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Biological Psychology, 37 (1994) pp. 177-180.
Rediscov_rev92.doc
J. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind. (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,
1992) pp. xv + 270, $22.50.
Watson's arguments (e.g. Watson, 1913) against the inclusion of mind and
consciousness in psychology held considerable sway in the minds of many
experimental psychologists of the forties and fifties, and was particularly strong in
the American S-R Hull-Spence brand of behaviorism. At the University of Iowa,
where Spence "reigned", the standing orders to use the expression "What's on your
behavior?" rather than "What's on your mind?" were only half in jest. Psychology's
Cognitive Revolution which began to gather force in the mid-sixties appeared to
bring mind back into psychology, but as contemporary supporters of the cognitive
shift, Segal and Lachman (1972), noted, the changeover was not on the basis of
contrary evidence, but more a matter of what they called a Kuhnian "paradigm
shift". In other words, the shift was made on instrumentalist rather than realist
grounds, that is in terms of what was convenient and "fruitful" rather than what
was true.
The instrumentalist approach has continued in psychology to the present. The
term "cognitive" is now used to qualify most psychological areas of investigation,
and has passed from being a low-status expression to a high-status one with an
extension that is infinitely broad, and tends to encompass almost all things
psychological. The realist distinction between a model (which is just an analogy,
and, although it may be useful for generating theory, is itself not one because it
does not assert a testable proposition) and theory (which does assert something to
be the case, and is therefore evaluable in terms of its truth, rather than mere
"fruitfulness") has been generally abandoned by most current psychological
researchers. And the computer model or analogy of the mind has been widely
accepted not only by those who state it explicitly (e.g. many workers in the area of
Artificial Intelligence) but also by most of the concepts in cognitive psychology
that employ expressions such as input/output, neglect affective and conative factors
(that computers do not possess), and treat the mind (and the brain) as an
information processor.
The result of this approach has been that, while mentalistic language is
frequently used in current cognitive psychology, the explanatory concepts are
formulated in computereze, so that the mental processes themselves have been
banished to a metaphorical realm of computer modeling. The title and text of
Searle's book argues for a serious reinstatement of mind in psychology's
explanatory concepts, and the argument is along evidential, realist lines.
SSDI 0301-0511(93)00923-S
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Book review / Biological Psychology 37 (1994) 177-180
The key concept in Searle book is consciousness, which was precisely Watson's
bete noire. And "in rediscovering consciousness—the real thing, not the Cartesian
ersatz nor the behaviorist doppelganger", he hopes at the outset of the book that we
shall "also rediscover the mind" (p. xv).
But why should experimental psychologists and psychophysiologists trouble to
embark on this predominantly philosophical voyage of rediscovery? The book is
clearly intended, in the first place, for professional philosophers, and both because
of the readership of this journal and because of my own lack of specialist training
in the field, I shall not attempt to provide an in-depth, philosophical critique of the
book (for which, see, e.g. Nagel, 1992). Rather, I shall take an experimental
psychophysiological research perspective that, nevertheless, for reasons argued
elsewhere (e.g. Furedy, 19881, recognizes the importance of the reflective element
in any empirical research, be it pure or applied, or some mixture of the two. From
this perspective, one important long-term question for the scientific community is
whether its current scientific understanding of the relevant phenomena (and, from
an applied point of view, its ability to control those phenomena) is clearly superior
to the common-sense, proverbial intelligent-man-in-the-street level. Another
related question is whether there is good evidence that there is progress in
understanding and control. Finally, there is the old but still relevant requirement of
the Ionian pre-Socratic thinkers such as Thales (who, by the way, were not only
philosophers, but also people with strong practical interests), that whatever
explanations are offered they should "save the appearances", rather than consigning
observed phenomena either to non-existence (as Watsonian behaviorists suggested
for mind) or merely analogical existence (as is done by the current computeranalogy-based explanations).
Searle's Chapter 9, entitled (in a Kantian play on words—neither the book nor
Searle appears to suffers from any false modesty) "The Critique of Cognitive
Reason" is especially relevant for current cognitive psychology's most salient
area—Cognitive Science ((3). Some of the arguments may be relatively tough
going for those not used to philosophical discussion, but there are at least two
factual claims which are both readily intelligible, and strongly damaging to the CS
approach whose foundations Searle characterizes as "shaky".
One of these is his assertion that the brain does not do information processing (p.
222). If accepted (and I think he provides both strong and simple grounds for the
assertion), this assertion alone appears to destroy most of contemporary cognitive
psychological (and psychophysiological) theorising about the way in which human
and animal (i.e. non-computer) cognition operates, because that theorising assumes
(as an unexamined axiom) the information-processing view of mind and brain.
This argument, moreover, is stated in the purely cognitive realm. In fact, of course,
any adequate psychological explanation has to refer to affective and conative
factors as well, and
Book review / Biological Psychology 37 (1994) 177-180
3
these non-cognitive factors operate not only in the "real" world, but also in the
laboratory. So, for example, just because cognitive psychophysiological
researchers using human college-student subjects assume maximal and equal
motivational levels for all their subjects (e.g. that all subjects throughout the
experiment find the experimental task as riveting and fascinating as does the
experimenter) does not mean that these non-cognitive factors are, in fact, held
constant.
The other basic CS assumption that Searle attacks is the view that psychological
cognitive processes are computational. He begins his attack on this claim by
remarking that "philosophically speaking, this does not smell right to me and I
have learned at least at the beginning of an investigation, to follow my sense of
smell" (p. 199). He then provides, in some 20 pages, a number of thoroughgoing
arguments to support his philosophical intuitions. One of the main arguments is
that equivalence of outcome does not imply equivalence in process. So, to provide
an introspectively based example that he does not mention, even though modern
computers have come to equal and even perhaps surpass human grand-masters in
chess performance, the ways in which the computer and human play are quite
different. In brief, the computer simply computes (although the modern computer
does so with vast power and precision). In contrast, the mentation involved in the
human player comprises cognitive processes that include computation (i.e. calculation of the consequences of certain sequences of moves>, perception, and intuition,
as well as non-cognitive factors. These non-cognitive factors include affective ones
(e.g. feelings about chess positions as a function of their differing degrees of
beauty; fear of blunders [one is reminded of Tartakover's fearsome maxim—the
blunders are there, just waiting to be made]; feelings personal inadequacy when
faced with a stronger opponent), as well as conative ones (e.g. varying amounts of
effort expanded on the game as function of one's physical conditioning, and the
importance of the game's outcome).
I have already noted that Searle does not suffer from false modesty. In this
regard his stated attitude towards referencing the work of others is striking. He
confesses that "I think unconsciously I have come to believe that philosophical
quality varies inversely with the number of bibliographical references" on the
grounds that "books I read in my philosophical childhood... contain few or no
references to other authors" (p. xiv). Clearly he does not recognize citations of
others as valid coins of the realm, but I think there is at least one contemporary
work on which he should have commented, namely The Meaning of Behavior by
Australian philosophical psychologist J.R. Maze (1982). Perhaps Searle ignored
this book because the title referred to behavior rather than mind, but in fact Maze's
book constitutes a thoroughgoing mentalist attack on the same sort of modern
cognitive psychology that comprises Searle's main target. However, whereas
Searle's
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Book review / Biological Psychology 37 (1994) 177-180
mentalism is teleological or purposivist, since it regards intentionality as an
adequate explanatory concept and part of what it means to cognize (Tolman's
position was similarly propositional as well as purposive), Maze's mentalism is
mechanistic or deterministic, according to which, in any adequate explanatory
account "the first step is to get rid of 'intentions”' (Maze, 1982, p. 27). In fact, it is
specifically Searle's earlier writings concerning intentionality (e.g. Searle, 1979)
that Maze criticizes in some detail (Maze, 1982, pp. 25-27), using, in the main,
Anderson's (1962) earlier critique of the doctrine of constitutive or intrinsic
relations.
Still, in general, Searle's book constitutes a very effective and clear argument for
the rediscovery of the mind, although my preference would have been for a more
critical examination of the teleological component (i.e. intentionality) of Searle's
position, and more attention paid to affective and conative factors. But for
cognitive psychophysiologists the important, though somewhat negative,
contribution remains—the demonstration that computer-modeling (i.e.
conventional Cognitive Science) can lead to no progress in our understanding even
of cognitive psychological functions, let alone non-cognitive ones. This message is
one on which many current psychophysiological researchers should reflect, even if
that reflection needs perforce take place only in the privacy of that ever-shrinking
part of their lives that is not engaged in the acquisition of funding through grant
writing, politicking, and the publishing of experimental reports which may advance
the approach of a particular "school" in psychophysiology, but which does nothing
for genuine progress in the understanding and control of psychological cognitive
processes.
References
Anderson, J. (1962). Studies in empirical philosophy. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
Furedy, J.J. (1988). On the relevance of philosophy for psychological research: Some
autobiographical speculations concerning the influence of Andersonian realism.
Australian Journal of Psychology, 40, 71-77.
Maze, J.R. (1982). The meaning of behavior. London: Allen & Unwin.
Nagel, T. (1993). The mind wins! Review of J. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind. The
New York Review, March 4, 37-41.
Segal, E.M., & Lachman, R. (1972). Complex behavior or higher mental process: Is there
a paradigm shift? American Psychologist, 27, 46-55.
Watson, J.B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psychological Review, 20,
158-177.
John J. Furedy University of
Toronto