John Searle does not like the Extended Mind

I think there’s no question that we’re getting an impoverished sensibility as a result of overexposure to electronic media. I don’t read much philosophy, it upsets me when I read the nonsense written by my contemporaries, the theory of extended mind makes me want to throw up…so mostly I read works of fiction and history. I love reading history books and I love reading works of fiction, there’s just an enormous amount of great stuff written.

Faulkner, the great American modernists, I can’t tell you the influence they’ve had on me. No philosopher has influenced me as much as Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald – they’ve had an enormous influence on my whole sensibility – and the whole American modernist tradition. There are so many great history books and great novels, not to mention poetry and other forms of literature, that I spend much more time on literature than I do on philosophy. I’m not boasting about that, I’m complaining, I probably should read more philosophy than I do. But I think a lot of works of philosophy are like root-canal work, you just think you’ve got to get through that damn thing.--John Searle in NewPhilosopher [HT: Lucas Thorpe on FB]

There is no doubt that in old age (Searle is "past 80") some mechanisms can reduce our normal social inhibitions. I wouldn't be surprised if the reduced presence of ordinary routines of external, social control -- work, friends, spouses, etc. -- plays some role in the process. The impartial spectator within can do her job more forcefully in the presence of the right sort of real spectators, after all. And, if we can distribute some of our memories into our environment (computers, diaries, pictures, emails, etc.), why not some of our socially relevant monitoring? This idea is a kind of corollary to the idea of an 'extended mind,' which Searle -- once one of the most important professional philosophers around -- finds so upsetting.

One way to stay youthful as a professional philosopher is to keep reading and engaging with either younger philosophers or philosophers from a different perspective. Since his exchange with Derrida, we know that Searle's strengths are not to be found in dealing with alternative approaches. Obviously, sustained engagement with other cognitive activities (i.e., reading novels) might well facilitate other important intellectual virtues. But how we engage might also prevent us from developing our own views in any meaningful way. For example, Searle writes, 'I have a suitable reverence for the great thinkers of the past, but alas, they are all pretty much mistaken, and my job is to point out the mistakes.' Now, what's  the point of refuting "Kant, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, Spinoza," if there is nothing to be learned there?

Don't misunderstand me, please. I wouldn't be surprised if Searle is more insightful on perception than several of the six he mentions. Several of the named long dead were so mistrustful of perception that they never get it clearly in view. Indeed, we shouldn't treat past philosophers as sacred texts that have to come out true come what may. But when we engage with others as no more than a series of mistakes, we foreclose the possibility of imaginatively engaging with their projects. It's likely that the "mistakes" (if they are mistakes) that Searle notes in the mighty dead are themselves, in part, a consequence of some of their systematic commitments.

It's striking that in the interview Searle emphasizes that it is "essential" to have a "systematic theory." Yet, for most of the twentieth century analytical philosophers have preferred  to work on piece-meal, solvable puzzles and problems. This has been splendid in many ways, but systematic theory forces a lot more constraints on the range of workable solutions to individual problems. Working with systematic constraints teaches one to play philosophical chess on multiple boards at once. In philosophy this is a skill that can almost not be taught; but a perceptive and open student can discern it by repeated engagement with a systematic thinker.

I would have thought that reading novels is another way to learn practice in the receptivity to others. By this I do not mean that reading novels makee us more moral; nor that novels are generally instructive. But they might force us, albeit temporarily, outside of ourselves (even if we identify with the protagonist(s)), and learn to see the world afresh.

It is, surely, tempting to reflect on the role of masculinity in American Modernist novels in light of Searle's emphasis on his skiing prowess and the embrace of a rifle in the accompanying photograph. (I'll leave that psycho-analytic exercise to students of Lacan.) But, perhaps, it might be useful if Searle spent some time with Paul Bowles -- the culmination and intensification of the tradition of American Modernism; for it's in Bowles that psychological depth is achieved in the tradition so passionately embraced by Searle;  given his fondness for guns and lone rangers, I'll just say that The Sheltering Sky is the Greatest Western ever written by an American.

Comments

[Jon Cogburn]

Yeah, the bits about Kant et. al. simply "resting on a mistake" and how his job is to correct false presuppositions of the mighty dead are just jaw droppingly awful.

He also says that no book in the philosophy of mind (presumably excepting his own) are any good.

The depravities of aging can (understandably) make some people way more irascible, but there's a pretty clear narrative arc from Searle point 0 to the Searle point two point five we're seeing in this interview.

[Carlo Ierna]

Nihil sub sole novum:

"Entire philosophical movements have been built around theories of Intentionality. What is one to do in the face of all this distinguished past? My own approach has been simply to ignore it, partly out of ignorance of most of the traditional writings on Intentionality and partly out of the conviction that my only hope of resolving the worries that led me into this study in the first place lay in the relentless pursuit of my own investigations. ... I follow a long philosophical tradition in calling this feature of directedness or aboutness “Intentionality”, but in many respects the term is misleading and the tradition something of a mess".
Searle, Intentionality (1983).

Ingnoring and dismissing traditions do not look like consequences of his dotage.