have predicted - the claims of 'hard' neuroscientists to be able (in due course) to provide explanations for default human behaviour.

From this comes the theoretical model of all human behaviour being predictable no less than the weather - that is, not in the specifics which prove to be unknowable after only a short period of forward analysis but in the general processes and systems.

The danger here is not only 'hubris' but the prediction becoming true not because it is true but because it can be made to be true by intervention. This 'nudge' interventionism which has become fashionable amongst the dimmer sort of centrist politician desperate to control what cannot be controled.

Such projects are either doomed to failure because of the chaotic system in which they operate or they will require the type of de-humanising tyrannical interventions that Aldous Huxley feared in order to be (or seem to be) effective.

In this respect, the work that Searle has started requires continuation for a new generation of simple minds with funds and careers on the line and weak politicians holding the grant strings.

The final area where criticism may be due is in his surprisingly limited analysis of the determinism and free will debate where there is no analytical solution because determinism is logical and yet the actuality of choice is embedded in our experience of the world.

Of course, the set of philosophers who have tended to have the most cogent criticism of determinism are the continental existentialists but, hey, this book was written at a time when the analytical and continental schools did not talk to each other.

Searle is moving towards categorising the determinism/free will problem as a non-problem as he ably does with the mind-body problem which I characterise (again, in quasi-existentialist terms) as one of consciousness being an emergent property of matter where only matter exists.

However, he cannot make the same leap and I suspect that is because determinism is logical but not true and an analytical philosopher cannot accept that something that appears logical (and the assumptions are sound) may not be true - that is, consistently meaningful.

The point here is that free will is also an emergent property of consciousness which is an emergent property of matter and that, though matter is determined all things being equal, the arrival of self-reflexion and thought, within constraints, can change the nature of the matter that would otherwise have been predetermined.

To say that the subsequent matter was predetermined is logical but not true because it is meaningless in the context of the arrival into the system of an emergent consciousness.

Searle offers a useful corrective to the dreamy new age invention of quantum physics as cause for consciousness (though one should retain an open mind) and, since then, as cause for the last ditch defence of platonic mathematical truths.

In essence, the quantum elements within classical physics simply cohere into the physical substrate from which we derive.

My consequent argument is that, just as indeterminacy is lost as the system organises itself into the material substrate of the world, so indeterminacy re-appears at the higher level with awareness of oneself as having choices, even if these choices are heavily constrained by the nature of matter.

We might take the invention of manned flight as an example where it was not determined that man fly but that a will to fly created sets of choices whereby he did fly but was constrained by the determinism of matter as to what was possible and thereby following certain technologically determined paths once the choices were made.

The other factor not taken into account in assessing free will is the illusion of the future. The future is always assumed to exist but it only exists as an extrapolation of the unfolding of materiality.

In fact, the future is as probabilistic as the social sciences. It probably will happen but it need not exist unlike the past which has unfolded already as a result of the working out of material laws (and some choices) that have been experienced.

This, of course, is the problem of time but arguments from cosmology, physics and mathematics (and science fiction) do not trump this philosophical truth that the future only exists when it has happened.

This rather puts the kybosh on a lot of ideas about time including those of J. W Dunne which were a last refuge for many spiritualists and other romantics.

In the real world, our understanding of scientific rules and processes makes the world thoroughly predictable regardless of this fact that the future does not exist until it has happened but the indeterminacy of consciousness means that the future can also be changed.

It is this latter indeterminacy that creates the science fiction hope that the future determined by the working out of what we see around us might be changed by an act of will.

Again, in the real world, human power to change the future is limited, suffers from inadequate knowledge of consequences and is often collective (that is, it averages out in the 'wisdom of crowds' or serious change gets 'croweded out' by a default thinking which is barely conscious).

We must be clear here. Being human does not intrinsically mean that a human being is capable of self-reflexive choice and so of not being determined.

It is the exercise of a capability of being human - self-reflexive choice and the 'weighing up' of intentionalities - that creates freedom.

Most people most of the time are determined by their conditions and, of course, most people most of the time may have little choice in their conditions. Free will is thus a possibility but not inherent in being human simply by dint of being an evolved ape.

Nevertheless, the fact that indeterminacy is an evolved quality of consciousness in the context of a state of being where the future is only set because of determinacy and not because it exists means that evolved consciousness can change the 'determined' future.

This is not an argument for the hysteria surrounding multiverses which is another extreme mathematical invention but it is an argument for accepting that free will and effective determinism within classical physics can co-exist, especially as the free will is extremely limited in scope.

Free will can rearrange existing molecules for micro-utilitarian purposes but it cannot change the structure of reality that permits the survival of the organism. In any case, the organism's sphere of influence is tiny and highly localised in space and time.

So, there is no free will/determinism problem any more than there is a mind/body problem.

The value of this book is the value implicit in the discussion above. It makes you ask questions. Like all the best philosophers, Searle does not assert the truth but gives a view of the truth that keeps open the door to disagreement.

In a time when we are surrounded by the rise of dim-witted text-based religious assertion, new age wish-fulfilment flummery and ecstatic claims by 'scientists' who think that science fiction is a true representation of the world, this sort of thinking is invaluable. show less

Searle continues to expand the scope of his work, this time to include a theory of perception, pieces of which appeared in various earlier writings on intentionality.

By a theory of perception, Searle means something specific — a theory of how our subjective experiences of objects in the world are related to those objects themselves. By the very formulation of the problem, we can see that Searle is going to take a realist position. He refers to his position as “Direct Realism”, to show more indicate that, according to his view, when we perceive objects in the world, we perceive them directly, not through some evidentiary intermediary such as sense data.

In fact, perhaps the principal argument in the book concerns sense data, or anything else that is supposed as the direct object of perception rather than objects in the world themselves. Searle believes that by exposing what he calls “the Bad Argument” he will cut through a mistake he thinks “disastrous” for the history of epistemology and the theory of perception from the seventeenth century forward.

The “Bad Argument” seems to come down to a confusion about the relations between, in Searle’s terms, intentional content and intentional objects. The mistake is in thinking that wherever there is intentional content, there is an intentional object — whenever we have an experience, there is an object experienced. Thus, when we experience a hallucination, we have intentional content (the content of our hallucination) and then we suppose there to be an intentional object (the hallucination itself — some sort of of sensory object or “sense data”). And then we make the additional step of supposing that the analysis of the hallucination is the same as the analysis of any other perceptual experience — what we see in each case is sense data, the only difference being that the object of our experience sometimes does and sometimes does not match the reality outside our experience.

Searle’s own account relies on a strong distinction between intentional content and intentional object. When we see a chair, we have the experience of a chair — that is the intentional content. But the intentional object is the chair itself, not something internal to our experience. In other words, we experience chairs, not some internal representation, idea, or set of sense data.

The two — intentional content and intentional object — are related causally. What differentiates the hallucination from the veridical case is that, in the veridical case, our intentional content is caused by the chair. In the hallucination, it is not.

On this account, Searle does not have the traditional problem of making sense of representation in the perceptual context. Seeing a chair doesn't consist in having or seeing some internal image of a chair that represents real, objective chairs. We do not see images in our heads that, in veridical perception, represent objects in the world. What we see are just objects in the world. Nothing represents anything.

In place of representation, though, he does have to account for the causal relationship between objects in the world and our perceptual experiences. Abandoning representation has a cost, and there was an important role played by representation. Veridical perception requires not just that the perceptual experience be caused by something, but that it be caused by the right kind of thing. In the “brain in a vat” scenario, where, in a Matrix-like world, we are fed continuous illusions of reality, the experience of a red chair, for example, is certainly caused — it just isn’t caused by the right kind of thing.

As I read him, Searle’s response is a bit tricky. What he says is that “for something to be red in the ontologically objective world is for it to be capable of causing ontologically subjective visual experiences like this.” In other words, being red consists in causing red experiences. Actually, he qualifies the claim, in most passages, by saying that being red, for example, consists “at least in part” in its causing red experiences.

Since he isn't giving a representational account, he isn't going to say that the object itself shares a likeness to our perceptions in some way. Instead the relationship is constitutive and at least quasi-logical -- what systematically causes red experiences just is red. This is central to his notion of "intentional causality" in which cause and effect bear a different, "internal" relationship to one another than causes and effects of the "billiard ball" variety, in which cause and effect can be defined independently of one another.

This claim sounds dangerously close to Berkeleyian idealism, which Searle certainly wants to deny. Berkeley’s “esse est percepi” (“to be is to be perceived”) sounds superficially much like Searle’s claim. The test of whether or not something is red (or a chair) is that it produces that sort of perceptual experience.

Searle of course maintains a kind of causal distance between the experience and its object that Berkeley does not. That places a great burden on “cause” in Searle’s theory. He accordingly claims that the causal relationship is itself imminently observable, although, to me, the more compelling examples have to do with action (lifting my arm) rather than more passive perception (seeing a chair). I’m not sure where I come out on Searle’s claim.

A different aspect of Searle’s theory is the perception of everyday objects. Although he supports "Direct Realism,” Searle does not think that the perception of familiar objects is really very simple. Seeing a car is a complicated matter. That our experience is caused by the object that is a car, if we grant that, is one thing. But our actual recognition of the object as a car is another. Cars exist and are defined as cars in a world of relations, actions, etc. that influence our experience of objects in such a way as to make them experiences of cars. We have to have some familiarity with cars to recognize cars when we see them.

Searle addresses this problem with a hierarchy of perceptual features. As he says, seeing a car is dependent on perceiving other perceptual features. Seeing the car is dependent on seeing its shape. The shape of the car, unlike the car itself, is “basic” — it is not dependent on seeing other perceptual features, and it is perceivable by anyone. Seeing a car is dependent on seeing its shape, and also on other things like my understanding what a car is.

It’s a little surprising to see Searle adopt a notion of “basic perceptual features,” given the historical association of such an idea with sense data theories. In addition to the problem Searle raises for sense data (the claim that all we really see is our own impressions and not real objects), sense data theories have a problem in reconstructing perceptions of familiar objects from the paltry data of color patches and shapes. Searle now has a similar problem. His answer here isn’t complete — it involves both what we could call geometrical construction (e.g., 3D objects from 2D colored shapes) and more involved workings of what he refers to as the “Background” — our understandings of cars, effects of perspective, etc. His account sounds a bit more like a project than a done deal.

These two issues — making good on the causal relationships between subjective experiences and objective realities, and accounting for the complex perception of familiar objects — are ones that I’m not entirely convinced Searle has resolved.

Those are issues with the problem that Searle is trying to solve. Separately, I think it is important for understanding Searle’s project to distinguish that problem from one he is not solving. He is not solving the problem of skepticism, which he says he doesn’t find particularly interesting.

The problem he is solving is accounting for perception, or how our perceptual experience relates to objects in the world. The skeptical problem is one of determining whether or not those perceptual experiences are in fact related to real objects in the world that in some way match (or are related in a preferred way to) those experiences, a related but distinct problem. And we could grant that what distinguishes the veridical from the hallucinatory is the presence or absence of the intentional object causing the intentional content without supposing that we ever know when it in fact is true that the intentional object is causing the intentional content. This would just be a different formulation of the skeptical problem.

In evaluating his theory, the fact that he has not solved the problem of skepticism is neither here nor there. The value of his theory is rather in whether or not he has successfully explained how perceptual experiences relate to objects outside experience, in objective reality. show less