Daniel Clement Dennett

M. R. Bennett

Daniel Dennett

Peter Hacker

John Searle

Three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist engage in a lively, often contentious debate about cognitive neuroscience and philosophy and the relationships among brain, mind, and person.

Brain, Mind, and Language

Neuroscience and Philosophy

There are few more important philosophers at work today than John Searle, a creative and contentious thinker who has shaped the way we think about mind and language. Now he offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality--a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties. The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.

The Structure of Human Civilization

Making the Social World

F. Kiefer

M. Bierwisch

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics". The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, describing, explaining, apologizing, thanking, congratulating, etc. Characteristically, a speaker performs one or more of these acts by uttering a sentence or sentences; but the act itself is not to be confused with a sentence or other expression uttered in its performance. Such types of acts as those exemplified above are called, following Austin, illocutionary acts, and they are standardly contrasted in the literature with certain other types of acts such as perlocutionary acts and propositional acts. Perlocutionary acts have to do with those effects which our utterances have on hearers which go beyond the hearer's understanding of the utterance. Such acts as convincing, persuading, annoying, amusing, and frightening are all cases of perlocutionary acts.

Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics

Maxwell Bennett

In Neuroscience and Philosophy three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist clash over the conceptual presuppositions of cognitive neuroscience. The book begins with an excerpt from Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker's Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Blackwell, 2003), which questions the conceptual commitments of cognitive neuroscientists. Their position is then criticized by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, two philosophers who have written extensively on the subject, and Bennett and Hacker in turn respond. Their impassioned debate encompasses a wide range of central themes: the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Clearly argued and thoroughly engaging, the authors present fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical method, cognitive-neuroscientific explanation, and human nature, and their exchange will appeal to anyone interested in the relation of mind to brain, of psychology to neuroscience, of causal to rational explanation, and of consciousness to self-consciousness. In his conclusion Daniel Robinson (member of the philosophy faculty at Oxford University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Georgetown University) explains why this confrontation is so crucial to the understanding of neuroscientific research. The project of cognitive neuroscience, he asserts, depends on the incorporation of human nature into the framework of science itself. In Robinson's estimation, Dennett and Searle fail to support this undertaking; Bennett and Hacker suggest that the project itself might be based on a conceptual mistake. Exciting and challenging, Neuroscience and Philosophy is an exceptional introduction to the philosophical problems raised by cognitive neuroscience.

Il linguaggio costituisce per Searle il luogo privilegiato per mostrare la relazione tra coscienza e intenzionalità (come capacità di riferirsi a qualcosa) ovvero, in senso generalissimo, la relazione tra ciò che sta entro la mia mente e oggetti circostanti. Gli atti linguistici mostrano una considerevole ricchezza e varietà di modi di adattarsi alla realtà. Tra questi, quello che maggiormente interessa Searle negli sviluppi più recenti del suo pensiero, è quello che sta all’origine della società.

Coscienza, linguaggio, società

Angela Ales Bello

Roberto Poli

Gianfranco Basti

Jurgen Haamas

Shahid Mobeen

Raffaela Giovagnoli

Benedict Kanakappallj

In questo volume sono raccolti gli scritti frutto della ricerca effettuata nell’ambito del Progetto: “Ontologia Formale e Ontologie: uno Strumento per il Dialogo Interdisciplinare e Interculturale”. Scopo del progetto è mostrare al pubblico intellettuale italiano, sia di estrazione scientifica che umanistica, le potenzialità dello strumento dell’ontologia in generale, e dell’ontologia formale in particolare, per il dialogo costruttivo interdisciplinare e interculturale. Dialogo interdisciplinare per il rapporto fra discipline scientifiche e umanistiche, dialogo interculturale per il rapporto fra le diverse culture e religioni in una società globalizzata.

John Searle

About

Books

Join the club