Consciousness and Language

One of the most important and influential philosophers of the last thirty years, John Searle has been concerned throughout his career with a single overarching question: How can we have a unified and theoretically satisfactory account of ourselves and of our relations to other people and to the natural world? In other words, how can we reconcile our common-sense conception of ourselves as conscious, free, mindful, rational agents in a world that we believe comprises brute, unconscious, mindless, meaningless, mute physical particles in fields of force? A cluster of individual questions that have preoccupied him - What is a speech act? What is intentionality? What is consciousness? What is rationality? - are all part of the larger problematic. The essays in this collection are all related to the broad overarching issue that unites the diverse strands of Searle's work. The first five essays address the issue of how to situate consciousness in particular, and intentional phenomena in general, within a scientific conception of the world. The essays that follow discuss the implications of Searle's approach to the mind for psychology and the other social sciences, explore various ramifications of the theory of speech acts, and defend a version of mental realism by challenging the skepticism espoused by Quine and Kripke. Gathering in an accessible manner essays otherwise available in relatively obscure books and journals, this collection will be of particular value to professionals and upper-level students in philosophy, as well as to Searle's more extended audience in such neighboring fields as pyschology and linguistics.Searle, John R. is the author of 'Consciousness and Language' with ISBN 9780521597449 and ISBN 0521597447.