Searle Review

John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, Mass., andLondon: MIT, a Bradford Book, 1992.1. Introduction.In this remarkable work, the author launches a brilliant attack on thetraditional orthodoxies in the philosophy of mind. He wants to criticizeand overcome the dominant traditions in the study of the mental, both"materialist" and "dualist". And with the same blow he tries to put thefinal nail in the coffin of a theory which pretends the mind is a computerprogram.Noteworthy is his message about the philosophy of language, whichhe classifies as a branch of the philosophy of mind. Therefore, he pretends,no theory of language is complete without an account of the relationsbetween mind and language. Moreover, he says, we cannot ignorehow meaning, as subtle part of language, is grounded in the biologicalintentionality of the mindlbrain. Some expressions are conscious, someof them are not. Sometimes we are making statements about the realityof the world, which can be considered as objective observations, sometimeswe are speaking about the outcomes of mental processes, utteranceswhich are necessarily subjectively grounded. For that matter, one of themajor themes that runs throughout his book is the attempt to get clearabout which of the predicates in the philosophy of mind appoint featuresthat are intrinsic and which are observer relative. For Searle this distinctionis very important, for it basically embodies the difference betweenobjectivity and sUbjectivity.