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Showing posts from March, 2012

The Incompleteness of Searle’s Seemingly Complete Answer to Jaegwon Kim

Phil 132, again, I guess trying to argue that Searle himself is wrong 😅.. (6/13/22) In his letter to Jaegwon Kim, Searle explains his position on mind body problem and try to explain why Kim’s argument against him is fallacious. The core of Kim’s charge that biological naturalism suffers from overdetermination comes from his misunderstanding of Searle’s use of word “cause”. While Searle’s explanation easily counters this fact, his answer itself rebounds with another challenge to him that is embedded in Kim’s remark which questions the idea of irreducible subjective ontology of the conscious states. Searle’s simplistic answer that calls to preserve subjectivity doesn’t seem to go far enough to properly counter such a charge. This mainly stems from the fact that such a claim needs a deeper analysis of subjective states. It might also have to engage in the formidable argument from Kim that conscious states are functionally reducible, and it is unclear why Searle’s letter does not clearly