John Searle & the Mind-Body Problem

An interesting 1992 philosophy paper from Bryan Caplan, author of the excellent, if flawed, new book The Myth of the Rational Voter:

While John Searle exposes the errors of materialists, dualists can only be delighted. Searle and dualists, both minorities in academic philosophy of mind, have something crucial in common: Namely, they agree that mental states as standardly conceived exist; they are not "really" illusions, behavior, functions, or computer programs. Denial of the reality of the mental, rather than being the necessary implication of science, is in fact a profoundly unscientific attempt to say that reality can only contain what our theories adequately account for. Despite these points of agreement, Searle's solution to the mind-body problem is avowedly anti-dualistic; and even if he requested admission to the dualist camp, it is likely that they should be uneasy to receive him. This paper compares and contrasts the Searlean and dualistic solutions to the mind-body problem; it then argues that dualism is a perfectly adequate theory of the mind and Searle's view is not...

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