John R. Searle, the Slusser professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, is a philosopher in the tradition of Wittgenstein. He wants to clarify things. That is, he thinks there are two big mistakes philosophers have made throughout history, and Descartes popularized both.
Mistake Number One is the idea “that there is some special problem about the relation of the mind to the body, consciousness to the brain, and in their fixation on the illusion that there is a problem, philosophers have fastened onto different solutions to the problem.” Mistake Number Two “is the mistake of supposing that we never directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world, but directly perceive only our subjective experiences.”
Searle is a proponent of what he calls Direct Realism: “It is called ‘realism’ because it says we do have perceptual access to the real world, and ‘direct’ because it says that we do not first have to perceive something else by way of which we perceive the real world.” That is, there really are things and a world out there, and we really do see them. And here is a refreshing paragraph the likes of which you will not read in many (any?) other contemporary books of philosophy:
Searle then goes on to question not only the Great Philosophers (how dare he!) but also to describe, step by step, “the central mistake of modern epistemology”—that is, “the single greatest disaster from which all the little disasters follow.” Imagine!
I find this immensely refreshing because, in my first undergraduate philosophy survey course, the professor would say things like: “As Hume proved, there is no way to show that there actually is causation qua causation.” Or this: “As Kant proved in his Copernican Revolution of metaphysics. . .” In other words, he was appealing to authority just as much as any dogmatic theology professor might. I always wanted—but never, or rarely, dared—to raise my hand and ask, “How exactly did he prove this?” But Searle pushes back, devastatingly so.
He says that the “Bad Argument” has six steps, which I will give in very brief but (I hope) accurate fashion:
(1) In both “veridical” or true perceptions and hallucinations, a person has a “subjective visual experience.”
(2) Because the subjective experience is the same, you must analyze both in the same way.
(3) In both cases we are aware of something.
(4) Since in the hallucination there is no object, what we are aware of is a “sense datum.”
(5) But because we have to analyze both in the same way (see Step Two), when we really “see” something, “we see only sense data.”
(6) Therefore, we never see sense objects, only “sense data”—which is to say, we have a subjective experience caused by sense data.
This argument seems like a shell game. To Searle, the fallacy is in Step Three, where two senses of the word “aware” are used. You can be aware of a real object, and you can be aware of that real object causing you a “painful sensation.” In the former, you are aware of an object outside yourself; in the latter, you are aware of something (not an object) inside yourself.
“The temptation,” Searle writes, “is to treat the visual experience itself as the object of the visual experience in the case of the hallucination, but in fact there is no object. . . . It is a good example of Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophical problems typically arise when we misunderstand the logic of our language.”
The meat of Searle’s argument follows this diagnosis—and is sound, as far as I can tell—but I don’t find it as interesting. It is an analytical way of stating Dr. Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley’s Idealism when he kicked “the large stone” and said, “I refute him thus!” But then, the Scholastic philosophy I learned (Aristotle by way of Thomas Aquinas) says that metaphysics—the study of being, including why there is anything at all—must come prior to epistemology, the study of knowledge, of how we can know anything at all.
So the Bad Mistake, from my point of view, was this seismic shift from metaphysics to epistemology as the foundation of philosophy. Searle does not address that issue here. Like Wittgenstein, but with less openness, he seems to assume that there is nothing to be said about metaphysics:
But why are vitalism and metaphysical dualism out of the question? As Searle himself writes later, “Always beware of what a philosopher takes for granted as so obvious as to be not worth arguing for.”
Frank Freeman is a writer in Maine.
