國立臺灣大學哲學論評

Abstract /

In the last two decades, Searle has mounted two fronts of attack upon cognitive science. In the 80`s, Searle contended with his well-known "Chinese Room Argument" that a computer capable of producing the right answers to questions in Chinese did not really understand Chinese, whereas in the 90`s, he took issue with the alleged mental reality of "unconscious rules of inference," the description of which is thought to define the main task of cognitive scientists. Suspecting that cognitive scientists borrow the idea of unconscious mentality only to saveguard the mental status of those rules of cognition, Searle imposes a constraint upon the notion of unconscious mentality, namely that unconscious mentality must be potentially conscious. This is the so－called "connection principle." The aim of this paper is to analyze and evaluate this constraint for unconscious mentality. In the paper, I contend that the connection principle is poorly argued for the following two reasons. First, it assumes implicitly a more fundamental principle, what I call the "intentionality/consciousness principle" (IC), which implies that occurrent intentional states are necessarily conscious and which thereby excludes the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious. However, Searle does not provide any explicit argument for this key premise at all. Second, as for as the notion of the unconscious it explicitly preserves, i.e. the rather uninteresting case of unconscious dispositions such as the sleeping believer`s belief about God, the alleged connection between unconscious mentality and consciousness wouldn`t hold either unless we assumed (IC) beforehand. Hence, the key factor lies in (IC). I thereby take up the hidden issue and introduce the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious as a counter-example against (IC). In the end, I return to Searle`s original concern with cognitive science and conclude that the connection principle can`t succeed in excluding the "cognitive unconscious," which may have to find further support in a somewhat controversial notion of "subdoxastic intentionality." Though sympathetic with Searle`s intuition about the specialness of human mind, I find his notion of consciousness too narrow to capture a wide variety of "consciousness." Perhaps, the attempt to preserve the specialness of human mind can only be realized when we can successfully disentangle various notions of consciousness, intentionality, and subjectivity.