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The revolution going on around us in the cognitive sciences has brought with it a renaissance in the philosophy of mind. John Searle, however, is a member of the old guard. He is known for his claim that Artificial Intelligence is irrelevant to the meanings the human mind constructs and attributes to objects and events. In his new book, The Rediscovery of the Mind, he extends his critique to the entire enterprise of the cognitive sciences, with psychoanalysis included among his subjects.
Searle claims that meaning is a function of consciousness. He sees meaning as created by consciousness and as apprehended only by the conscious mind. He says that nothing can be meaningful that is not at least potentially accessible to consciousness. His book begins as an exposition and defense of this thesis. He writes with intelligence, wit, and an engaging familiarity. Yet in the end he arrives at a strange conclusion that completes what seems to me to be the progressive unraveling of his argument.
On the next to last page he writes:
If I am right, we have been making some stunning mistakes. Why? I believe it is in part because we have been supposing that if the input to the system is meaningful and the output is meaningful, then all the processes in between must be meaningful as well…. But it is simply false to assume that the meaningfulness of the input and output implies a set of meaningful processes in between…. (p. 246)
How could this assumption be simply false? Searle appears to be taking the idea of the behaviorists that intermediate processes in