http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giwXG3QYWQA
Listen to it first, then read the rest of the post so that it will make sense.
I seriously disagree with him on many points in the later part of the conversation. Much of that has to do with the structure and function of a university and his distaste for the Ethnic Studies department. I am pretty sure he has the same opinion of Disability Studies.
I met one of the professors who works in the latter. By chance she called the shop were I worked for a service call. I stayed for about two hours on a job that took less than ten minutes. I gathered her approach was to background the course in a historical summary of the position of various disabilities and their roles in past societies. Then cover the changing positions since the modern nation state and its institutions. Then finally a summary of changes in the US including some of the movement stuff here to the present. Anyway, it was a fun afternoon.
Now to Searle. His approach to philosophy is pretty much straight from the British Empirical school (BE). Not a surprise since he spent seven years at Oxford.
Searle is a mind set that sounds really, really familiar to me as a student and now later just reading and thinking about past and present. In another post on the Derrida thread I listed off the philosophy courses and the readings. There was and still is a deep intellectual divide that is an on going project. Searle is definitely on one side, and I am on another. The difference is that I have been on both sides of this divide and enjoy being in multiple modes. It's an exciting tension to me. My art work, when I am doing it, is divided in a similar way. I like working either in severe abstraction where I can play with mathematical ideas, or I can sit in a figure drawing studio and do my best at rendering the figure close enough to try to capture something of the person's character from their body and positions and expressions.
So then, ultimately this is a cultural divide between the Anglo-American world of thought and a continental or French and German world. We could add Spain, here and some of the Latin Americans. And Italy. So in my mind Searle represents one side of this divide, while Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Sartre, Malraux and Paz represent another.
Searle in the early part of the interview talks about his excitement as a student and later, and his jumping into all kinds of fields in the sciences and humanities mostly. He was ready made for this mixture of interest because his father was an engineer for AT&T and his mother was a doctor.
He says, he always wanted to know how things work.
I think this is deeply related to why he is on the other side. He doesn't really seem to understand how people work in the way they are shaped by their social and economic milieu, and how that milieu itself works. Well, he does and doesn't, He says the mission of the university is to bring the best students into an international world of intellectual pursuits where they can carry out their chosen work and gain the deep satisfaction available to them as they make their contributions. He says it shouldn't matter what the accidents of your birth and development are. Fair enough.
The problem is that part of this rather idealistic and I think naive view is it leaves the actually existing students and the fair and unfair paths of life they must lead completely out of the intellectual and academic picture. For example, if you have various sorts of privilege, primarily economic and intellectual background, then it seems to me you may not be either very committed to, or interested in studying the facts of life in society and its strata. If on the other hand by the accidents of birth and subsequent development you are not among the privilaged, then there is likely to be more interest in the facts of life and its strata, because these students have struggled with the facts and the strata. They are also more likely I think to make different demands on the university and its promised entrance into an intellectual life. (While Searle mentions his own generation of the 30s and how different that was to the later 60s generation at UCB, he doesn't examine that, as a philosopher most definitely should.)
It's this aspect that I don't think Searle understands with sufficient depth to see why there are departments like Ethic Studies. BTW, just getting that department into the university took a huge battle complete rocks, tear gas, and jail time for some. It was called the Third World Strike. The strike was only a start of the battles.
I was just out with my degree, and working on campus remodeling California Hall. I was working on the roof, so I could watch the battles while I was working. Another accident of life, my journeyman (I was an apprentice), learned his trade under the Hitler Youth program, in Silesia. His classmates were routinely getting blown up from fiddling around with the abandoned Russia munitions in the area.
So then Searle probably doesn't see that the arts and literatures and other cultural productions are also a form of knowledge. This issues from within deep presumptions of what does and doesn't constitute knowledge in the British Empirical school. So for example, the BE school would admit that empirical social studies, using census data with statistics and a logical narrative was a form of knowledge.
I am pretty sure they would reject the idea that novels, plays, and visual arts of a period along with a cultural analysis of them was also a form of knowledge. They might accept these as descriptive knowledge, but I almost certain they would reject the idea that a cultural or social analysis was a form of philosophical knowledge.
So the up shot of that is the divide I experienced, I think can be boiled down to a problem in epistemology.
Searle says, ``Knowledge continues to grow. We know a lot more than our grandparents.''
What he means by that is our empirical knowledge base has grown. Notice he say Knowledge, with no qualifier. What he doesn't see is our knowledge of society, how it works, how cultural productions work in relation to society has also grown. So then, when students arrive from different intersections of the strata and their complex subdivisions, they bring with them their own life knowledge. I think it's really important to find out what that realm of understanding is, and get them to start thinking and writing or doing arts in relation to that knowledge.
So then I use a different set of mental tools to follow Searle, the hard sciences, and empirical studies. Curiously some parts of mathematics seem to require very much different sorts of tools than anything in empiricism. Then I have to switch tools to take on Derrida, Foucault, or Levi-Strauss. Both Levi-Strauss and Piaget try to straddle this divide in the way that L-S makes an analysis of mind and mythological thinking and Piaget in the way he writes about early child development and the concept of the mind.
And then there is my favorite Cassirer who was devoted to expanding our understanding of epistemology to include the humanities as well as the sciences and mathematics.
Searle mentions metaphor and asks how does that work? This is the core, I think. What I think he misses is that investigating the worlds of metaphor, what's called magical thinking, and studying the great mythologies, which in our day amount to studying religions and national histories, leads you onto the other side from empiricism to cultural analysis. This is how Cassirer started his move from a philosopher of science to a philosophy of cultural forms.
So I think what's going on in these list debates is almost an illustration of how pervasive the divides are in our own minds. What we believe is a truth and what we believe is mere gibberish or mistaken or what Searle sometimes might bluntly call stupid.
CG