John Searle Out at UC Berkeley

John Searle is no longer affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley. He has been stripped of his emeritus title.

This is quite a comedown since Searle's name regularly shows up on lists of the most prominent and influential philosophers writing today.

Let's review a little intellectual history. As of the late 1970s, the dominant view of consciousness, intelligence, and the mind-body relationship among professional philosophers in the Anglosphere was functionalism. There was a lot of disagreement about the details, but mostly consensus on the big picture.

The idea was that the brain was a machine that functioned more or less like a digital computer. Or, at any rate, its functions could be indefinitely approximated by a digital computer. Thus, there was nothing fundamental (just irrelevant biological history) setting the brain aside from what algorithms embodied with wires and on/off gates can or will eventually be able to do.

Alan Turing had speculated about a "Turing test" for intelligence, which turned on the ability of an embodied program to carry on a conversation that would be indistinguishable (from the PoV of a human being) from a conversation he might have with another human being. The embodied programs that could do this would be functioning intelligently, thus they would BE intelligent in a full sense of the world.

Turing's 1940s computers were good for helping the Allies hunt German U-boats, but nobody would have tried to discuss metaphysical poetry with one of them.

My point, though: the functionalist view grew in strength throughout the post-war period and was quite firmly ensconced by the late 1970s. Then came Searle, and the "Chinese room" thought experiment first published in 1980, and the subject of vigorous dispute in the following years. I won't go into the particulars of that thought experiment here -- they are easy to find it you want to pursue that point. I'll cut to the chase.

Although Searle didn't kill functionalism he did bring an end to its dominance. Presently the dominant view of mind/body questions is a form of property dualism, combined with ontological monism. This means, briefly, that philosophers now generally regard the (biological) brain and the conscious intelligent mind as the same fact in the world (monism), but they explain that this fact has at least two distinct sorts of property -- the mental and the physical. Further, there is great doubt as to whether the "Turing test" tells us anything at all about whether certain physical objects possess the mental set of properties. The new view, on behalf of which functionalism is often rejected, is called "property dualism" sometimes, and "emergentism" at other times. in other contexts.

I think the change-over from functionalism to emergentism is a healthy one (though I don't unqualifiedly endorse it). And I credit Searle for producing it. So naturally I am saddened by his downfall as the result of his apparent violation of UCal sexual harassment policies.

http://dailynous.com/2019/06/21/searle-found-violated-sexual-harassment-policies/?fbclid=IwAR07dgwGRR-IA-6XQKV5fGyK4GKQZyc7vJ0J3Kn8HF68q-1Ex4S4gwp7G3A

Will this bring back functionalism? No: fortunately it doesn't work that way.

And it wasn't ALL Searle. Another important contributor to the decline of functionalism was Frank Jackson. In his argument, too, there was a critical thought experiment: Mary's Room. Of Jackson, and of Mary, I will write another time.

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