Favorite Reads: John R. Searle, “Mind, Language and Society”

Favorite Reads: John R. Searle, “Mind, Language and Society”

Another of my occassional entries on some favorite reads on human nature, society and information technology.

Since I started my ‘favorite reads’ list with a founding father of artificial intelligence research, perhaps it is fitting to next mention a famous critic. John R. Searle achieved notoriety for a critique of AI known as the Chinese Room Argument. The ensuing controversy kept a few generations of graduate students and journalists well-occupied.

In “Mind, Language and Society”, Searle provides a lay summary of his life’s work. The book outlines Searle’s efforts to demystify the human mind by removing the cultural baggage which hinders objective analysis of it. For Searle, the mind is an impressive biological organ which in the human species is able to generate language. Language provides the mechanical foundation for our most distinctive talent — the ability to construct social realities on top of the physical realities around us. While attempting to outline the mechanisms by which humans are able to create stuff like culture, Searle hopes to bring the dispassionate methods of empirical science to a realm often shrouded in mystical terminology.

Searle’s ideas about language and the construction of social realities seem especially interesting given the rise of the Internet. People now have widespread access to social software. These new tools simplify the creation of human institutions that may have no physical presence other than the digital bits on a server’s hard drive.

It is noteworthy that Searle’s social and physical realities seem to parallel Herbert Simon’s artificial and natural worlds (see below).

 

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