Searle Out and About

8/3/2019 Searle Out and About

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Background

Professor Searle, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you.

Where were you born and raised?

I was born in Denver and I lived there until I was twelve, but because of the vagaries of

the Second World War and the way people moved around then, I then lived in a lot of

places. My father was an executive of AT&T. My mother was a medical doctor. And

after we left Denver I lived in New York, New Jersey, and Wisconsin, where I graduatedfrom high school and where I went to my first university.

How did your parents shape your character?

That's not for me to say. I think a lot of people think they didn't do a good enough job.

But I think now that my education was somewhat unusual, my upbringing was a bit

unusual, because my mother was a professional medical doctor so I never had theproblem that a lot of people have of finding it difficult to get used to women as equal

members of the profession. I never had any doubts about that in my house. In fact, I sort

of thought, when I was a real little kid, that professions like law and medicine really were

more women's professions than they were [for men] ... like my dad was an engineer. Nowthat I'm a bit older and I can look back on it, I think a kind of wanting to know how

things work has infected my philosophy, which I got from both of my parents -- a kind of

engineering approach to philosophical problems. And that's not entirely typical in myprofession, I've discovered.

What about your interest in science?

Well the funny thing is, in a sense I reacted against science in high school and college. I

didn't want to be a doctor and I didn't want to be an engineer. I thought that the

humanities were the more exciting parts of my education. But in fact, now I wouldn'tmake the distinction. Now it all comes together for me. I don't see any distinction

between, let's say, mathematics, literature, and neurobiology. Now I have a big enough

scope and a big enough view of human intellectual enterprise that I don't make the

distinction between these things. And I think my problem, a problem for everyphilosopher, is that to do philosophy well you have to know everything. And I don't know

everything. Neither does any other philosopher. And there's a bad inference from that.

That is, it looks like we've got a built-in problem.

Still talking about your youth, any particular books that you read that

turned you on, that really made a difference?


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Gosh, there must be hundreds.

You read a lot.

Yes. Much more then than I do now. I think [Bertrand] Russell's History of Western

Philosophy, which I read when I was a teenager -- it's not a very good book really from a

scholarly point of view -- but it made it seem like these were real people doing real

things. It made it look like philosophy was a human activity. You didn't have to be agenius or some kind of monster to do it. So I think that had a big influence on me, but

other obvious things, likeHuckleberry Finn. I read it over and over, more or less every

year. And every time I read it, it seemed like a different book to me, and it is a

remarkable book. And then I started reading literature seriously when I was a teenager.Proust ... I read the great modernists: Proust and Joyce and Mann and Kafka. And they

had a tremendous influence on me.

But you were reading things then probably that your cohorts weren't?

You were ahead of the game?

Well, I'm not sure that that was true. I had an unusual bunch of friends in high school and

in college. And we were, now that I think about it, for sixteen-year-olds, we were prettyself-consciously intellectual. That is, we hated American popular culture. We had nothing

to do with the culture of the fifties. We threw up when we heard Bing Crosby or Frank

Sinatra. We thought that was just dreck, we wanted nothing to do with that. And we were

self-consciously intellectual in our interests, and I think that was healthy.

I think it's healthy, especially when you're young, to feel that you're different and uniqueand not just part of a great mass of people flowing forward. I think it's good to fight

against the current.

That's something that a philosopher is often doing, as we'll talk about

in a couple a minutes.

Yes. I got used to being in a minority by the time I was fourteen or fifteen. One thing I

should say is, I went to a very unusual school when we lived in New York. I went to theexperimental school of Columbia University called Horace Mann Lincoln. And that, I

have to say, at the age of thirteen, was the most intense intellectual environment I'd ever

lived in, was when I was thirteen years old. These were very intense ninth graders. They

were fanatically political. So I was a Fabian Socialist at the time but I was sort of the

class right-winger of the ninth grade, being merely a socialist. That was a remarkableatmosphere and I think it did have an effect on me in the long run. For one thing, it gave

me a kind of intellectual self-confidence in debate. You had to shout as loud as anybodyelse at Horace Mann Lincoln or you were never heard.

So toughness went along with thinking in this environment.


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I got used to arguing. I do not feel uncomfortable when people challenge my views. And

I don't feel uncomfortable if it turns out I'm in a minority. That doesn't bother me.

As an undergraduate you went to the University of Wisconsin.

That was my first university, yes. And at the time it was a wonderful place. I think all

universities have lost some of that enthusiasm that they had in the early fifties, but I was

part of what was called the Integrated LiberalStudies Program. They taught us Western

civilization, roughly speaking from the pre-

Socratics right up to the present time. And it

really was a marvelous intellectual environment.

You were also in student government?

Yes. I don't know how I got into that exactly, but in the way that you do. You findsuddenly you're running for an office in student government, and I did.

You were president of the student body.

I was, yes. But I'm afraid I disappointed a lot of people because I found I had a terrific

conflict between being president of the student body and my intellectual interests. And in

the end I resigned as president to pursue my studies. I just had to make a choice and I did.

And you were in philosophy as a major?

Well, I was in everything. You see, I hadn't settled on anything.

Everything interested me, and it still does. I mean this is part of my problem, everythinginterests me. I go to the library to get a book on symbolic logic and I find I'm reading

about the war in the desert or the development of ceramic pottery in Europe or Byzantine

art. Everything interests me.

But you want to bring order to ...

Yes, I do. Maybe that's one of the reasons that I, intellectually, like to produce orderlybooks and an orderly theory, because

inside it's all chaos.

Then you were a Rhodes scholar

and went to England to study for

how many years?

Well, I got a Rhodes scholarship in my

junior year and I was only nineteen. AndI really was not very well formed. Now,

I didn't know that at the time. I thought,

you know, I was a pretty old guy, pretty


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far along. And when I got to Oxford they treated me as if I had no education at all. They

made me start at the very beginning because, unlike other Rhodes scholars, I didn'talready have a degree. And consequently they said, "Well, you have to start at the

beginning." So I took philosophy, politics, and economics, which was a standard degree,

a standard combination. And that's when I first became professionally interested in

philosophy. Then when I got my BA -- in Oxford in those days you could get a job; ifyou got a good BA you could be hired -- and some months after I got my BA I got a job

as what's called a "don," a research lecturer at Christ Church, my old college. So I stayed

on for another three years. I spent a total of seven years in Oxford my first visit. That is,three years as an undergraduate, one year doing research, and then three years as a faculty

member.

And then your first position in the United States was at Berkeley?

Berkeley, yes.

You came here in what year?

Fifty-nine, and I've been here since. Forty years.

Fifty-nine, forty years, my goodness! Let's talk a little about doing

philosophy.

Next page:Philosophical Problems

Copyright 1999, Regents of the University of California

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Philosophical Problems

Is it hard to do philosophy?

It's murder, absolutely. I compare it ... if you really want to know how to do it, you get up

in the morning, there's a large brick wall and you run your head against that brick wall.And you keep doing that every day until eventually you make a hole in the wall. That'swhat it feels like.

But metaphorically the wall has ceased to exist, right? Using the

metaphor that you're always ...

Unfortunately I keep banging the wall. And then once I get one wall battered into shape

then I've got to work on another one. Now the way it actually works out is that you're
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constantly fighting with a whole lot of apparently contradictory ideas, and yet they all

seem appealing and you have to find some way to resolve them.

So take an obvious case. We're all conscious and it's real. All you do

is pinch yourself and you know this is real. How can matter be

conscious? You know, what you've got in your skull is about akilogram and a half, three pounds of this gook. It's about the texture

of English oatmeal -- it's slimier. And it's gray and white. And nowhow can this three pounds of gook in your skull, how can that have

all these thoughts and feelings and anxieties and aspirations? How

can all of the variety of our conscious life be produced by thissquishy stuff blasting away at the synapses? A hundred billion

neurons, glial cells, synapses, how does that produce consciousness?

And that's typical of philosophical problems. On the one had you

want to say, well, consciousness couldn't exist because, you know, how does it fit in withthe physical world? On the other hand we all know it does exist, so you have to find some

way to resolve that. That's a typical philosophical problem.

And this has been a major research interest of yours in philosophy.

Well, this one right now is, yes. In my early career I worked on language. My main

research was about language and speech. My first two books were about the philosophyof language. But when I was writing those books I kept using mental notions like belief

and intention and desire and human action. And I knew some day I'd have to pay off that

debt, I'd have to go and write a book about those sorts of things. So I did. I wrote a book

calledIntentionality. But that left open this whole range of traditional issues in thephilosophy of mind. How does the mind work? How does it relate to physical reality?

I've written several books about those issues. And two things happened. One is,

consciousness became a fashionable subject. For the first twenty or thirty years of mycareer, if you talked about consciousness people thought you're some kind of mystic or

you're not serious. But that's changed now. Now it's a very exciting subject. And the

second thing that happened was that cognitive science was created as a new disciplineand I was in on that. It was in the late seventies and early eighties that here in Berkeley,

and really all over the country, we created this new movement of cognitive science.

As a philosophical issue, what is really exciting about this is that it

touches on this whole division between the mind and the body, which is

something that philosophy has never really resolved.

That's why I'm trying to resolve it. What I'm trying to say is we need to get rid of theseventeenth-century categories.

We've inherited this vocabulary that makes it look as ifmental andphysical name

different realms. And it's part of our popular culture, so we sing songs about your bodyand your soul or we have saying about how your mind is willing but your flesh is weak,

and sometimes the other way around, the flesh is willing but the mind is weak. And we


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have inherited, not only philosophically but in our religious tradition, we've inherited the

idea that there are two quite distinct realms, a realm of the spiritual and a realm of thephysical. And I'm fighting against that. I want to say we live in one realm, it's got all of

these features, and once you see that then the philosophical mind-body problem

dissolves. You're still left with a terrible problem in neurobiology, namely, how does the

brain do it, in detail? What are the specific neurotransmitters? What's the neuronalarchitecture? But I think the philosophical problem, how is it possible that the mental can

be a real part of a world that's entirely physical, I think that problem I can solve.

And how?

The way I solve it is to get rid of the traditional categories. Forget about Descartes'scategories ofres existence and res cogitance, that is, the extended reality of the material

and the thinking reality of the mental. Once you get rid of the categories and you ask

yourself how it works, then it seems to me there are two principles which, if properly

understood (it's not all that easy to understand them, but if properly understood --)provide you with a solution to the traditional mind-body problem. Those principles are

first, all of our mental processes are caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the

brain. We assume that it's at the level of neurons, but that's for the specialists to settle inthe end. Neurons and synapses -- maybe you've got to go higher, maybe you've got to go

lower -- but some sorts of lower-level processes in the brain, whether it's clusters of

neurons or subneuronal parts or neurons and synapses, their behavior causes all of yourmental life. Everything from feeling pains and tickles and itches, pick your favorite, to

suffering the angst of post-industrial man under late capitalism, whatever is your favorite.

Or stubbing your toe.

Or stubbing your toe. Whatever is your favorite feeling. Feeling ecstatic at a football

game, feeling drunk when you've had too much to drink. All of that is caused by variablerates of neuron firings in the brain or some other such neurobiological phenomenon, wedon't know in detail what. Okay, that's principle number one. Brains cause minds. All of

our mental life is causally explained by the behavior of neuronal systems.

The second principle is just as important: the mental reality which is caused by the

neurobiological phenomena is not a separate substance that's squirted out. It isn't some

kind of juice that's squirted out by the neurons. It's just the state that the system is in. Thatis to say, the behavior of the microelements causes a feature of the entire system at a

macro level, even though the system is made up entirely of those elements that cause the

higher level behavior. Now that's hard for most people to grasp, that you can accept both

that the relation between the brain and the mind is causal, and that the mind is just afeature of the brain. But if you think about it, nature is full of stuff like that.

Look at this glass of water, for example. It's liquid. Now, liquidity is a real feature, but

the liquidity is explained by the behavior of the molecules, that is, the liquid behavior is

explained by the behavior of the molecules, even though the liquidity is just a feature of

the whole system of molecules. I can't find a single molecule and say "This one is liquid,this one is wet, I'll see if I can find you a dry one." Similarly, I can't find a single neuron


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and say "This one is conscious or this one is unconscious." We're talking about features

of whole systems that are explained by the behavior of the microelements of thosesystems. So I think the philosophical problem is resolved. That is, I don't have any worry

about the philosophical mind-body problem. But the scientific problem -- how exactly

does the machinery do it? -- that's still very much up for grabs. And I'm in the middle of

that battle as well, even though I'm not a neuroscientist. Okay, thereare a whole lot of other philosophical problems left over, but that

one I'm not worried about.

In one of your most recent books you talk in passing

throughout the book about doing philosophy, that's my

interpretation; but at one point you say "It's always

good to remind ourselves of the facts." You've said

this is really exciting, and part of the excitement

comes from doing this [philosophical] work at the same

time that all these biological discoveries are being

made.

That's right. You see, I think in philosophy especially you have to remind yourself ofwhat you know already. We know that the world is made up of entities that we call

particles. They're not exactly particles but that's close enough. It's made up of entities,

molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles. It's made up of these tiny entities and they'reorganized into systems. And these systems have causal relations to other systems. So a

planet is a system and a water molecule is a system. A baby is a system. There are all

these subsystems. And some of those systems have evolved through biological evolution.

We're carbon-based systems with a heavy dosage of hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen.

That's our life. We've got a thing about these four elements. And those systems evolveacross evolutionary time. We know all of that. Now some of those carbon-based, living

systems have evolved neuronal systems. Funny kind of cell, the neuron. It's a cell likeany other, but it's different anatomically. And some of those neuronal systems causeconsciousness. Start there. Now that's how much we know before the philosopher ever

goes to work. Then we go to work on that. We don't go back and think, well, maybe the

real world doesn't exist. No, that's not an option. So you have to remind yourself of what

you actually know.

At one point you're trying to explain when we do philosophy. This is in

... I can't remember which book this was in, but you say, "As soon as

we are confident that we really have knowledge and understanding in

some domain, we stop calling it philosophy and start calling it

science. And as soon as we make some definite progress, we think

ourselves entitled to call it scientific progress."

That's right, yes.

So this world you're in right now, that's part of the excitement,

right?

That's right. What happens is this.


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Philosophy is, in part, the name for a whole lot of subject matters that we really don't

know how to settle the issues in, where we don't have established methods for resolvingquestions. Now for me that's part of the fun, it's wide open. You're not hemmed in, you're

not trapped in a narrow little research program. But a lot of people find that

uncomfortable, that you can't fall back on an established body of philosophical truths.

Okay, now you have this wide-open area, but as soon as we can get a question into aprecise enough form that it admits of a systematic answer that everybody can see is right,

we quit calling it philosophy. We call it science or mathematics or logic. And that's

happened in a whole lot of questions. That happened to the problem of life. So at onetime: How can inert matter be alive? That was a philosophical issue. Now it's very hard

for us to remind ourselves how important that was. We can't recover the intensity with

which our great-grandparents fought that question. Now we know how it works. And this,I think, will happen to the problem of consciousness. We will get a way of resolving it as

a scientific question. This has a funny result for philosophers, namely, this is why science

is always "right" and philosophy is always "wrong," because as soon as we're convinced

that it's right we quit calling it philosophy and call it science.

So once you have the method of coming up with answers, it's time for

you to close up shop as a philosopher.

Once you have a method that all the competent researchers in the field, I mean there are

always a few cranks, but for the most part that the competent researchers in the field can

agree is the right method for resolving this problem, then it ceases to be a philosophical

problem and it becomes a problem in logic, or it becomes a problem in biology. So thequestion, "How many carbon rings are there in serotonin?" (that's a neurotransmitter) --

that's not a philosophical question. But: "What's the relation of the mental and the

physical?" -- that's still a philosophical question. What's the cause of cancer? That's not a

philosophical question. But what's the nature of causation? What is it for one thing to

cause another thing anyhow? That's a philosophical question.

Next page:Being a Philosopher


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Being a Philosopher

When you think of coming to get a degree here and taking a philosophy

course, it might be intimidating for a student.


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At one point you say, "We have to begin by approaching the problem

navely. We have to let ourselves be astounded by facts that any sane

person would take for granted." So this sense of wonder and navet and

innocence that you might have is a virtue, in a way.

Yes. I mean that quite literally, and in fact we've been exhibiting that just in our

discussion. The way that I describe the mind-body problem: you have to allow yourself tobe astounded by things that any sane person takes for granted. We've got this stuff in our

brains, it's conscious. How the hell can it be conscious? Now that's the childlike question

that you have to ask. When you begin working on a philosophical question you have tobe totally nave. "I've got this hole in my face, noise comes out. People find it

meaningful. They think it's true or false or interesting. How can that be? How can just

making these noises through my mouth, how can that have all of these remarkable

properties?" That's the nave stage. Then you have, at some point, to become incrediblysophisticated. You stop being nave and become immensely knowledgeable, rigorous,

and sophisticated. And I've never figured out the algorithm for when you stop being

dumb and start being smart. But you have to start off very nave and very dumb. "Oh yes,

amazing, how can that be?" Then later on, then you bring in your intellectual apparatusand get it resolved.

But also you have to immerse yourself in the studies, for example, in

the case of what's going on in the mind that science is discovering.

Yes. And the Internet is a disaster, because it means there's more stuff than ever to read.

And the proliferation of good articles -- I can't read all the intelligent attacks on myself.There are just too many! And I can't read all my e-mail. So the problem is that

technology doesn't give us more time in the day, this is the real problem. And you have to

read a lot and I'm sure I don't read enough. But what I do read I take very seriously.

Now you've given us a sense of the domain in which you work, the kinds

of problems you work on. What then are the traits that go with doing

philosophy well? It sounds like you have to be very patient.

Yes. Well I'm not patient, I know that. I tend to get impatient.

But let me describe some of the traits, I think, that make for a good philosopher. One is

you really have to have a kind of openness. You can't think that you know all the rightanswers in advance, you've got to be willing to be astonished when you go to work on

problems. And this has happened to me on a number of occasions. I'll give one example.


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I knew all my life I would some day have to write an article about metaphor: How do

metaphors work? And like every American, I've been to high school. And like everyAmerican, I guess, you think that the stuff you learn in high school must, at some level,

be right. In high school they taught us that all metaphors are really similes in disguise. It's

really, when you say "man is a wolf," you mean "man is like a wolf," in certain respects. I

just assumed that, and then I was astounded to discover that theory doesn't work. Youcan't make that theory work because, well, for a

number of reasons it doesn't work. But that's an

example of how you've got to be open. You'vegot to be willing to have your most fundamental

beliefs challenged and even refuted. So that's the

first thing.

The second thing is you've got to mind your p's

and q's. You've got to make sure that each stepfollows logically from the earlier steps.

The third thing is, in a way, the hardest of all.You just have to avoid saying things that are obviously false. And you'd be surprised how

many famous philosophers say things that are obviously false. I mean, Berkeley says the

material world doesn't exist, it's all just ideas. A lot of contemporary philosophers say themind doesn't really exist, it's just a computer program or it's a way we have of looking at

things. Consciousness doesn't really exist, it's just a certain type of computer program. I

would say, if you can proceed rigorously, you have an open mind, and you avoid making

obvious mistakes, avoid saying things that are obviously false, well, I don't guarantee youa successful career in philosophy, but you're off and running. I mean, you're doing better

than a lot of famous people.

And you have to be argumentative and courageous, right?

Yes, I think it takes a certain amount of courage. If you have a view that you think is

right but an awful lot of people don't think is right, and you publish it and you turn onyour e-mail or open the philosophy journals and you find out all these guys think you're

wrong, if you really think you're right and you really think you have good arguments, you

have to have the courage of your convictions. And some people find that difficult. I don't.I guess my upbringing or my personal style ... I don't mind it if other people disagree with

me. I'm sorry that they make these mistakes, but I do what I can to correct them.

Next page:The Chinese Room Argument



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Page 4 of 6

The Chinese Room Argument

In your work on the mind and the brain you talk about how there is

always a turn in an era to a metaphor that is dominant in technology,

hence the dominant one now is to say that the mind is like a computer

program. And to answer that you've come up with the "Chinese Room."

Tell us a little about that.

Well, it's such a simple argument that I find myself somewhat embarrassed to be

constantly repeating it, but you can say it in acouple of seconds. Here's how it goes.

Whenever somebody gives you a theory of themind, always try it out on yourself. Always

ask, how would it work for me? Now ifsomebody tells you, "Well, really your mind is

just a computer program, so when youunderstand something, you're just running the

steps in the program," try it out. Take some

area which you don't understand and imagineyou carry out the steps in the computer

program. Now, I don't understand Chinese. I'm

hopeless at it. I can't even tell Chinese writing

from Japanese writing. So I imagine that I'mlocked in a room with a lot of Chinese symbols

(that's the database) and I've got a rule book forshuffling the symbols (that's the program) andI get Chinese symbols put in the room through

a slit, and those are questions put to me in

Chinese. And then I look up in the rule book

what I'm supposed to do with these symbolsand then I give them back symbols and

unknown to me, the stuff that comes in are questions and the stuff I give back are

answers.

Now, if you imagine that the programmers get good at writing the rule book and I get

good at shuffling the symbols, my answers are fine. They look like answers of a nativeChinese [speaker]. They ask me questions in Chinese, I answer the questions in Chinese.

All the same, I don't understand a word of Chinese. And the bottom line is, if I don't

understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the computer program forunderstanding Chinese, then neither does any other digital computer on that basis,

because no computer's got anything that I don't have. That's the power of the computer, it

just shuffles symbols. It just manipulates symbols. So I am a computer for understanding


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Chinese, but I don't understand a word of Chinese.

You can see this point if you contrast Searle in Chinese with Searle

in English. If they ask me questions in English and I give answers

back in English, then my answers will be as good as a native Englishspeaker, because I am one. And if they gave me questions in

Chinese and I give them back answers in Chinese, my answers willbe as good as a native Chinese speaker because I'm running the

Chinese program. But there's a huge difference on the inside. On the

outside it looks the same. On the inside I understand English and Idon't understand Chinese. In English I am a human being who

understands English; in Chinese I'm just a computer. Computers,

therefore -- and this really is the decisive point -- just in virtue of

implementing a program, the computer is not guaranteedunderstanding. It might have understanding for some other reason but just going through

the steps of in the formal program is not sufficient for the mind.

And so the computer program, then, has not explained consciousness.

That's right. Nowhere near. Now, that isn't to say that computers are useless and we

shouldn't use them. No. Not a bit of it. I use computers every day. I couldn't do my workwithout computers. But the computer does a model or a simulation of a process. And a

computer simulation of a mind is about like computer simulation of digestion. I don't

know why people make this dumb mistake. You see, if we made a perfect computer

simulation of digestion, nobody would think, "Well, let's run out and buy a pizza andstuff it in the computer." It's a model, it's a picture of digestion. It shows you the formal

structure of how it works, it doesn't actually digest anything! That's what it is with the

things that a computer does for anything. A computer model of what it's like to fall inlove or read a novel or get drunk doesn't actually fall in love or read a novel or get drunk.

It just does a picture or model of that.

Next page:The University


Page 5 of 6

The University

Let's talk a little about the university and how a philosopher looks at

the goals of the university, but also the changes that have occurred at


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Berkeley. This was your

first position here, and

shortly after you came,

the Free Speech Movement

started.

Yes, right.

And you were involved in

that. Tell us about that.

Well, okay I will. That was along story and what happened

was this. I am not basically a

very political person. Given a

choice between intellectual lifeand political life, I'd take

intellectual life any time. It's more fun. In the long run it's more satisfying. But when I

came back from England I was involved in civil liberties activities, and in particular I wasinvolved against the McCarthyite residues of the fifties. I was involved against something

called the House Un-American Activities Committee. And I had, as an undergraduate at

Wisconsin, been active against Senator McCarthy, who was then our senator in

Wisconsin. I was secretary of an organization called Students Against McCarthy. So Ikept that as a kind of sideline. And to my total amazement, I was forbidden to speak at

our law school in response to a movie put out by the House Un-American Activities

Committee. The Chancellor's Office called up the law school and said, "That guy Searle

is too controversial, you can't have him speaking." This was a man named ViceChancellor Kragen under Chancellor Strong, who called up and forbade me to speak at

the law school and invoked various stupid university rules, the "Kerr Rules," he called

them. Now, Clark Kerr assures me this was a misapplication of the rules, but at the timethey could shut off my free speech and I can tell you, I did not appreciate that. I was

extremely indignant that that had happened to me. I was an assistant professor in this

university, I was invited to lecture in a law school class, and a Vice Chancellor Kragen inthe Chancellor's Office could call up and stop that lecture.

So a couple of years after this incident a bunch of students came to me and said, "We areprotesting the absence of free speech on the campus. We've got something called the Free

Speech Movement." And they found in me a sympathetic audience. I was extremely

sympathetic to the idea that the university had a long way to go to assure complete

freedom of speech. And in particular I had a good student named Mario Savio, and I had

a teaching assistant named Suzanne Goldberg, and they were the first people that I talkedto about this student activity that was going on. I remember one day going around with

Suzanne and seeing all these people surrounding a police car and seeing the mostamazing scene. I mean, it wasn't like something out of the 1950s. So the first thing you

know, I was busy making speeches on behalf of the FSM. I became very active, in fact I

was the first tenured faculty member who really took the side of the students and I was

extremely active on the side of the FSM.


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And what did you learn from that experience? Obviously the Free Speech

Movement became something entirely different over time.

Yes, it did. Yes. Well, there are a number of things that happened, most of which wouldhave been unpredictable.

The Free Speech Movement, within its own initial objectives, was successful. We didchange the university regulations so the kind of thing that was done to me as an assistant

professor couldn't be done after 1964, and I don't believe it could be done today. I may be

wrong about that but I don't think so.

However, two other things happened that really we couldn't have predicted and they werenot so fortunate. One is, we created a whole lot of radical expectations. This is

characteristic of revolutionary movements; people involved get a sense of enormous

possibility. "All kinds of exciting things are going to happen, we can create a new kind of

a university. We can create a new kind of a society. It's all going to start right here inBerkeley." That's one thing that happened: we created unreasonable expectations about

what could be achieved by a student movement of this sort. And a lot of people wanted tokeep going after the FSM because we had this marvelous student movement here, we've

got all this energy and idealism. It's very hard after you've had the heady and exhilaratingtriumph of overthrowing the university administration to then go back to your classes and

start doing homework, taking notes, and writing term papers. A lot of people found that

very hard.

The second thing that happened was an issue came up that really made it impossible to

carry on a normal civil life in the United States, and that was the Vietnam War. By thelate sixties, from '66 afterwards, it became progressively more difficult to run the

university in the face of the amount of protest that went on against the Vietnam War. So

the FSM, by providing an example of successful student protest, created imitators all overthe United States, and it was possible for a lot of people to have the illusion that, well, wehave created a national student movement, and this national student movement is going to

have an enormous change, an enormous effect on the process of change in American life,

beginning with the Vietnam War.

I mentioned two things; actually there was a third thing that happened, and that is the set

of totally dreadful vulgarizations of culture that occurred under the general name of "thesixties." In the sixties, people had a whole lot of really quite stupid theories about life.

They thought, you get immediate gratification through drugs, and indeed if you can't get

immediate gratification through drugs then you get it through some other equally

instantaneous form of gratification. The idea that satisfactions in life normally take a lotof work, you have to do years of preparation to do anything worthwhile, in the sixties it

was very hard to convince people of that.

In your book Campus Wars you look at some of the underlying structural

conditions that, so to speak, weakened the immune system, made it

vulnerable to these issues like Vietnam. And you talk about the real

generational difference, that these expectations were based in a


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there as a way of seeking power or overcoming personal problems. What happened after

the FSM, though, was not that there was a general decline in the IQ, but somehow oranother this became, so to speak, an undergraduate career option. That is, it became

something you could "do" as a student. And the role models had already been created, so

all kinds of people who really hadn't paid their dues fighting southern sheriffs and so on,

as the original leaders of the FSM had, could then become prominent student radicalleaders. Many of them weren't students of course, they were just people who came to

Berkeley like Jerry Rubin. Jerry Rubin did not come here as a student, he came here after

the FSM to try to get in on the activities. But there was a kind of opportunism and a sortof, I don't want to use the word careerism exactly, because it's not a normal career, but a

model of opportunity was created by the FSM that didn't exist before and it attracted all

sorts of mediocre people.

How do these events change the university and our understanding of what

a good education is about?

Well again, that's a very difficult question and I will give really a rather too short and too

inadequate an answer. One of the things that struck me in all of this period was howresilient the university was. We just went on with the sheer glacial force of academia,

with its budgets and its committees and its procedures for promotions and tenure. So atone level, the university proved itself remarkably strong in fighting this stuff off. In this

respect American universities were better than European universities, because we had a

kind of self-confidence in the traditional institutional structures and we just kept

marching on. I think, for the most part, if somebody had gone to sleep in the 1950s andcame back to the campus today, he'd be struck by the weird way students dress and the

way professors dress ...

And how much they're making.

And how much they're making, for better or worse -- but he would not be astounded by

the system of courses, credits, lectures, exams, degrees, and so on. All of the basicapparatus remained unchanged. However, there were forces at work in the larger society

that combined with the radicalism of the sixties, that, I think, made serious long-term

damage to the university.

And what was that damage?

Well, again, it's very hard to summarize but I would say the university became less self-confident in its elitism. By definition a university has to strive for the best. If you're not

striving for the best you're not the best university, you're not doing all that you can. Butthe best means that some things are better than others. Some professors are better than

other professors, some books are better than other books. Some ideas are intelligent, otherideas are stupid. And a university has to be committed to quality. It's nothing mysterious,

it's like the San Francisco '49ers. They try to get the best coaches and the best players and

make them do the best they can. Well we're supposedly trying to get the very bestprofessors and the very best students, and that means intellectually the best -- the

intellectual elite of the country as the professors, and the intellectual elite of the state and


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people from out of state as the students -- and make them perform at the highest possible

level. Well, we're still committed to that but we're more bashful about saying it in public.And there is a sort of an undercurrent that, well, maybe that's all a really kind of

disguised power structure and maybe it's all a sort of disguised oppression and

colonialism, and we've got to get out of this idea that some books are really superior to

others, and some students are superior to others, and some professors are better thanothers. And that's bad. I mean, if you don't believe in quality, and you don't believe that

the ultimate criterion of success in this game is what's better and what's worse, what has

the quality and what lacks the quality, then you've given up on the ideal of academic life.And I don't want to overstate this. I don't want to say we've abandoned our elitism. But

we're less self-confident than we were in the fifties and in the sixties.

You've written that "Traditionally, one of the aims of humanistic

education was to get the student to overcome the accidents of his or

her background. You are invited to redefine yourself as an individual

in light of a universal human civilization and cultural tradition." And

then you go on to say, "Emphasis was on the individual within the

universal. Now you derive your identity not from individual efforts at

self-definition, but rather from the group to which you belong."

Yes, well now this is a particular manifestation of what I was talking about, and I think,

in a way, it's the worst single manifestation of this. We have abandoned the idea that the

university invites the student to become part of a universal community of scholars, part ofa universal community of human civilization, where you achieve individual self-

definition through participating in a universal human civilization. Now what we tell you

is, what's your ethnicity? What's your race? What's your gender? That's who you are. You

don't define yourself. You are defined by race, gender, class, ethnicity, and culturalbackground. And that isn't just stupid, that's evil. I'm fighting against that, but I think a lot

of people now accept that. They think that's perfectly legitimate. And one way to put it is

to say that traditionally in America, such things at that were regarded as accidental. It'slike you're blue-eyed or you're left-handed. You don't build your life around being left-handed, and you don't build your life around your ethnicity or your race. These are just

stupid accidents of your birth. The serious professional intellectual regards it as an

accidental fact that he or she was born of a particular race or a particular gender. Youcreate yourself as an individual intellect and that's what counts, and we will invite you

into membership into a universal human community of advanced culture. And within that

community you can create yourself as a serious individual. But now we're tellingotherwise innocent children, "Look, you came from this background, that's who you

really are." And I think to say that is to abandon one of the fundamental advantages of the

university education, namely, before we told you, yes, okay, you came from this

background, you can be proud of this background, we'll offer you something better. We'lllet you redefine yourself, giving you the resources of the whole of human history to

redefine yourself. Now we've even got this stupid Ethnic Studies requirement where we

make people study American cultures where the idea is you're supposed to celebratevarious forms of really quite ordinary phenomena. There's nothing intellectually special

about having been born a certain race or a certain gender.


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Now, given your background -- you said your mother was a doctor and so

you were used to a liberal environment that might have not been

traditional -- you would agree though that the canon needed to be

expanded to a certain extent. But the problem became something else, is

that what you are saying?

Exactly. I never quite believed that there was a thing called "the canon." There weresomething called "the classics," and the idea was that there were a collection of works ofhuman civilization that, because of their intellectual quality or their historical importance,

or both their intellectual quality and importance, were regarded as an essential part of

education. So Plato is both important historically and has high intellectual quality. Marxis certainly important historically; you can have debates about the intellectual quality of

the work. But both of those are important for people to read. The idea is that we are

conveying to you a human civilization with a number of cultural and intellectual

achievements of quality and importance. And now that's challenged. Now the idea is, ohwell, one book is as good as another. I debated a guy once at another university who said,

"Well, you know, Bugs Bunny is as good as Shakespeare. I mean these are all just texts.

One text is as much of a text as another text." And indeed one English department at oneuniversity said, "We really shouldn't call ourselves the Department of English Language

and Literature, we should be called the Department of Textual Studies." And from the

point of view of textual studies, well, a cereal box is as good as a sonnet by Shakespeare.It's all just some nonsense. You can always say in French, "C'est la textualit du texte." A

certain kind of textuality is all that counts. So that, I think, is ... that isn't just stupid, it's

self-destructive. Because if you don't believe that there's a distinction in quality then whyon earth would the taxpayers pay you, why would the students pay you to teach this stuff,if one opinion is as good as another and one text is as good as another? That is, I think

that the mission that we're engaged in is predicated on a belief in quality.

And teaching students how to think.

Well absolutely. But there are different ways of thinking.

You can't just teach a student how to think like that. You've got to teach them how to

think in a sensitive and critical fashion about interpreting poetry. You've got to teach him

how to think rigorously in analyzing philosophical arguments. You've got to teach him tothink in the lab about how to conduct a lab experiment. So the idea that's ... you see, if

you just say, well, our method is teaching people how to think, then it seems like these

courses that consist of just bull sessions are as good as anything else. People sit around

and talk about their upbringing and how they felt oppressed, and what their communitywas like and so on. That is not, in my opinion, a serious form of intellectually rigorous

thinking. That's sort of self-congratulatory introspection.

And part of education is getting beyond that.

Exactly. Part of education the way I teach it is [that] I teach the students to overcome theaccidents of their background, to think about things they would never have thought about

otherwise. In high school nobody teaches you about -- unless it's a most remarkable high

school -- various neurobiological approaches to solving the problem of consciousness. I


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mean that's something you have to get to an advanced level in order to be enabled to

reflect on.

Next page:Conclusion


Page 6 of 6

Conclusion

What do you hope to impart to your students? Once they've had John

Searle, what do you want them to have taken away?

A whole lot of things. There's always the immediate objective of the course. You should

understand from this course how language works, if it's a course on the philosophy of

language. And you should understand the predominant theories, the dominating theoriesabout how language works, but I'm not bashful about telling you which theories I think

are right. I mean, I'll teach you the other guy's theories, but I'm not concealing from you

my own opinions. When you go away from this course you should know that. You should

understand the material of the course. And then you should have acquired a certain kindof disciplined practice of reading and studying in the course, of reading the articles and

writing the term papers and preparing for the exams. And really, if I am successful, then

you ought to be able to go and read the latest philosophy journals and read the articlesand read the latest stuff on this. I mean, I tell my students that if I'm successful in the

course they should, in an undergraduate course, they should be able to pass a Ph.D.

qualifying exam in this course, in the philosophy of language or the philosophy of mind,

which are two courses I teach.

However, having said all that, I have to say Ithink the most important thing that I try to

convey, and the most important thing any

professor can convey, is to exemplify a style of

thinking and a mode of sensibility. It's what you

provide an example of that is as important, and insome ways more important, than what you

actually say explicitly. You convey by examplewhat it's like to actually engage in a process of

investigation and research, what it's like to

formulate ideas and have them challenged by

other ideas, and then deal with the conflicts of these ideas. So the style that youexemplify, the mode of sensibility you express, I think is as important as the content of


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the course. Now you don't want to get too self-conscious about that. You don't want to go

into class thinking, well you know, today I've got to really exemplify this. You do yourthing. But at the end of the semester, or even more importantly ten years later, when the

student comes back to the campus, if you ask yourself what difference could I have made

to these students, I think that's as important as the content of the course.

Is there something that students can do to prepare for the next

millennium?

Work hard. You see, what I'vefound about Berkeley students in

particular is that they hunger for

commitment. And what they

want to know from the professoris, does this material matter to

you? Are you really

intellectually committed to this

material? And they areremarkably instinctive at

spotting phonies, at spotting fakecommitments or various forms

of intellectual concealment. I

think there's a kind of instinctive

ability to spot this, and Berkeley students are looking for commitment and they hungerfor intellectual commitment. And not everybody does. When I've taught at other

universities, I teach at a lot of universities, and at some universities I've taught at you get

students whose IQs are as high as the Berkeley students, they're just more apathetic. They

just don't much care about it. They don't have the hunger for commitment. They don't

have the passion that I find in my Berkeley students.

Professor Searle, thank you for taking time to be with us today and

giving us a sense of the habits of critical thinking.

Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you. And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation

with History.

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Searle Out and About