Biological naturalism against monism and dualism: John Searle

The main topic of this study is Searle's theory of biological naturalism differing from materialism and dualism which are dominant views in the history of analytical philosophy of mind. According to biological naturalism, which does not reduce mental into physical and does not utter a separate ontological category to mental at the same time, mind is the upper level property of the brain. Searle, by centralizing consciousness to his understanding of mind, aims to indicate that subjectivity of consciousness does not create a problem for the scientific investigation of mind. This view contradicts with the traditional views in philosophy mind. In order to construct a ground for his claims, Searle argues materialism and dualism in a critical way and tries to develop a new point of view by claiming that these two movements include conceptual falsities. Chinese Room Argument, which is proposed against artificial intelligence, is one of the most important elements of Searle's theory of mind. Chinese room argument involves significant claims in terms of comprehending Searle's integrative understanding of mind. The main target of Searle by this thought experiment is to justify his claim that it is wrong to talk about computers' mind because they just have syntactical operations and never have semantic content. In this study, the systematical structure of this justification will be evaluated in detail and the counter-arguments of Chinese room argument will be critically analyzed. Searle's possible thoughts on other minds problem will also be interpreted by the way of Chinese room argument and these thoughts will be adapted into biological naturalism. As a concluding idea, Searle's position in philosophy of mind will be evaluated by his effects on other contemporary philosophers and the arguments proposed by his mind theory grounding upon the concepts like intentionality, subjectivity, causality and qualitativity will be handled critically. In this respect, it is aimed to provide a humble contribution for insufficient studies of philosophy of mind in Turkey by analyzing Searle's understanding of mind which is different from traditional approaches.