Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

One day before the sudden death of Jeff Epstein (I refuse to call it a suicide before evidence to that effect is made public), one heard of the unsealing of a lot of the records that led to Epstein's imprisonment and so, likely, through one causal link or another, to his death. THAT material, unsealed, showed that the late Marvin Minsky, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was one of the clients to whom Epstein allegedly trafficked underaged girls. Minsky can no longer be hurt by this disclosure. He has been dead for three years. It is worth saying here too what I said in connection with John Searle not long ago, although the two are on opposite sides of at least one philosophically important debate:  No wrong Minsky may have committed diminishes the value of his contributions to cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and related fields. Minsky was on the faculty at MIT from 1958 until his death, which is a heck of a time to stay at one job. He was a pionee...

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 ab...

Ideas generated from the story of Aladdin. http://www.existentialcomics.com/comic/277 I'm not familiar with the Disney movie in question, or the stage musical based on it, so I'll focus on the philosophy. What does it mean to say that someone is a Prince? Not as a metaphorical turn of phrase/praise ("oh, you're such a prince.") But in earnest. "The Queen's son Charles is a Prince." What does THAT mean? The comic to which I linked you above offers three answers: 1. From Aristotle, there is essentialism. There is some essence of princehood which princes possess, and a non-prince could be made a prince, by a hypothetical lamp-captive genie, if that essence could be infused into him. 2. From Kripke, there is a causal theory of reference. There must have been some event by virtue of which a Prince became a Prince, ie a coronation, or birth to a Queen, or some such, just as he becomes a husband by virtue of a wedding, etc. All essentialist ...

I've referenced John Searle in this blog fairly often, I believe. But it has always been as the inventor of the "chinese room" thought experiment. Today I hope to describe another aspect of his life's work: his view of "speech acts," and the conflict with Jacques Derrida over same. In 1972, Jacques Derrida wrote an essay about J.L. Austin's book, "How to do things with words," a work published in 1962 based on lectures delivered in 1955. Austin's over-riding point was that much of what one does with words is a performance, even if it masquerades as a description. For example, "I'm sorry," in the context in which an apology is socially appropriate.  This is an action, not a report on the degree of one's personal sorrow. Derrida's essay, "Signature, Event, Context," expresses the view that, yes, Austin had a valid point. But Derrida devotes a lot of attention to the things Austin didn't say, questions...

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...