This collection of papers offers a useful survey of John Searle's views on the two themes that have made him one of the most influential philosopher of the last three decades: how to reconcile our common sense intuitions about consciousness with a scientific view of the world and how to unpack the relationships between intentionality and linguistic behavior. Although designed to display the flow and coherence of a book, Consciousness and Language still has the flavor of an anthology, whose primary virtue is to make available to the reader a set of papers that would otherwise be difficult to hunt down.

The first three chapters, organized in chronological order, are a good sample of Searle's attempt to provide a non-dualist, yet non-materialist causal account of consciousness. Where others (see e.g. Rosenthal Reference Rosenthal1986 and Lycan Reference Lycan and Tomberlin1995) depict consciousness as mental representation, Searle goes the other way, depicting all mental representation in terms of its potential accessibility to consciousness. The scientific explanation of consciousness itself, he believes, requires not a functional or computational story, but the understanding of its neurobiological roots. Alongside this apparent scientific optimism, however, Searle asserts that consciousness is in a sense irreducible, in that any third-person, scientific account must indeed leave out the subjective, first-person dimensions. “Consciousness consists of inner, qualitative, subjective states and processes of sentience or awareness” (38) yet at the same time consciousness is to the brain what digestion is to the stomach. As liquidity is a higher-level property of water caused by its specific molecular composition, so conscious states are higher-level features (‘emergent’ features) of the brain caused by the brain's neural underpinnings. Like liquidity, conscious states are not epiphenomenal. They are real physical states for they play an essential causal role in the explanation of behavior.

This proposal is appealing both because it strikes us as commonsensical and because it is presented in Searle's signature lucid, jargon-free and persuasive manner. However, it is not clear that Searle manages, in the end, to avoid choosing between dualism and materialism. The comparison between liquidity and consciousness provides a good illustration for this claim. In the case of liquidity, scientists can explain, e.g., under which particular conditions a given substance will morph into that state, while in the realm of consciousness we remain completely at a loss. To claim that the brain causes conscious states without showing just how this is done seems, if true, to be platitudinously true. The lower-level descriptions that would let us connect properties of neural mechanisms to higher-level properties of qualitative and subjective conscious states are missing and so are the causal laws that would bridge the levels. Despite the initial attractions, Searle's final view seems to provide much less than promised and perhaps to justify what Fodor, the great pessimist, has to say about the topic: “[we don't know], even to a first glimmer, how a brain (or anything else that is physical) could manage to be a locus of conscious experience. This … is, surely, among the ultimate metaphysical mysteries; don't bet on anybody ever solving it” (Fodor Reference Fodor1995, 5).

Whether plausible or not, Searle extends his view on consciousness to the analysis of some related issues in the philosophy of mind, such as animal minds (chapter 4), intentionality (chapter 5), collective intentions (chapter 6), and the evils of computational explanation both in the cognitive (chapter 7) and in the social sciences (chapter 8). His approach to these topics also constitutes the motivating force for revisiting some of his original and most influential work on speech act theory. Chapters 9, 10, 11, 13 and 14 (the only one not previously published) are all related to Searle's work in linguistics and philosophy of language. Chapter 12 “Analytic Philosophy and Mental Phenomena” sits oddly since its content—a defense of folk mental phenomena against behaviorism, functionalism and computationalism—makes it better suited to appear in the first part of the book. The first three “Individual Intentionality and Social Phenomena in the Theory of Speech Acts,” “How Performatives Work” and “Conversation” all cover Searle's classic discussion of the role of intentionality in speech acts. Classic themes in this part of the book include reconciling Gricean individual intentionality with the convention and social oriented style of those like Wittgenstein and Austin (chapter 9), explaining how in, e.g., declarations the intention to perform an action is sufficient for the action's performance (chapter 10) and questioning whether it's possible to characterize the rule-governed behavior of conversation using the same conceptual apparatus applied for speech acts (chapter 11).

The last two chapters are slightly different in nature, being a critique of Quine's indeterminacy thesis and of Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's private language argument, each challenges, from a realist point of view, different forms of philosophical skepticism about meaning and intentionality. Like many others in the past, Searle attempts to show that Kripke's is not a faithful interpretation of Wittgenstein. More interestingly, he also tries to show that although Kripke's skeptical argument properly applies to the idea of words and symbols as mental phenomena mediating between expressions and concepts, it leaves untouched the explanatory power of precisely those rules or concepts. Searle appeals to what he has dubbed ‘the Background’—a set of basic know-hows, non-representational biological and culturally-bound skills and capacities—to avoid an infinite regress in the interpretation of a rule. The solution, Searle argues, lies in a network of practical abilities and commitments to act in a certain way. The game of ascribing concepts like ‘plus’ is rooted in a network of socially reliant skills for recognizing the propriety of certain practices and the impropriety of others. To say of someone that she means e.g. plus by ‘plus’ is to locate her in a web of individual know-hows and social patterns, regularities and interests; a web characteristic of the community to which she belongs. Since Searle's own account of the Background points out the inherent obscurity of the notion (see his Reference Searle, Lepore and Gulick1991, 289), it is difficult to see in any detail how it can really unseat Kripke's skeptical argument. But the attempt is worth exploring and this final paper stands out as one of the most novel and philosophically challenging in the whole collection. Despite Searle's fresh and plain prose, the anthology is probably not for the general public. Most topics are technical and require a certain familiarity with the literature. It could, however, be valuable to upper-level students or as a ready-made package for a graduate course in philosophy.