FREEDOM AND NEUROBIOLOGY Reflections on Free Will…€¦ · COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY Series...

FREEDOM ANDNEUROBIOLOGY

Reflections on Free Will,Language, andPolitical Power

John R. Searle

Columbia University Press New York

FREEDOM AND NEUROBIOLOGY

Columbia Themes in Philosophy

COLUMBIA THEMES IN PHILOSOPHY

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Reflections on Free Will,

Language, and Political Power

John R. Searle

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University PressPublishers Since 893

New York Chichester, West SussexOriginally published as Liberté et neurobiologie. Copyright © 2004 Editions Grasset & Fasquelle

English language version copyright © 2007 Columbia University PressAll rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Searle, John R.[Liberté et neurobiologie. English]

Freedom and neurobiology : reflections on free will, language, and political power / John R. Searle.

p. cm. — (Columbia themes in philosophy)Lectures presented in French in 200 at the Sorbonne.

Includes index.ISBN 0–23–3752–4 (cloth : alk. paper) —

ISBN 0–23–5055– (e-book). Free will and determinism—Physiological aspects.

2. Neuropsychology. 3. Power (Social sciences)4. Sociolinguistics. I. Title. II. Series.

B649.S264A5 200723' .5—dc22 200605274

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

c 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

For Dagmar

INTRODUCTION

Philosophy and the Basic Facts

ONE

Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology37

TWO

Social Ontology and Political Power79

Index

CON TEN TS

This book has had an unusual publication history, and in this introduction I am going to explain its history and attempt to locate its two chapters within the larger research project of which they are a part.

In late Spring of 200, I gave a series of lectures at the Sorbonne, one a large public lecture in French on the general topic of language and political power, and some presentations in English to smaller groups, ranging from lectures to seminar discussions, under various auspices and on topics ranging from the freedom of the will to the semiotics of wine tasting. I was asked if I would allow two of these presentations, the lecture I had given

IN TRODUCTION

Philosophy and the Basic Facts1

. I am indebted to Romelia Drager and Dagmar Searle for com-ments on earlier versions of this introduction. I thank Jennifer Hudin for preparing the index.

in French on political power and one of the lectures in English on the problem of free will, to be published in France. I agreed, on the natural supposition that the two lectures would appear in a journal, or some such venue. To my surprise, my editor, Patrick Savidan, published the two lectures as a rather elegant, though small, book in French called Liberté et neurobiologie.2 I knew nothing of the publication plans until a boxful of books arrived at my home in Berkeley. It is the first time in my life that I published a book I did not know that I had written. Savi-dan did an excellent job translating the English lecture into French, and I was immensely helped in the prepa-ration of the French text of the other lecture by Anne Hénault and especially by Natalie van Bockstaele.

Just as I was surprised by the publication of the French book I was equally surprised by swift publications of translations of the book from the French into German and Spanish, and, subsequently, Italian and Chinese. By coincidence, the publication in Germany came out while a great public debate was going on there about the sta-tus of free will, and the possibility of genuine free will, given contemporary neurobiology. In Germany, the book received several reviews, some quite negative, in daily newspapers of the sort that do not normally review philo-sophical works.

2. John R. Searle, Liberté et neurobiologie: Réflexions sur le libre arbitre, le langage et le pouvoir politique, ed. and trans. Patrick Savidan (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2004).

PHILOSOPHY AND THE BASIC FACTS

2

After all of this, I was approached by Columbia Uni-versity Press with the proposal to produce an “English translation.” I had the original English texts on which the viva voce lectures in Paris were based, so it was not necessary to translate the French text. Furthermore, in the intervening years, I had revised “Language and Power,” and this revised version, called “Social Ontol-ogy and Political Power,”3 is presented here, because it comes closer to my current views than does the original 200 text.

The two lectures published here, one about the prob-lem of free will and neurobiology and the other about language, social ontology and political power, do not appear to have any connection with each other. And at one level, the level of authorial intent, they really do not have any connection. It would never have occurred to me while I was preparing them that they would one day be published together. However, they are both parts of a much larger philosophical enterprise and it is worth explaining that enterprise, as it will deepen the reader’s understanding of what I am trying to do in these lectures. Because I discuss some important philosophical issues in a rather brief and compressed fashion in what follows, I will provide references to some of the works in which I have discussed these same issues at greater length.

3. First published in English in F. Schmitt, ed., Socializing Metaphys-ics: The Nature of Social Reality (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 95–20.


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I. Philosophy and the Basic Facts

There is exactly one overriding question in contempo-rary philosophy and each of these lectures is an attempt to answer a part of that question. As a preliminary suc-cinct formulation we could put it in this form: How do we fit in? In the longer version, it goes as follows: We now have a reasonably well-established conception of the basic structure of the universe. We have plausible theories about the origin of the universe in the Big Bang, and we understand quite a number of things about the structure of the universe in atomic physics and chemis-try. We have even come to understand the nature of the chemical bond. We know a fair amount about our own development on this little Earth during the past five billion years of evolution. We understand that the uni-verse consists entirely of particles (or whatever entities the ultimately true physics arrives at), and these exist in fields of force and are typically organized into systems. On our Earth, carbon-based systems made of molecules that also contain a lot of hydrogen, nitrogen and oxy-gen have provided the substrate of human, animal and plant evolution. These and other such facts about the basic structure of the universe, I will call, for short, the “basic facts.” The most important sets of basic facts, for our present purposes, are given in the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology.

There is, however, an interesting tension. It is not at all easy to reconcile the basic facts with a certain


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conception we have of ourselves. Our self-concep-tion derives in part from our cultural inheritance, but mostly it derives from our own experience. We have a conception of ourselves as conscious, intentionalistic, rational, social, institutional, political, speech-act per-forming, ethical and free will possessing agents. Now, the question is, How can we square this self-conception of ourselves as mindful, meaning-creating, free, ratio-nal, etc., agents with a universe that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles? In the end, perhaps we will have to give up on certain features of our self conception, such as free will. I see this family of questions as setting the agenda not only for my own work, but for the subject of philosophy for the foreseeable future. There are several specific questions, some of which I have dealt with else-where, that are part of the larger single question.

) Consciousness. What exactly is consciousness and how does it fit in with the basic facts? I define “con-sciousness” as subjective, qualitative states of sentience or feeling or awareness. Waking experiences are typi-cally conscious, but dreams are also a form of con-sciousness. Conscious states typically, but not always, have intentionality. The short answer to the question of how consciousness fits in with the basic facts is that conscious states are entirely caused by neuronal pro-cesses in the brain and are realized in the brain. This approach to the mind-body problem, however, leaves us with a number of philosophical problems such as, for


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example: What are the relations between consciousness and intentionality and how does consciousness func-tion causally to move our bodies? It also leaves us with very difficult neurobiological problems: How exactly does the brain cause conscious experiences, and how are those experiences realized in the brain? One of the tasks of the philosopher is to get the problem into such a shape that it can be subject to experimental testing in neurobiology. I believe that, to some extent, that is already happening, and this research is in fact now in progress in neurobiology, where the question of con-sciousness is vigorously pursued.4

2) Intentionality. There are similar questions about intentionality. “Intentionality” as used by philosophers and psychologists refers not only to cases of intending, in the ordinary sense in which I intend to go to the mov-ies, but to any form of directedness or aboutness. Beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, loves, hates and perceptions are

4. I have discussed these problems about consciousness and the related problems about intentionality in a number of works, especially:

Minds, Brains and Science, The 984 Reith Lectures (London: Brit-ish Broadcasting Corporation, 984); (London: Penguin, 989); (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 985).

The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 992).The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: A New York Review Book,

997); (London: Granta Books, 997).Mind: A Brief Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press,

2004).


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all cases of intentional phenomena, along with intend-ing to go to the movies. Many philosophers think that the special problem of intentionality is the mystery of how ordinary cell structures in the brain could be about something, how they could refer beyond themselves. In my view, intentionality only seems mysterious if we think of it as a very big problem, instead of breaking it down into a series of specific questions about how par-ticular forms of intentionality, such as thirst and hunger, perception and intentional action, function in our lives and in the universe at large. We can separate the logical/philosophical questions (for example, What exactly is the logical structure of intentionality?) from the biologi-cal questions (for example, How exactly are intentional states caused by brain processes? How are they realized in the brain? How do they function? How has intention-ality evolved in humans and other animals?).5

A special form of intentionality, common to humans and other social animals, is what I call “collective inten-tionality,” cases where humans and other animals are capable of cooperating and thus sharing common forms of intentionality, where the intentionality is not just in the first-person singular (I intend, I believe, I want, etc.), but would be expressed in the first-person plural (we intend, we believe, we want, etc.).

5. For more details, see John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 983).


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3) Language. In addition to having consciousness and intentionality, traits that humans share with many other species of animals, humans have the special ability to form derived intentionality, i.e. meaning, in sentences and speech acts. What exactly is meaning, and how does meaning enable words—which are, after all, merely sounds that come out of our mouths or marks we make on paper—to refer to objects, events and states of affairs in the world? This has been the main topic in the phi-losophy of language for the past century and I think that many, perhaps most, of the great achievements of philos-ophy in the past one hundred years have been in the phi-losophy of language. However, if there has been one flaw in the philosophy of language over the past century, it is that it is insufficiently naturalistic. The general approach that I am advocating is that we need to think of language as a manifestation and extension of more biologically primitive forms of intentionality. It is a mistake to treat language as if it were not part of human biology.6

4) Rationality. An animal that has consciousness, intentionality and language already has constraints of

6. Some of the books in which I have discussed the philosophy of language are:

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 969).

Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 979).

Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind.


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rationality. These are built into the structure of inten-tionality and language. An animal that does not have consciousness cannot have intentionality or language. Rationality, on my view, is not a separate faculty, some-thing added to language and mind. It is an internal structural feature of intentionality and of language that intentional states and speech acts are subject to inter-nal constraints of rationality. I will say more about this point later.

An account of rationality becomes essential in build-ing an answer to our questions of how we fit into the basic facts. The standard accounts of rationality in our tradition, accounts that receive their finest mathemati-cal expression in decision theory, seem to me in various ways defective. Specifically, they fail to see the special features of human rationality that come from having a human language. The use of language enables us to cre-ate desire-independent reasons for action. All sorts of speech acts, for example statement making and promise making, create commitments and obligations of various kinds. The structure of society also reveals all sorts of commitments, requirements, obligations, etc., and each of these is typically treated by rational agents as creat-ing desire-independent reasons for action.7

Think what it means to find a parking ticket on your car’s windshield, to accept an invitation to a party, or

7. For further discussion of rationality, see Rationality in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 200).


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to be called for jury duty. In all of these cases, society works only because you and others recognize these phenomena as creating desire-independent reasons for action. It is tempting, though mistaken, to think that all of these are maintained only by a system of sanctions. People who think that the sanctions are the only things that matter fail to recognize that the collective accep-tance of the sanctions typically depends on the recog-nition of a prior system of desire-independent reasons for action.

5) Free will. Human rationality presupposes free will. The reason is that rationality must be able to make a difference. There must be a difference between ratio-nal and irrational behavior, but this is only possible if there is a space in which rationality can operate. The presupposition, in short, of rationality is that not all of our actions have antecedent conditions that are caus-ally sufficient to determine the action. Unless we pre-suppose a certain room for maneuver, we cannot make sense of the notion of rationality and consequently we cannot make sense of the notion of obligations, speech acts and a whole lot of other things.

The problem of free will, in short, is how can such a thing exist? How can there exist genuinely free actions in a world where all events, at least at the macro level, apparently have causally sufficient antecedent condi-tions? Every event at that level appears to be deter-mined by causes that preceded it. Why should acts performed during the apparent human consciousness


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of freedom be an exception? It is true that there is an indeterminacy in nature at the quantum level, but that indeterminacy is pure randomness and randomness is not by itself sufficient to give us free will.

The problem of free will is unusual among contem-porary philosophical issues in that we are nowhere remotely near to having a solution. I can give you a pretty good account of consciousness, intentionality, speech acts and of the ontology of society but I do not know how to solve the problem of free will.

Well, why is that important? There are lots of prob-lems we do not have solutions to. The special prob-lem of free will is that we cannot get on with our lives without presupposing free will. Whenever we are in a decision-making situation, or indeed, in any situation that calls for voluntary action, we have to presuppose our own freedom. Suppose you are given a choice in a restaurant between steak and veal. The waiter asks you “And sir, which would you prefer, the steak or the veal?” You cannot say to the waiter, “Look, I am a determinist. I will just wait and see what I order because I know that my order is determined.” The refusal, i.e. the conscious, intentional speech act of refusing to place an order, is only intelligible to you if you understand it as an exer-cise of your own free will. The point that I am making now is not that free will is a fact. We don’t know if it is a fact. The point is that given the structure of our con-sciousness, we cannot proceed except on the presup-position of free will.


6) Society and institutions. What exactly is the ontol-ogy of society? In particular, how is it possible that there can be a class of facts that are perfectly objec-tive, yet exist only because we believe that they exist? I am thinking of such facts as that George W. Bush is now President of the United States, or that the object in my wallet is a twenty-dollar bill. This is another project which I have worked on.8 Here too I insist on a reso-lutely naturalistic account. We must see human insti-tutional structures such as money, property, marriage, universities, income tax, cocktail parties, summer vaca-tions, lawyers, licensed drivers, and professional foot-ball players as extensions of our capacity for collective intentionality and our capacity for language. Once you have language and social cooperation, you already have the possibility of creating institutional reality in the form of money, property, government, marriage, etc.

7) Politics. Once we see that consciousness, language, rationality and society are all expressions of a more fundamental underlying biology, then it seems to me that we can have a more naturalistic ethical and politi-cal philosophy than has been traditional in our soci-ety. Oddly enough, it seems to me that the very possi-bility of this was created by Rawls’s theory of justice.9

8. Especially in The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 995).

9. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-versity Press, 97).


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In my philosophical childhood, it was widely accepted that substantive first-order theories in political phi-losophy and ethics were impossible because claims in those areas could not have objective truth. This was supposed to be shown by Hume’s famous claim that you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” If philoso-phy is concerned with stating truths, and there are no truths about how we ought to behave, or what sort of political society we ought to have, then philosophy can have nothing to say about how we ought to behave in ethics or politics. When I was an undergraduate, it was widely believed that political philosophy was dead10 and that ethics, as a subject matter in philoso-phy, was the same thing as “metaethics,” which con-sisted of analyses of the use of ethical terms such as “good” and “ought.” The study of politics was thought to be an empirical discipline, and hence if there was to be something called “political philosophy,” this would have to be on all fours with, for example, a subject we might invent, geological philosophy. One might examine the use of political vocabulary to study its conceptual nature as one might study the use of geo-logical vocabulary. But the idea of substantive politi-cal theory was regarded as obsolete. I fought against

0. P. Laslett in Philosophy, Politics and Society wrote “For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.” See Peter Laslett, ed., introduction to Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 956), vii.


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this conception as early as 964, in my article “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is.’ ”11 But I have to say the most effective disproof of the prevailing orthodoxy was pro-vided by the publication of Rawls’s book in which he simply did what was supposed to be impossible to do, that is, to provide rational justifications for substan-tive claims about justice.

8) Ethics. What would a “naturalistic” ethics look like? It would be based on two other completely natural phe-nomena, first, our basic biological needs, and second, our biologically given capacity for rationality, which is itself a constitutive and structural feature of both inten-tionality and language.

I have listed eight areas of subject matter where it seems to me there is now enormous scope for a dif-ferent type of philosophical investigation. I would not wish to suggest that these are the only such areas. On the contrary, there are many I have not listed. One area in which I wish I had more to say is aesthetics, another is mathematics. I think there is an aesthetic dimension to all conscious experiences. Why do we not have a satisfactory theoretical account of this? Again, what sorts of facts are mathematical facts, and what sorts of entities are mathematical entities such as numbers?

. “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’ ” Philosophical Review 73 (Janu-ary 964).


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II. Logical Dependencies among the Philosophical Problem Areas

Notice that the eight topics I have listed and the asso-ciated questions are logically ordered in a very basic way. The phenomena in one topic area presuppose the existence of phenomena in another topic area. Let me go through the steps. Intentionality (2) requires consciousness (). Most of our intentional states are unconscious at any given moment, and many con-scious states lack intentionality. But all the same, only a being capable of consciousness is capable of hav-ing intentional states. Again, language (3) presup-poses intentionality (2). Only a being that is capable of mental representation is capable of the special type of second-level representation that exists in the per-formance of a speech act. Unless you are capable of belief, desire and intention, you are not capable of performing intentional speech acts that are expres-sions of your beliefs and desires. Rationality (4) is a constitutive structural feature of both language (3) and intentionality (2). When I say that it is constitutive and structural, I do not mean that we always, or even in general, speak and think rationally, but rather that the constraints set by rationality are built in as intrinsic features of intentional states and speech acts. Thus, if we hold inconsistent beliefs, it is part of our concept of belief that there is something defective about our beliefs. Similarly, if we perform inconsistent speech


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acts, this too is a structural defect. It is not some out-side consideration that is imposed on the intentional state or the speech act. Rationality is a structural fea-ture in the sense that you cannot have a language and intentionality without having rational constraints as constitutive of the phenomena in question. Though the concept of rationality (4) is different from the concept of free will (5), their extension is the same. This, as I mentioned before, is because actions are assessable as rational or irrational only where there is the possibil-ity of alternative courses of action, only where there is free will. Again, institutional ontology (6) presupposes language (3). You cannot have property, money, mar-riage or government without language. But you can have language without having property, money, mar-riage, or government.

I think it should be obvious that politics (7) and eth-ics (8) as domains of human activity presuppose the existence of all six of the preceding phenomena, that is they presuppose () consciousness, (2) intentionality, (3) language, (4) rationality, (5) free will, and (6) soci-ety and institutions. Only conscious and intentional-istic, rational, free will–having social and institutional animals, such as we are, can engage in those activities that we think are distinctly political and be subject to those constraints and reasons that we think of as dis-tinctly ethical.

When I say that these subjects and questions are hierarchically ordered, I am not saying that we can-


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not give an answer to any of the questions regarding the dependent phenomena until we have answered the questions regarding the more fundamental phenom-ena. It would be a very depressing result if we could not answer questions about the dependent phenomena until we had answered questions about the more fun-damental phenomena, because for many of the most fundamental subjects we do not know the answers to either the philosophical or the scientific questions. I mentioned consciousness as an obvious case where we still do not have an adequate account of how exactly the brain causes consciousness or how consciousness is realized in the brain. Another obvious example is the freedom of the will. We have to presuppose free will whenever we engage in voluntary action, but the presupposition is not self-guaranteeing. Perhaps we are mistaken in supposing that we have free will, but mistaken or not, we still do not have an account of free will that will make it consistent with both our experi-ences and what we know about the rest of the universe. Rationality presupposes free will but we can develop a theory of rationality whether or not we give an account of free will. So, the solutions that we develop are in a sense hypothetical or contingent: Assuming that we have free will, a theory of rationality can be given. Again, it is possible to develop a theory of intentional-ity without having a well worked out account of con-sciousness, specifically, it is possible to have a theory of the logical structure of belief, desire, intention, etc.


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without an account of how brain processes cause con-scious states in the first place and how those states are realized in the brain.

In a sense, we are in the usual situation in philoso-phy where at some deep level we feel we cannot solve one problem until we have solved them all. But all the same, in order to make any progress, we have to divide the huge problem, as I have done, into sets of smaller problems, and those indeed into even smaller problems so that we can answer them in a piecemeal fashion. Our strategy is to divide and conquer: divide these questions into questions of a more manageable form, and then work on them one at a time. That at least is the method that I have followed all my life and the method that I am pursuing in this book.

III. Naturalism and Contemporary Philosophy

At first sight, it may seem puzzling that I say there have been major changes in philosophy and then, by way of describing these changes, list eight sets of questions all of which seem very traditional. Consciousness, inten-tionality, language, rationality, free will, human society, politics, and ethics—all of these are very much part of the history of traditional philosophy. What is so special about the present period? I am arguing that it is now possible to treat all of these issues “naturalistically”, that is, in a way that makes them consistent with, and indeed a natural outgrowth from, what I call the basic facts.


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It is now possible to recognize the real and sometimes irreducible character of the phenomena that I have been describing while at the same time acknowledging that we live in exactly one world and not two or thirty-seven. Often when philosophers talk about “naturaliz-ing intentionality” or “naturalizing consciousness” they take “naturalizing” to mean denying the existence of the phenomena in question. So, for example, naturalizing intentionality would consist in showing that there really is no such thing as irreducible, ineliminable intention-ality. Ditto for consciousness. Naturalizing conscious-ness would be showing that consciousness does not really exist as an irreducible phenomenon. That is not the sense of naturalization that I am talking about. I am claiming that it is possible to recognize the real intrinsic character of consciousness, rationality, language, etc., and at the same time see them as part of the natural world. That has now become possible in a way that it was not obviously possible before. This is due to sev-eral changes in philosophy that I will shortly attempt to describe.

IV. Polemical Digression: The Rejection of Alternative Ontologies

First I need to make exactly clear what philosophical movements and tendencies I am explicitly rejecting. I am rejecting both: on the one hand, materialism (as it is usually understood), with its attendant reductionism


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and eliminativism, and, on the other hand, any form of dualism, or the three world theory, or any form of mystification that denies the basic nature, or the uni-versality of the basic facts. Materialism is usually taken to be a denial of the irreducible and ineliminable char-acter of consciousness and intentionality. According to the materialist what we think of as consciousness and intentionality either do not exist at all (eliminativ-ism) or if they do, they are really something else, they are reducible to some third-person material phenom-ena such as behavior, brain states neurophysiologically described, functional states of the organism, or com-puter programs (reductionism). All of these efforts at elimination and reduction fail because they all end up denying the data of our own experience, they all end up denying that we really do have conscious, inten-tionalistic experiences such as feeling thirsty or think-ing about the weather. These data have a first-person ontology, in that they only exist as experienced by a human or animal agent and consequently cannot be reduced to something that has a third-person ontol-ogy, such as behavior or brain states. Reductionism pretends to be different from eliminativism because it claims to grant the existence of mental states, not to eliminate them. But in the end it is a form of elimi-nativism, because the proposed reductions invariably eliminate the subjective first-person character of con-sciousness and intentionality in favor of some objec-tive third-person ontology. I have attempted to refute


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these views at length elsewhere and will not repeat the refutations here.12

Dualism is usually defined as the view that we live in two distinct realms, the mental and the physical. The three world view, espoused by Popper, Eccles, Habermas and Penrose, among others, is that we live in three dis-tinct worlds, the physical, the mental, and the world of cultural products such as poetry and scientific theories, “the world of civilization and culture”13 in all its mani-festations (Popper and Eccles), or the world of abstract Platonic entities such as numbers (Penrose,14 following Frege). It ought to worry us, and the three world parti-sans, that they cannot agree on the population of World 3, as it is grandly called. The problem with dualism is that it amounts to giving up on a central enterprise of

2. John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind.The Mystery of Consciousness.Mind: A Brief Introduction.“Minds, Brains and Programs,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences

3 (980).3. Sir John Eccles, “Culture: The Creation of Man and the Creator

of Man,” in Mind and Brain: The Many-Faceted Problem, ed. Sir John Eccles (Washington, D.C.: Paragon House, 982), 66. See also Sir Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 972), chaps. 3 and 4.

4. Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 997), and The Road to Real-ity: A Complete Guide to the Laws of Nature (London: Jonathon Cape, 2004).


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philosophy. It might turn out that consciousness and intentionality are not a part of the real “physical” world of biology as I have claimed. It might, for example, turn out that after our bodies are destroyed, our souls or conscious states will float about in a disembodied fash-ion. But it would be giving up on the philosophical (not to mention, scientific) enterprise of trying to explain what we know to be real phenomena if we simply say they defy explanation because they inhabit a separate realm. I offer a solution to the philosophical mind-body problem and we are on the way to having a neurobio-logical account that may substantiate and exemplify my philosophical solution. We now have more than three centuries of scientific results that overwhelmingly sup-port the idea that we live in exactly one world, not two or three or any other larger number.

If dualism is bad, the three world view, “trialism” as it is sometimes called,15 is worse. Just as human biology is an expression of the underlying physics and chem-istry, so human culture, in all of its manifestations, is an expression of our underlying biological capacity for language, rationality, etc. It is a kind of mystification to suppose that because we can write poems and develop scientific theories, somehow or other these inhabit a separate realm and are not part of the one real world we all live in.

5. Eccles, “Culture,” 65.


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The Popper-Eccles version of trialism fails because the world of culture is a part of the one real world that we all inhabit and indeed involves applications of bio-logical capacities for consciousness and intentionality. The postulation of a third world of abstract Platonic entities is also unsatisfactory. Properties, numbers and “universals” generally do indeed exist and they are not human creations in the way that poems and scientific theories are human creations, but their existence is a trivial consequence of something that is a human cre-ation, namely, the introduction of general terms, adjec-tives and verbs. These are human creations. The exis-tence of numbers and abstract entities does not require us to postulate a separate ontological realm. In order to make that clear I have to account for the existence of such abstract entities, and for the truth of statements about them, especially statements in mathematics. I do not believe that the Frege-Penrose view, that there is a third Platonic world of abstract universals such as num-bers, can be given a coherent formulation. The Frege-Penrose postulation of a third realm is not the solution to an ontological problem, but it does indeed present us with a challenge. How do we account for the objective truth of statements in mathematics and about abstract universals generally without postulating a third realm?

This is not the place to give a detailed philosophy of mathematics, but at least I can give a bare bones out-line of a solution that will meet the challenge that I just mentioned. In order to state how things are in the


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world we have to introduce general terms to describe how they are. Thus we say, “That is a horse,” or “That is green.” The introduction of general terms immedi-ately allows us to form corresponding noun phrases and to use these expressions referentially. Instead of saying, “This is green,” we can say, “This object has the property of greenness” or “exemplifies the color green”; instead of saying, “That is a horse,” we can say, “That object has the property of being a horse.” The introduc-tion of these abstract entities—the property of being green or the property of being a horse—does not intro-duce a new ontological realm but is just a manner of speaking. Notice that the fact in the world that makes it true that this object is green is exactly the same fact that makes it true that this object has the property of greenness. There is no difference in the world and con-sequently no difference in our “ontological commit-ments” in the two cases. I cannot in this brief space tell you how much confusion has been generated over the centuries ranging from the Platonic doctrine of the uni-versal forms right up to Quine’s criterion of ontologi-cal commitment.16 The point for the present purpose is to see that any meaningful predicate, whether verb or adjective or other form, immediately allows us to form a corresponding noun phrase, which refers to the

6. W. V. O. Quine, “On What There Is,” reprinted in From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper and Row, 953).


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property expressed by the original predicate. Hence the existence of the objects named by these noun phrases is automatically guaranteed by the meaningfulness of the predicates. This is a large part of the solution to the great so-called “Problem of Universals.” There is no separate realm of universals, but rather there are alter-native ways of talking about the single realm in which we all live, the real world. Universals do indeed exist, in fact their existence is a trivial consequence of the meaningfulness of the corresponding predicates, but their existence introduces no new facts and no new ontological realms. To talk of such universals is just an alternative way of speaking. Such entities exist in our system of representing horses and green objects, etc. This account, by the way, works as much for universals that are not exemplified as for those that are. We can say either, “No one is a saint” or “The property of saint-liness is possessed by no one.”

But what about numbers? Suppose there are three horses in the field. Then each of the objects in the field has the property of being a horse. But none of the horses in the field has the property of being three. To what does the property of threeness attach? It is the set of horses-in-the-field that has the property of three. Indeed, we can say in colloquial English, the number of the horses in the field is three. And we can generalize this point. Numbers are properties of sets (they are not sets of sets, nor properties of properties. They are properties of sets). I have to apologize for the swiftness of this


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discussion, but in order to state my general position about the basicness of the basic facts I had to answer some alternative conceptions of ontology and of phi-losophy.

The conclusion of this section is that in developing a naturalistic philosophy we can begin by rejecting both the reductionism and the eliminativism of traditional materialism as well as the postulation of several onto-logical realms by dualists and trialists.

V. Some Recent Changes in Philosophy

If we escape both the Scylla of materialism and the Charybdis of dualism and trialism, then given certain changes in philosophy over the past several decades, I think the time has now come when we can pursue a type of philosophy, which, though not impossible, was at least more difficult to pursue fifty or a hundred years ago. Here are some of the changes that have occurred.

First, epistemology is no longer at the center of phi-losophy. For three centuries after Descartes, the episte-mological questions, especially the skeptical questions, formed the center of philosophical interest. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the question, “How do you know?” was transformed by Wittgenstein, Rus-sell and Moore into “What do you mean?” This is the famous “linguistic turn” that took place in philosophy in the first part of the twentieth century. But, at least in part, the linguistic turn was still directed at the tra-


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ditional philosophical epistemic agenda. A large part of the aim of switching to the philosophy of language was to try to show that linguistic methods would enable us to answer skeptical, as well as other traditional, philo-sophical problems.

There are a number of reasons why we do not take skepticism as seriously as we did fifty years ago. Many philosophers, and I am one of them, think that the inves-tigations of Wittgenstein and Austin have to some extent answered skepticism by showing that it rests, in part, on certain misuses of language. I realize that this claim is controversial, and I do not suppose that it is universally accepted that the methods of linguistic philosophy have shown skepticism to rest on misuses of language. There is a second and more important reason why we do not take skepticism as seriously as we used to and that is: We simply know too much. We have a prodigious amount of knowledge that is known with objectivity, certainty and universality. Claims such as that the Earth is round or that hydrogen atoms have one electron are objective in the sense that their truth does not depend on the feelings or attitudes of the participants in the discussion. They are known with certainty, in the sense that the evidence is now so great that it is irrational to doubt them. And they are universal in the sense that they are as true in Vladi-vostok or Pretoria as they are in Berkeley or London. Half a century ago many people thought that there could be no empirical truths known with certainty, because they believed that certainty implied incorrigibility. They


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thought that a claim to know something with certainty would imply that we could not imagine a circumstance in which the statement could turn out to be false. I think this is a deep mistake. There are a lot of things that we know with certainty in the ordinary sense of the word that, given the evidence, it is simply irrational to doubt the truth of these claims. But this does not imply that we could not imagine circumstances, massive sci-entific revolutions, let us say, which would lead us to revise these claims. “Certain” is similar to “know,” in this respect. “It is certain that p” implies “p”, hence “not p” implies “it is not certain that p”. Similarly “It is known that p” implies “p”, hence “not p” implies “it is not known that p.” In both cases the fact that we can imagine cir-cumstances that would force us to revise our claims to knowledge and certainty does not show that nothing is known or that nothing is certain. To repeat, certainty does not imply incorrigibility.

Go to any university bookstore and look at the section on, for example, molecular biology or mechanical engi-neering, and you will find an accumulation of knowl-edge, the sheer volume and power of which would have taken Descartes’s breath away. It is hard to send men to the moon and bring them back and then take seriously the problem, for example, of whether the external world really exists. This is not to say that there is no room for skeptical epistemology in philosophy, but I regard the epistemic puzzles as like Zeno’s paradoxes about space and time. It is an interesting paradox how it is possible


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for me to move across the room. First I have to go half-way, and then prior to that, half of that half, and prior to that half of that half, and so on. And similarly, it is an interesting puzzle as to how I can have certain, objec-tive and universal knowledge given the various skepti-cal possibilities that one can raise. But, all the same, we do not seriously think that Zeno’s paradoxes show that space and time do not exist, nor do most of us sup-pose that the skeptical paradoxes cast any doubt on the existence of knowledge. We now regard knowledge as no longer in question, in the way that it was very much in question in the seventeenth century, and, in conse-quence, we can now start philosophy on the assump-tion of the basic facts.

Second, just as skepticism is no longer at the center of philosophy, I think it is fair to say that the philosophy of language is no longer at the center of philosophy. It was the center of philosophy for nearly a century, partly because many people felt that other philosophical prob-lems could only be resolved by using linguistic methods, but also because it was widely accepted among analytic philosophers that all thought requires language. This is a mistake. Human language is an extension of more biologically fundamental forms of intentionality such as perception and action, as well as belief and desire, and we need to see language as derivative from these more basic, biological forms of intentionality. I think that this is actually a major change in analytic philosophy. Ana-lytic philosophy was originally invented as a form of the


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philosophy of language, employing Frege’s mathemati-cal logic both as a tool and as exhibiting the underlying logical structure of real languages. I am proposing that we should treat language not as the foundational sub-ject matter of philosophy but as itself the expression of more biologically fundamental forms of intentionality. We need to base our analysis of language on analyses of prelinguistic forms of intentionality.

Third, philosophy in my intellectual childhood was pursued in a piecemeal fashion. The idea was that it was a mistake to pursue general theories. First we need to get clear about a number of small, specific issues. We need to make a whole lot of distinctions and clarifications by way of clearing the ground before we would be in a position to state general theories. I think much of this groundwork has been successful and we now are in a position to advance very general accounts of mind, language, rationality, society, etc., and, in fact, I have attempted to do that. Systematic large-scale philosophy is now possible in a way that, though it was not impossible, it was certainly discour-aged a half century ago.

Fourth, there is now no sharp distinction between philosophy and other disciplines. In my intellectual childhood it was regarded as essential to understand that philosophy consisted in conceptual analysis and that this is quite different from any sort of empirical investigation. Now, many philosophers, and I am one, think it is not always possible to make a sharp distinc-


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tion between conceptual and empirical issues, and indeed, in my own work I rely heavily on all sorts of empirical results.

VI. Free Will, Neurobiology, Language and Political Power

With this all-too-brief presentation of eight major prob-lem areas in philosophy, a discussion of some of the relations between them, and a few remarks about the current situation in philosophy that I think makes a dif-ferent approach to these problems possible, I am now at last in a position to say something about the two chap-ters that form the main substance of this book. The first, “Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology,” which inspired the title of the book, attempts to give an account of the free will problem which would show how it could, in principle at least, achieve an empirical, scientific solu-tion. I cannot give you a solution to the problem of free will, but I hope to be at least able to state the problem in a precise enough form so that we can see what possible solutions would look like. What would the world, spe-cifically our brains, be like if determinism were true, and what would the world, specifically our brains, be like if determinism were false? In the nature of the case, any-thing we say is very provisional. We don’t know enough about how the brain works, specifically, how it produces consciousness, which it definitely does, and how it gives us the experience of free will, which it definitely does,


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to enable us to know how the experience of free action could be other than an illusion. We do not know how our conscious experiences of freedom could correspond to an actual fact of freedom.

Some philosophical problems, but unfortunately not very many, can receive scientific solutions. The prob-lem of life is a famous case. We can no longer take seri-ously the great debates between vitalists and mecha-nists because we now know enough about the nature of life to understand its biochemical character. I think it is reasonable to suppose that the problem of conscious-ness will find a similar scientific resolution. If we knew exactly how brain processes cause conscious states, and how those conscious states exist in the brain and how they function causally in our lives, then the traditional mind-body problem would go the way of the traditional vitalism-mechanism problem. The task of the philoso-pher is to get the problem into a precise enough form, to state the problem carefully enough, so that it admits of a scientific resolution. I have tried to do that with the problem of consciousness in a number of books, and I am trying, in chapter one, to take at least the first steps of doing it with the problem of the freedom of the will.

Some interesting results of the investigation are worth calling attention to. One is, to my surprise, I found that I could not give a satisfactory account of decision mak-ing without presupposing the existence of the self. The notion of the self has for centuries been something of a scandal in philosophy, and we are right to think that


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Hume, with his skeptical account, destroyed any possi-bility of the conception of the self as some sort of sub-stantive entity that could be the object of experiences. But there are certain formal features of conscious deci-sion making that force us to recognize that one and the same entity is conscious, rational, capable of reflection and capable of decision and action, and therefore of assuming responsibility. This purely formal entity I call the self.

The first chapter in this book is primarily about two of my subject areas, consciousness () and free will (5). But of course, it is impossible to discuss consciousness and free will without discussing intentionality (2) and rationality (4). The second chapter also fits into the problematic I have attempted to describe. Society and institutions (6), and their relations to politics (7), can only be properly understood in light of a theory of the constitutive role of language (3) in the construction of social and therefore political reality. Essentially, chapter two is an attempt to apply my account of institutional reality, originally stated in The Construction of Social Reality, to the special problem of political power. It rests on the claim that human power relations have a feature not found in the relations of other animals, namely, that we create institutional structures which are, above all, enabling. Institutional structures, such as money, prop-erty and government, increase our power enormously, and they also enable us to regulate and organize our lives within the institutional structures that we have


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created. It is characteristic of these structures that they give agents reasons for action. They provide them with motivation for acting within an institutional system, whether it is a university, a church, a state or a ski club. The institutional structure gives us deontic powers, that is to say, powers that involve rights, duties, obligations, requirements, permissions, authorizations, etc. And all of these are essentially constituted by language in that only a creature that has language can create, recognize, and act on such powers.

The key notion in the analysis of institutional reality is the notion of a status function. Many objects and peo-ple, such as knives and bicyclists, can perform certain functions, such as cutting or riding a bicycle, strictly in virtue of their physical structure and the powers that result from the physical structure. But humans differ from other animals in that we have a large number of powers that derive from institutional structures, where the powers derive from the fact that the object or per-son in question is assigned a certain status and with that status a function that can only be performed in virtue of the collective acceptance of that status. Being Presi-dent of the United States, being a twenty-dollar bill and being private property are all forms of status functions because the objects in question do not derive their capac-ity to perform their functions in virtue of their physical structure, but rather in virtue of the fact that there is collective acceptance of these sorts of objects as hav-ing a certain status and with that status a function that


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derives from the collective acceptance of that status. I hope it is clear that there is an implicit conception of the political in this conception even though I have stated it very briefly here. Political power in general differs from simple sheer brute physical power in that it rests on a system of status functions and with those status func-tions a set of deontic powers of the sorts that I have just mentioned. This is, incidentally, why the question of legitimation is crucial in all modern political societies. There has to be an answer to the question: Why should we accept the system of deontic powers?

While the second chapter is very much provisional, and work in progress, I see it as opening the way to a vastly more extended investigation that I have begun but not yet completed.


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I. The Problem of Free Will

The persistence of the traditional free will problem in philosophy seems to me something of a scandal. After all these centuries of writing about free will, it does not seem to me that we have made very much progress.

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CHAPTER ONE

Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology1

. This chapter is an extension of some of the ideas presented in my lecture to the Royal Institute of Philosophy in February 200, and at the Sorbonne in May 200. Those lectures were based on an earlier article, “Consciousness, Free Action and the Brain,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 0, no. 0 (October 2000). And this version was originally pub-lished in English in the journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy: Philosophy 72, no. 298 (October 200). Some of the arguments in this chapter are developed in more detail in my book Rationality in Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 200).

Is there some conceptual problem that we are unable to overcome? Is there some fact that we have simply ignored? Why is it that we have made so little advance over our philosophical ancestors?

Typically, when we encounter one of these problems that seems insoluble it has a certain logical form. On the one hand we have a belief or a set of beliefs that we feel we really cannot give up, but on the other hand, we have another belief or set of beliefs that is inconsistent with the first set, and seems just as compelling as the first set. So, for example, in the old mind-body problem we have the belief that the world consists entirely of material par-ticles in fields of force, but at the same time the world seems to contain consciousness, an immaterial phe-nomenon; and we cannot see how to put the immaterial together with the material into a coherent picture of the universe. In the old problem of skeptical epistemology, it seems, on the one hand, according to common sense, that we do have certain knowledge of many things in the world, and yet, on the other hand, if we really have such knowledge, we ought to be able to give a decisive answer to the skeptical arguments, such as, How do we know we are not dreaming, are not a brain in a vat, are not being deceived by evil demons, etc.? But we do not know how to give a conclusive answer to these skeptical challenges. In the case of free will the problem is that we think explanations of natural phenomena should be completely deterministic. The explanation of the Loma Prieta earthquake, for example, does not explain why it

FREE WILL AS A PROBLEM IN NEUROBIOLOGY

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just happened to occur, it explains why it had to occur. Given the forces operating on the tectonic plates, there was no other possibility. But at the same time, when it comes to explaining a certain class of human behavior, it seems that we typically have the experience of acting “freely” or “voluntarily” in a sense of these words that makes it impossible to have deterministic explanations. For example, it seems that when I voted for a particu-lar candidate and did so for a certain reason, well, all the same, I could have voted for the other candidate all other conditions remaining the same. Given the causes operating on me, I did not have to vote for that candi-date. So when I cite the reason as an explanation of my action I am not citing causally sufficient conditions. So we seem to have a contradiction. On the one hand we have the experience of freedom, and on the other hand we find it very hard to give up the view that because every event has a cause, and human actions are events, they must have sufficient causal explanations as much as earthquakes or rain storms.

When we at last overcome one of these intractable problems it often happens that we do so by showing that we had made a false presupposition. In the case of the mind-body problem, we had, I believe, a false presupposition in the very terminology in which we stated the problem. The terminology of mental and physical, of materialism and dualism, of spirit and flesh, contains a false presupposition that these must name mutually exclusive categories of reality—that our


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conscious states qua subjective, private, qualitative, etc. cannot be ordinary physical, biological features of our brain. Once we overcome that presupposition, the presupposition that the mental and the physical naively construed are mutually exclusive, then it seems to me we have a solution to the traditional mind-body problem. And here it is: All of our mental states are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are themselves realized in the brain as its higher-level or system features. So, for example, if you have a pain, your pain is caused by sequences of neuron fir-ings, and the actual realization of the pain experience is in the brain.2

The solution to the philosophical mind-body problem seems to me not very difficult. However, the philosophi-cal solution kicks the problem upstairs to neurobiology, where it leaves us with a very difficult neurobiological problem. How exactly does the brain do it, and how exactly are conscious states realized in the brain? What exactly are the neuronal processes that cause our con-scious experiences, and how exactly are these conscious experiences realized in brain structures?

2. I am assuming for the sake of this chapter that the right func-tional level for explaining mental phenomena is the level of neurons. It might turn out to be some other level—microtubules, synapses, neuro-nal maps, whole clouds of neurons, etc.—but for the purposes of this chapter it does not matter what the right neurobiological explanatory level is, only that there is a neurobiological explanatory level.


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Perhaps we can make a similar transformation of the problem of free will. Perhaps if we analyze the problem sufficiently, and remove various philosophical confu-sions, we can see that the remaining problem is essen-tially a problem about how the brain works. In order to work toward that objective I need first to clarify a number of philosophical issues.

Let us begin by asking why we find the conviction of our own free will so difficult to abandon. I believe that this conviction arises from some pervasive features of conscious experience. If you consider ordinary conscious activities such as ordering a beer in a pub, watching a movie, or trying to do your income tax, you discover that there is a striking difference between the passive char-acter of perceptual consciousness and the active charac-ter of what we might call “volitional consciousness”. For example, if I am standing in a park looking at a tree, there is a sense in which it is not up to me what I experience. It is up to how the world is and how my perceptual appa-ratus is. But if I decide to walk away or raise my arm or scratch my head, then I find a feature of my experiences of free, voluntary actions that was not present in my per-ceptions. The feature is that I do not sense the antecedent causes of my action in the form of reasons, such as beliefs and desires, as setting causally sufficient conditions for the action; and, which is another way of saying the same thing, I sense alternative courses of action open to me.

You see this strikingly if you consider cases of rational decision making. I recently had to decide which candi-


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date to vote for in a presidential election. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I voted for George W. Bush. I had certain reasons for voting for Bush, and certain other reasons for not voting for Bush. But, interestingly, when I chose to vote for Bush on the basis of some of those reasons and not others, and later when I actually cast a vote for Bush in a voting booth, I did not sense the antecedent causes of my action as setting causally suffi-cient conditions. I did not sense the reasons for making the decision as causally sufficient to force the decision, and I did not sense the decision itself as causally suf-ficient to force the action. In typical cases of deliberat-ing and acting, there is, in short, a gap, or a series of gaps, between the causes of each stage in the processes of deliberating, deciding and acting, and the subsequent stages. If we probe more deeply we can see that the gap can be divided into different sorts of segments. There is a gap between the reasons for the decision and the mak-ing of the decision. There is a gap between the decision and the onset of the action, and for any extended action, such as when I am trying to learn German or to swim the English Channel, there is a gap between the onset of the action and its continuation to completion. In this respect, voluntary actions are quite different from per-ceptions. There is indeed a voluntaristic element in per-ception. I can, for example, choose to see the ambigu-ous figure either as a duck or a rabbit, but for the most part my perceptual experiences are causally fixed. That is why we have a problem of the freedom of the will, but


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we do not have a problem of the freedom of perception. The gap, as I have described it, is a feature of our con-scious, voluntary activities. At each stage, the conscious states are not experienced as sufficient to compel the next conscious state. There is thus only one continuous experience of the gap, but we can divide it into three dif-ferent sorts of manifestations, as I did above. The gap is between one conscious state and the next, not between conscious states and bodily movements or between physical stimuli and conscious states.

This experience of free will is very compelling, and even those of us who think it is an illusion find that we cannot in practice act on the presupposition that it is an illusion. On the contrary, we have to act on the presup-position of freedom. Imagine that you are in a restau-rant and you are given a choice between veal and pork, and you have to make up your mind. You cannot refuse to exercise free will in such a case, because the refusal itself is only intelligible to you as a refusal if you take it as an exercise of free will. So if you say to the waiter, “Look, I am a determinist—che sarà sarà, I’ll just wait and see what I order,” that refusal to exercise free will is only intelligible to you as one of your actions if you take it to be an exercise of your free will. Kant pointed this out a long time ago. We cannot think away our free will. The conscious experiences of the gap give us the conviction of human freedom.

If we now turn to the opposing view and ask why we are so convinced of determinism, the arguments for


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determinism seem just as compelling as the arguments for free will. A basic feature of our relation to the world is that we find the world causally ordered. Natural phe-nomena in the world have causal explanations, and those causal explanations state causally sufficient conditions. Customarily, in philosophy, we put this point by say-ing that that every event has a cause. That formulation is, of course, much too crude to capture the complex-ity of the idea of causation that we are working with. But the basic idea is clear enough. In our dealings with nature we assume that everything that happens occurs as a result of antecedently sufficient causal conditions. And when we give an explanation by citing a cause, we assume that the cause we cite, together with the rest of the context, was sufficient to bring about the event we are explaining. In my earlier example of the earthquake, we assume that the event did not just happen to occur, in that situation it had to occur. In that context the causes were sufficient to determine the event.

An interesting change occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century. At the most fundamental level of physics, nature turns out not to be in that way deterministic. We have come to accept at a quantum mechanical level explanations that are not determinis-tic. However, so far quantum indeterminism gives us no help with the free will problem, because that indeter-minism introduces randomness into the basic structure of the universe, and the hypothesis that some of our acts occur freely is not at all the same as the hypothesis


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that some of our acts occur at random. I will have more to say about this issue later.

There are a number of accounts that seem to explain consciousness and even free will in terms of quan-tum mechanics. I have never seen anything that was remotely convincing, but it is important for this discus-sion that we remember that as far as our actual theories of the universe are concerned, at the most fundamental level we have come to think that it is possible to have explanations of natural phenomena that are not deter-ministic. And that possibility will be important when we later discuss the problem of free will as a neurobio-logical problem.

It is important to emphasize that the problem of free will, as I have stated it, is a problem about a certain kind of human consciousness. Without the conscious experi-ence of the gap, that is, without the conscious experi-ence of the distinctive features of free, voluntary, rational actions, there would be no problem of free will. We have the conviction of our own free will because of certain features of our consciousness. The question is: Granted that we have the experience of freedom, is that experience valid or is it illusory? Does that experience correspond to something in reality beyond the experience itself? We have to assume that there are causal antecedents to our actions. The question is: Are those causal antecedents in every case sufficient to determine the action, or are there some cases where they are not sufficient, and, if so, how do we account for those cases?


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Let us take stock of where we are. On the one hand we have the experience of freedom, which, as I have described it, is the experience of the gap. The gap between the antecedent causes of our free, voluntary decisions and actions and the actual making of those decisions and the performance of those actions. On the other hand we have the presupposition, or the assump-tion, that nature is a matter of events occurring accord-ing to causally sufficient conditions, and we find it dif-ficult to suppose that we could explain any phenomena without appealing to causally sufficient conditions.

For the purposes of the discussion that follows, I am going to assume that the experiences of the gap are psy-chologically valid. That is, I am going to assume that for many voluntary, free, rational human actions, the purely psychological antecedents of the action are not causally sufficient to determine the action. This occurred, for example, when I selected a candidate to vote for in the last American presidential election. I realize that a lot of people think that psychological determinism is true, and I have certainly not given a decisive refutation of it. Nonetheless, it seems to me we find the psychological experience of freedom so compelling that it would be absolutely astounding if it turned out that at the psycho-logical level it was a massive illusion, that all of our behav-ior was psychologically compulsive. There are arguments against psychological determinism, but I am not going to present them in this chapter. I am going to assume that psychological determinism is false, and that the real


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problem of determinism is not at the psychological level, but at a more fundamental neurobiological level.

Furthermore, there are several famous issues about free will that I will not discuss, and I mention them here only to set them aside. I will have nothing to say about compatibilism, the view that free will and determinism are really consistent with each other. According to the definitions of these terms that I am using, determinism and free will are not compatible. The thesis of deter-minism asserts that all actions are preceded by suffi-cient causal conditions that determine them. The thesis of free will asserts that some actions are not preceded by sufficient causal conditions. Free will so defined is the negation of determinism. No doubt there is a sense of these words where free will is compatible with deter-minism (when, for example, people march in the streets carrying signs that say, “Freedom Now,” they are pre-sumably not interested in physical or neurobiological laws), but that is not the sense of these terms that con-cerns me. I will also have nothing to say about moral responsibility. Perhaps there is some interesting con-nection between the problem of free will and the prob-lem of moral responsibility, but if so I will have nothing to say about it in this chapter.

II. How Consciousness Can Move Bodies

Because the problem of free will is a problem about the causal facts concerning certain sorts of consciousness,


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we need to explain how consciousness in general can function causally to move our bodies. How can a state of human consciousness cause a bodily movement? One of the most common experiences in our lives is that of moving our bodies by our conscious efforts. For exam-ple, I now intentionally raise my arm, a conscious effort on my part, and lo and behold, the arm goes up. What could be more common? The fact that we find such a banal occurrence philosophically puzzling suggests that we are making a mistake. The mistake derives from our inherited commitment to the old Cartesian categories of the mental and the physical. Consciousness seems too weightless, ethereal and immaterial ever to move even one of our limbs. But as I tried to explain earlier, con-sciousness is a higher-level biological feature of the brain. To see how the higher-level feature of consciousness has physical effects, consider how higher-level features work in the case of metaphysically less puzzling phenomena.

To illustrate the relationships between higher-level or system features, on the one hand, and micro level phenomena, on the other, I want to borrow an example from Roger Sperry. Consider a wheel rolling down hill. The wheel is entirely made of molecules. The behav-ior of the molecules causes the higher-level, or system feature of solidity. Notice that the solidity affects the behavior of the individual molecules. The trajectory of each molecule is affected by the behavior of the entire solid wheel. But of course there is nothing there but molecules. The wheel consists entirely of molecules.


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So when we say the solidity functions causally in the behavior of the wheel and in the behavior of the indi-vidual molecules that compose the wheel, we are not saying that the solidity is something in addition to the molecules; rather, it is just the condition that the mol-ecules are in. But the feature of solidity is nonetheless a real feature, and it has real causal effects.

Of course there are many disanalogies between the relation of solidity to molecular behavior, on one hand, and the relation of consciousness to neuronal behavior, on the other. I will explain some of them later, but now I want to focus on the feature that we have just explored and suggest that it applies to the relation of conscious-ness and the brain. The consciousness of the brain can have effects at the neuronal level even though there is nothing in the brain except neurons (with glial cells, neurotransmitters, blood flow, and all the rest). And just as the behavior of the molecules is causally constitutive of solidity, so the behavior of the neurons is causally constitutive of consciousness. When we say that con-sciousness can move my body, what we are saying is that the neuronal structures move my body, but they move my body in the way they do because of the conscious state they are in. Consciousness is a feature of the brain in a way that solidity is a feature of the wheel.

We are reluctant to think of consciousness as just a biological feature of the brain, in part because of our dualistic tradition, but also because we tend to suppose that if consciousness is irreducible to neuronal behavior


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then it must be something extra, something “over and above” neuronal behavior. And of course consciousness, unlike solidity, is not ontologically reducible to physi-cal microstructures. This is not because it is some extra thing; rather, it is because consciousness has a first-per-son, or subjective, ontology, and is thus not reducible to anything that has a third-person, or objective, ontology.3 In this brief discussion I have tried to explain how con-sciousness can have “physical” causal consequences, and why there is nothing mysterious about that fact. My con-scious intention-in-action causes my arm to go up. But of course, my conscious intention-in-action is a feature of my brain system, and as such at the level of the neurons it is constituted entirely by neuronal behavior. There is no ontological reductionism in this account, because at no point are we denying that consciousness has an irreduc-ible first-person ontology. But there is a causal reduction. Consciousness has no causal powers beyond the powers of the neuronal (and other neurobiological) structures.

III. The Structure of Rational Explanation

I said that the problem of free will is a problem about certain sorts of consciousness. If we look at the sorts of explanations that we give for actions which are manifes-

3. For further discussion, see John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 992), especially chap. 5.


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tations of the gap, that is, actions which are expressions of our experience of free, rational decision making, we find that the experience of free will is reflected in the logical structure of action explanations. In a word, because of the gap, explanations that appeal to our rational decision-making processes are not determinis-tic in form in a way that typical explanations of natural phenomena are deterministic in form. To see how this is so, contrast the following three explanations:

. I punched a hole in the ballot paper because I wanted to vote for Bush.

2. I got a bad headache because I wanted to vote for Bush.

3. The glass fell to the floor and broke because I accidentally knocked it off the table.

Of these examples, and 2 look very similar in their syntactical structure, and they appear to be different from 3. I will argue, however, that 2 and 3 are the same in their underlying logical structure, and they both differ in this respect from . 3 is a standard causal explanation which states that one event or state caused another event or state. The logical form of 3 is simply: A caused B. But the form of is quite different. We do not take statements of form as implying that the event described by the clause before “because” had to occur, given the occur-rence of the event described after the “because” and the rest of the context. We do not take as implying that my


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desire to vote for Bush was such as to force me to punch a hole in the ballot paper, that given my psychological state at the time, I could not have done otherwise. Expla-nations of this form may on occasion cite causally suf-ficient conditions, but the form of the explanation does not require such conditions. If we compare and 3 with 2, it seems to me that 2, like 3, is a matter of causally sufficient conditions. The form of 2, like 3, is simply: A caused B. In that context, the state of my desiring to vote for Bush was causally sufficient for the event of my get-ting a headache.

But this feature of rational explanation leaves us with a puzzle, almost a contradiction. It seems that if the explanation does not give causally sufficient conditions, it cannot really explain anything, because it does not answer the question why one event occurred as opposed to another event, which was also causally possible given exactly the same antecedent conditions. I think answer-ing that question is an important part of the discussion of free will, so I want to spend a little bit of time on it.

As a matter of their logical structure, explanations of voluntary human actions in terms of reasons are differ-ent from ordinary causal explanations. The logical form of ordinary causal explanations is simply that event A caused event B. Relative to specific contexts, we typically take such explanations as adequate because we assume that in that context, event A was causally sufficient for event B. Given the rest of the context, if A occurred then B had to occur. But the form of the explanation


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of human behavior, where we say that a certain person performed act A by acting on reason R, has a different logical structure. It is not of the form “A caused B”. I think you only understand that structure if you realize that it requires the postulation of a self or an ego. The logical form of the statement “Agent S performed Act A because of reason R” is not of the form “A caused B”, it is of the form “a self S performed action A, and in the per-formance of A, S acted on reason R”. The logical form, in short, of rational explanation is quite different from that of standard causal explanations. The form of the explanation is not to give causally sufficient conditions, but to cite the reason that the agent acted on.

But if that is right, then we have a peculiar result. It seems that rational action explanations require us to postulate the existence of an irreducible self, a rational agent, in addition to the sequence of events. Indeed, if we make explicit two further assumptions and add them to those we have already been making, I think we can derive the existence of the self.

Assumption : Explanations in terms of reasons do not typically cite causally sufficient conditions.

Assumption 2: Such explanations can be adequate explanations of actions.

How do I know that Assumption 2 is true? How do I know such explanations can be and often are adequate?


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Because in my own case I often know exactly what rea-sons I had for performing an action and I know that an explanation that cites those reasons is adequate, because I know that in acting I acted on those reasons and on those reasons alone. Of course we have to allow that there are all kinds of problems about the unconscious, self-decep-tion, and all the rest of the unknown and unacknowl-edged reasons for action. But in the ideal case where I consciously act on a reason and am consciously aware of acting on that reason, the specification of the reason as the explanation of my action is perfectly adequate.

We have already been making a third assumption,

Assumption 3: Adequate causal explanations cite conditions that, relative to the context, are causally sufficient.

And this assumption just makes explicit the principle that if a causal statement is to explain an event, then the statement of the cause must cite a condition that, in that particular context, was sufficient to bring about the event to be explained. But from Assumptions and 3 we can derive:

Conclusion : Construed as ordinary causal expla-nations, reason explanations are inadequate.

If we were to assume that reason explanations are ordinary causal explanations we would have a straight


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contradiction. To avoid the contradiction we have to conclude:

Conclusion 2: Reason explanations are not ordinary causal explanations.

Though they have a causal component, their form is not, “A caused B”.

That leaves us with a problem. How are we to explain the adequacy of these explanations if they have a causal component, and, nonetheless, are not standard causal explanations? I think the answer is not hard to find. The explanation does not give a sufficient cause of an event, rather, it gives a specification of how a conscious ratio-nal self acted on a reason, how an agent made a reason effective by freely acting on it. But when spelled out, the logical form of such explanations requires that we postulate an irreducible, non-Humean self. Thus:

Conclusion 3: Reason explanations are adequate because they explain why a self acted in a certain way. They explain why a rational self acting in the gap acted one way rather than another, by specify-ing the reason that the self acted on.

There are thus two avenues to the gap, an experiential and a linguistic. We experience ourselves acting freely in the gap, and this experience is reflected in the logical structure of explanations that we give for our actions.


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We experience ourselves acting as rational agents, and our linguistic practice of giving explanations reflects the gap (because the explanations do not cite causally sufficient conditions). And, for their intelligibility, these explanations require that we recognize that there must be an entity—a rational agent, a self, or an ego—that acts in the gap (because a Humean bundle of percep-tions would not be enough to account for the adequacy of the explanations). The necessity of assuming the operation of an irreducible, non-Humean self is a fea-ture both of our actual experience of voluntary action and the practice that we have of explaining our volun-tary actions by giving reasons.

Of course such explanations, like all explanations, allow for further questions about why those reasons were effective and not other reasons. That is, if I say that I voted for Bush because I wanted an improvement in the educational system, there is a further question, Why did I want that improvement? And why was that reason more compelling to me than other reasons? I agree that such a demand for explanations can always be contin-ued, but that is true of any explanation. Explanations, as Wittgenstein reminded us, have to stop somewhere, and there is nothing inadequate about saying that I voted for Bush because I wanted an improvement in the educational system. It does not show that my answer is inadequate to show that it admits of further questions.

I am here summarizing briefly a complex argument that I have spelled out in more detail in Chapter 3 of


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Rationality in Action.4 But the bare bones of the argu-ment can be conveyed even in this brief summary: We have the first-person conscious experience of acting on reasons. We state these reasons for action in the form of explanations. The explanations are obviously quite adequate because we know in our own case that, in their ideal form, nothing further is required. But they cannot be adequate if they are treated as ordinary causal expla-nations because they do not pass the causal sufficiency test. They are not deterministic in their logical form as stated, and they are not deterministic in their interpreta-tion. How can we account for these facts? To account for these explanations we must see that they are not of the form A caused B. They are of the form, a rational self S performed act A, and in performing A, S acted on reason R. That formulation requires the postulation of a self.

Conclusion 3 does not follow deductively from the assumptions. The argument as presented is a “tran-scendental” argument, in one of Kant’s senses of that term. Assume such and such facts and ask: What are the conditions of possibility of these facts? I am claim-ing that the condition of possibility of the adequacy of rational explanations is the existence of an irreducible self, a rational agent, capable of acting on reasons.

Let us take stock again of where we are. We saw, first, that the problem of free will arises because of a special feature of a certain type of human consciousness, and,

4. John R. Searle, Rationality in Action.


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we saw, second, that in order to explain our apparently free behavior, we have to postulate an irreducible notion of the self. This, by the way, is typical of philosophy—in order to solve one problem you have to solve a bunch of others, but, so far, I seem to have given you three prob-lems for one. We started with the problem of free will, and we now have the problems of free will, of conscious-ness, and of the self, and they all seem to hang together.

IV. Free Will and the Brain

I now turn to the main question of this chapter: How could we treat the problem of free will as a neurobio-logical problem? And the assumption that I am making is that if free will is a genuine feature of the world and not merely an illusion, then it must have a neurobio-logical reality; there must be some feature of the brain that realizes free will. I said earlier that consciousness is a higher-level, or system, feature of the brain caused by the behavior of lower-level elements, such as neurons and synapses. But if that is so, what would the behavior of the neurons and the synapses have to be like if the conscious experience of free will were to be neurobio-logically real?

I have said that the philosophical solution to the tra-ditional mind-body problem is to point out that all of our conscious states are higher-level or systemic fea-tures of the brain, while being at the same time caused by lower-level microprocesses in the brain. At the sys-


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tem level we have consciousness, intentionality, deci-sions, and intentions. At the micro level we have neu-rons, synapses, and neurotransmitters. The features of the system level are caused by the behavior of the micro level elements, and are realized in the system composed of the micro level elements. In the past I have described the set of causal relations between decision making and acting in terms of a parallelogram where at the top level we have decisions leading to intentions in action, and at the bottom level we have neuron firings causing more neuron firings. Such a picture gives us a parallelogram that looks like this:

The question is, If we suppose there is a gap at the top level in the case of rational decision making, how might that gap be reflected at the neurobiological level? There are, after all, no gaps in the brain. In order


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Image has been suppressed

to explore alternative hypotheses we need to consider an example.

A famous, if mythological, example is the judgment of Paris. Confronted with three beautiful Goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite and Pallas Athena, Paris was required to deliberate and reach a decision as to which should receive the golden apple, inscribed “For the fairest.” He was not to decide this by appraising their beauty but by choosing among the bribes each offered. Aphrodite promised that he would possess the most beautiful woman in the world, Athena that he would lead the Trojans to victory over the Greeks, and Hera offered to make him ruler of Europe and Asia. It is important that he has to make a decision as a result of deliberation. He does not just spontaneously react. We also assume that he was operating in the gap: He consciously felt a range of choices open to him, and his decision was not forced by lust, rage or obsession. He made a free deci-sion after deliberation.

We can suppose there was an instant when the period of reflection began, call it t, and that it lasted until he finally handed the apple to Aphrodite at t2. In this example we will stipulate that there was no further stimulus input between t and t2. In that period he simply reflected on the merits and the demerits of the various offers. All the information on the basis of which he makes his decision is present in his brain at t, and the processes between t and t2 are simply a matter of deliberation leading to the choice of Aphrodite.


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Using this example we can now state the problem of the freedom of the will with somewhat more precision than we have been able to do so far. If the total state of Paris’s brain at t is causally sufficient to determine the total state of his brain at t2, in this and in other rel-evantly similar cases, then he has no free will. And what goes for Paris goes for all of us. If the state of his brain at t is not causally sufficient to determine the subsequent states of his brain up to t2, then, given certain assump-tions about consciousness that I need to make clear, he does have free will. And again, what goes for Paris goes for all of us.

Why does it all come down to this? The answer is that the state of his brain immediately prior to t2 is sufficient to determine the beginning of the muscle contractions that caused and realized his action of handing the apple to Aphrodite. Paris was a mortal man, with neurons like the rest of us, and as soon as the acetylcholene reached the axon end plates of his motor neurons, then, assum-ing the rest of his physiology was in order, his arm, with apple in hand, started to move toward Aphrodite by causal necessity. The problem of free will is whether the conscious thought processes in the brain, the processes that constitute the experiences of free will, are realized in a neurobiological system that is totally deterministic.

So we have two hypotheses: First, that the state of the brain is causally sufficient, and, Second, that it is not. Let us explore each in turn. On Hypothesis let us suppose that the antecedently insufficient psychological


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conditions leading up to the choice of Aphrodite at t2, the conditions that led us to the postulation of the gap, are matched at the lower neurobiological level by a sequence of neurobiological events each stage of which is causally sufficient for the next. On this hypothesis we would have a kind of neurobiological determinism corresponding to a psychological libertarianism. Paris has the experience of free will, but there is no genuine free will at the neu-robiological level. I think most neurobiologists would feel that this is probably how the brain actually works, that we have the experience of free will but it is illusory; because the neuronal processes are causally sufficient to determine subsequent states of the brain, assuming there are no outside stimulus inputs or effects from the rest of the body. But this result is intellectually very unsatisfy-ing because it gives us a form of epiphenomenalism. It says that our experience of freedom plays no causal or explanatory role in our behavior. It is a complete illusion, because our behavior is entirely fixed by the neurobiol-ogy that determines the muscle contractions. On this view evolution played a massive trick on us. Evolution gave us the illusion of freedom, but it is nothing more that that—an illusion.

I will say more about Hypothesis later, but first let us turn to Hypothesis 2. On Hypothesis 2 we sup-pose that the absence of causally sufficient conditions at the psychological level is matched by an absence of causally sufficient conditions at the neurobiologi-cal level. Our problem is, What could that possibly


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mean? There are no gaps in the brain. In order to take seriously the hypothesis that the free will that is mani-fested in consciousness has a neurobiological reality, we have to explore the relation of consciousness to neurobiology a little more closely. Earlier I described consciousness as a higher-level feature of the brain system. The metaphor of higher and lower, though it is common in the literature (my own writings included), I think is misleading. It suggests that consciousness is, so to speak, like the varnish on the surface of the table; and that is wrong. The idea we are trying to express is that consciousness is a feature of the whole system. Consciousness is literally present throughout those portions of the brain where consciousness is created by and realized in neuronal activity. It is important to emphasize this point, because it runs contrary to our Cartesian heritage that says consciousness can-not have a spatial location: Consciousness is located in certain portions of the brain and functions causally, relative to those locations.

I explained earlier how consciousness could function causally, by giving an analogy between the conscious-ness of the brain and the solidity of the wheel. But, if we carry that analysis a step further, we see that on Hypothesis 2 we have to suppose that the logical fea-tures of volitional consciousness of the entire system have effects on the elements on the system. This is true even though the system is composed entirely of the ele-ments, in the same way that the solidity of the wheel


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has effects on the molecules, even though the wheel is composed of molecules.

The point of the analogy was to remove the sense of mystery about how consciousness could affect neuro-nal behavior (and thus move human bodies) by showing how, in unmysterious cases, a system feature can affect micro level elements in a system composed entirely of the micro level elements, in which all causal powers are reducible to the causal powers of the micro level ele-ments. But of course any analogy goes only so far. The analogy, solidity is to molecular behavior as conscious-ness is to neuronal behavior, is inadequate at, at least, two points. First, we take the wheel to be entirely deter-ministic, and the hypothesis we are examining now is that the conscious, voluntary decision-making aspects of the brain are not deterministic. Second, the solidity of the wheel is ontologically reducible to the behavior of the molecules, and not just causally reducible. In the case of consciousness, though we suppose that con-sciousness is causally reducible to the behavior of the microelements, we cannot make a similar ontological reduction for consciousness. This is because the first-person ontology of consciousness is not reducible to third-person ontology.

So far then, in our preliminary formulation of Hypoth-esis 2 we have three claims. First, the state of the brain at t is not causally sufficient to determine the state of the brain at t2. Second, the movement from the state at t to the state at t2 can only be explained by features of


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the whole system, specifically by the operation of the conscious self. And third, all of the features of the con-scious self at any given instant are entirely determined by the state of the microelements, the neurons, etc. at that instant. The systemic features are entirely fixed at any given instant by the microelements, because, caus-ally speaking, there is nothing there but the microele-ments. The state of the neurons determines the state of consciousness. But any given state of neurons/con-sciousness is not causally sufficient for the next state. The passage from one state to the next is explained by the rational thought processes of the initial state of neurons/consciousness. At any instant the total state of consciousness is fixed by the behavior of the neurons, but from one instant to the next the total state of the system is not causally sufficient to determine the next state. Free will, if it exists at all, is a phenomenon in time. Diagrammatically the best I can do is this:


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Image has been suppressed

I have stated both Hypothesis and Hypothesis 2 very swiftly, and it is now time to go over them a bit more slowly to see what is involved.

V. Hypothesis and Epiphenomenalism

The best way to think of Hypothesis is to think of it as an engineering problem. Imagine you are build-ing a conscious robot. You build it in such a way that when confronted with choices it has the conscious experience of the gap. But you construct its hardware in such a way that each stage is determined by the preceding stages and by the impact of outside stimuli. Each movement of the robot’s body is entirely fixed by its internal states. Indeed, we already have a model for this part of the technology in traditional artificial intelligence. We simply put in computer programs that will give the robot an algorithmic solution to the problems posed by the input stimuli and the states of the system. On Hypothesis , Paris’s judgment was programmed in advance.

I have said that an objection to Hypothesis is that it leads to epiphenomenalism. The distinctive features of conscious, rational decision making would have no real influence in the universe. Paris’s judgment, my behavior and the robot’s behavior are all entirely causally deter-mined by the activity going on at the micro level. But, someone might challenge me, Why is the supposition involved in Hypothesis any more epiphenomenal than


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any other account of the relationship of consciousness to the physiological functioning of the human body?

I have claimed that once we abandon the traditional dualistic categories there is no mystery at all about how consciousness can function causally. It is simply a mat-ter of a higher-level, or system, feature functioning caus-ally. And, furthermore, the account that I gave does not postulate any causal over determination. There are not two sets of causes, the consciousness and the neurons; there is just one set, described at different levels. Con-sciousness, to repeat, is just the state that the system of neurons is in, in the same way that solidity is just a state that the system of molecules is in. But now, on my own account, why should Hypothesis imply epiphe-nomenalism any more than Hypothesis 2? The answer is this: Whether a feature is epiphenomenal depends on whether the feature itself functions causally. Thus there are many features of any event that are causally irrel-evant. For example, it is a feature of the event wherein I accidentally knocked the glass off the table that I was wearing a blue shirt at the time. But the blue shirt was not a causally relevant aspect of the event. It is true to say, “The man in the blue shirt knocked the glass off the table,” but the blue shirt is epiphenomenal—it does not matter. So when we say of some feature of an event that it is epiphenomenal, what we are saying is that that feature played no causal role. The suggestion that I am making is that on Hypothesis the essential feature of rational decision making, namely the experience of the


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gap—the experience of alternative possibilities open to us, the experience that the psychological antecedents of the action are not causally sufficient to compel the action, and the experience of the conscious thought pro-cesses where we make up our minds and then act—all of those features of the experience do not matter. They are irrelevant. The specific determinate forms of those fea-tures whereby we anguish over a decision and consider various reasons are as irrelevant as the blueness of my shirt when I knocked the glass over. The judgment of Paris was already determined by the antecedent state of Paris’s neurons, regardless of all of his cogitations.

The mere fact that a system feature is fixed by the microelements does not show that the system feature is epiphenomenal. On the contrary, we saw how con-sciousness could be fixed by neuronal behavior and still not be epiphenomenal. To show that something is epiphenomenal, we have to show that the feature in question is not a causally relevant aspect in determin-ing what happens. The epiphenomenalism in this case arises because of the causal insufficiency of the experi-ences of the gap, and the effort to resolve the insuffi-ciency by making up our minds is simply not a causally relevant aspect in determining what actually happens. Our decision was already fixed by the state of our neu-rons even though we thought we were going through a conscious process of making up our minds among gen-uine alternatives, alternatives that were genuinely open to us, even given all of the causes.


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Epiphenomenalism is sometimes said to be explained by counterfactuals. Multiple causes apart, the truth of, “Even if A had not occurred then B would still have occurred”, is supposed to be the test for whether A is epiphenomenal. But this test is at best misleading. Assuming that both the experiences of the gap and the final decisions are fixed at the neuronal level, then if the experiences had not occurred, the decision would not have occurred, or at least its occurrence would not have been guaranteed, because they are both caused by the same neuronal processes. So if one is absent the cause of the other must have been removed as well. But this does not show that the experiences were not epi-phenomenal. The test for epiphenomenalism is not the truth of the counterfactual, but the reasons for its truth. The test for epiphenomenalism is whether the feature in question is a causally relevant aspect. On Hypothesis the distinctive features of the gap and of rational deci-sion making are causally irrelevant.

Well, what’s wrong with epiphenomenalism? As we come to understand better how the brain works, it may turn out to be true. In the present state of our knowl-edge, the main objection to accepting epiphenomenal-ism is that it goes against everything we know about evolution. The processes of conscious rationality are such an important part of our lives, and above all such a biologically expensive part of our lives, that it would be unlike anything we know in evolution if a phenotype of this magnitude played no functional role at all in the


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life and survival of the organism. In humans and higher animals an enormous biological price is paid for con-scious decision making, including everything from how the young are raised to the amount of blood flowing to the brain. To suppose that this plays no role in inclusive fitness is not like supposing the human appendix plays no role. It would be more like supposing that vision or digestion played no evolutionary role.

VI. Hypothesis 2. The Self, Consciousness and Indeterminism

Hypothesis is unattractive, but at least it is coherent and fits in with a lot of what we know about biology. The brain is an organ like any other and is as deterministic in its functioning as the heart or the liver. If we can imag-ine building a conscious machine then we can imagine building a conscious robot according to Hypothesis . But how would one treat Hypothesis 2 as an engineering problem? How would we build a conscious robot, where every feature of consciousness is entirely determined by the state of the microelements, and at the same time the consciousness of the system functions causally in deter-mining the next state of the system by processes that are not deterministic but are a matter of free decision mak-ing by a rational self, acting on reasons. So described, it does not sound like a promising project for Federal funding. The only reason for taking it seriously is that as far as we can tell from our own experiences of the


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gap, together with what we know about how the brain works, that is precisely the condition we are in. We are conscious robots whose states of consciousness are fixed by neuronal processes, and at the same time we some-times proceed by nondeterministic conscious processes (hence neuronal processes) that are matters of our ratio-nal selves making decisions on reasons.

How could the brain work so as to satisfy all those con-ditions? Notice that I do not ask, “How does the brain work so as to satisfy all those conditions?” because we don’t know for a fact that it does satisfy the conditions, and, if it does, we have no idea how it does so. At this point all we can do is describe various conditions that the brain would have to meet if Hypothesis 2 is true.

It seems to me there are three conditions, in ascend-ing order of difficulty, and an account of brain function-ing in accord with Hypothesis 2 would have to explain how the brain meets these conditions.

. Consciousness, as caused by neuronal processes and realized in neuronal systems, functions causally in moving the body.

I have already explained in some detail how this is possible.

2. The brain causes and sustains the existence of a conscious self that is able to make rational decisions and carry them out in actions.

It is not enough that consciousness should have phys-ical effects on the body. There are many such cases that have nothing to do with rational free actions, as when


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a man gets a stomach ache from worry, or throws up at a disgusting sight, or gets an erection from erotic thoughts. In addition to a neurobiological account of mental causation one needs a neurobiological account of the rational, volitional self. How does the brain create a self, how is the self realized in the brain, how does it function in deliberation, how does it arrive at decisions, and how does it initiate and sustain actions?

In the sense in which I introduced the notion of the self by the transcendental argument of section III, the self is not some extra entity; rather, in a very crude and oversimplified fashion, one can say that conscious agency plus conscious rationality equals selfhood. So if you had an account of brain processes that explained how the brain produced the unified field of conscious-ness,5 together with the experience of acting, and in addition how the brain produced conscious thought processes, in which the constraints of rationality are already built in as constitutive elements, you would, so to speak, get the self for free. To spell this out in a little more detail, the elements necessary for an organ-ism to have a self in my sense are: first, it must have a unified field of consciousness; second, it must have the capacity for deliberating on reasons, and this involves not only cognitive capacities of perception and mem-ory but also the capacity for coordinating intentional

5. For the importance of the unified field, see John R. Searle, “Con-sciousness,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 23 (2000): 557–578.


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states so as to arrive at rational decisions; and third, the organism must be capable of initiating and carrying out actions (in the old-time jargon, it must have “volition” or “agency”).6

There is no additional metaphysical problem of the self. If you can show the brain does all that—how it cre-ates a unified field of consciousness capable of rational agency in the sense just explained—then you have solved the neurobiological problem of the self. Notice that, as far as the experiences are concerned, both Hypothesis and Hypothesis 2 need to meet this condition. Indeed, any theory of brain function has to meet this condition, because we know that the brain gives us all these sorts of experiences. The difference between Hypothesis and Hypothesis 2 is that on rational agency is an illu-sion. We have the experience of rational agency but it makes no difference to the world.

3. The brain is such that the conscious self is able to make and carry out decisions in the gap, where nei-ther decision nor action is determined in advance, by causally sufficient conditions, yet both are rationally explained by the reasons the agent is acting on.

6. On my view rationality is not a separate faculty; rather, the con-straints of rationality are already built into intentional phenomena such as beliefs and desires and into thought processes. So a neurobiologi-cal account of mental phenomena would already be an account of the rational constraints on such phenomena. For more detailed presenta-tion of this view and the reasons for it, see my Rationality in Action.


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This is the trickiest condition: How could the gap be neurobiologically real, given all that I have just said? Assume we have an account of how the brain produces mental causation, and an account of how it produces the experiences of rational agency, how would we get ratio-nal indeterminism into our account of brain function?

The only way I know to approach such a problem is to begin by reminding ourselves of what we already know. We know, or at least we think we know, two things that bear on the case. First we know that our experiences of free action contain both indeterminism and rational-ity and that consciousness is essential to the forms that these take. Second we know that quantum indetermin-ism is the only form of indeterminism that is indisput-ably established as a fact of nature.7 It is tempting, indeed irresistible, to think that the explanation of the conscious experience of free will must be a manifestation of quan-tum indeterminism at the level of conscious, rational decision making. Previously I never could see the point of introducing quantum mechanics into discussions of consciousness. But here at least is a strict argument requiring the introduction of quantum indeterminism.

Premise . All indeterminism in nature is quantum indeterminism.

Premise 2. Consciousness is a feature of nature that manifests indeterminism.

7. Chaos theory, as I understand it, implies unpredictability but not indeterminism.


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Conclusion: Consciousness manifests quantum inde-terminism.

Our aim now is to keep following relentlessly the impli-cations of our assumptions. If Hypothesis 2 is true, and if quantum indeterminism is the only real form of indeter-minism in nature, then it follows that quantum mechan-ics must enter into the explanation of consciousness. This conclusion does not follow on Hypothesis . As long as the gap is epiphenomenal, then no indeterminism in the causal apparatus is essential to explain how conscious-ness is caused by and realized in brain processes. This is important for contemporary research. The standard lines of research, both on the building block model and the unified field model, make no appeal to quantum mechanics in explaining consciousness. If Hypothesis 2 is true these cannot succeed, at least not for voli-tional consciousness.8

But even assuming we had a quantum mechanical expla-nation of consciousness, how do we get from indetermin-ism to rationality? If quantum indeterminacy amounts to randomness then quantum indeterminacy by itself seems useless in explaining the problem of free will because free actions are not random. I think we should take the question, “What is the relation between quantum inde-terminacy and rationality?” in the same spirit in which we take the question “What is the relation between brain

8. For an explanation of the distinction between the building block model and the unified field model, see Searle, “Consciousness.”


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microprocesses and consciousness?” or the question, “What is the relation between visual stimuli and brain processes on the one hand, and visual intentionality on the other?” In the latter two cases we know in advance that the system features are caused by and realized in the microprocesses, so we know that the causal features of the system level phenomena are entirely explainable by the behavior of the microphenomena. As I have repeated to the point of tedium, the causal relations have the same formal structure as the causal relations between molec-ular movements and solidity. We also know that it is a fallacy of composition to suppose that the properties of the individual elements must be properties of the whole. Thus, for example, the electrical properties of the indi-vidual atoms are not properties of the whole table, and the fact that a particular action potential is at 50 Hz does not imply that the whole brain is oscillating at 50 Hz. Now exactly analogously, the fact that individual micro-phenomena are random does not imply randomness at the system level. The indeterminacy at the micro level may (if Hypothesis 2 is true) explain the indeterminacy of the system, but the randomness at the micro level does not by itself imply randomness at the system level.

Conclusion

I said at the beginning that obdurate philosophical prob-lems arise when we have a conflict between deeply held inconsistent theses. In the case of the mind-body prob-


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lem we resolved the inconsistency by a kind of compati-bilism. Once we abandon the assumptions behind the traditional Cartesian categories, then naive materialism is consistent with naive mentalism. We could not make such a compatibilism work for the free will problem, because the thesis that every human act is preceded by causally sufficient conditions remains incompatible with the thesis that some are not. Once we sorted out the issues we found two possibilities, Hypothesis and Hypothesis 2. Neither is very appealing. If we had to bet, the odds would surely favor Hypothesis , because it is simpler and fits in with our overall view of biology. But it gives a result that is literally incredible. When I gave this lecture in London someone in the audience asked, “If Hypothesis were shown to be true would you accept it?” The form of the question is: “If free, rational deci-sion making were shown not to exist, would you freely and rationally make the decision to accept that it does not exist?” Notice that he did not ask, “If Hypothesis were true would the neuronal processes in your brain produce the result that your mouth made affirmative noises about it?” That question at least is in the spirit of Hypothesis , though even that goes too far, because it asks me freely and rationally to make a prediction, something that is impossible on the Hypothesis.

Hypothesis 2 is a mess, because it gives us three mys-teries for one. We thought free will was a mystery, but consciousness and quantum mechanics were two sepa-rate and distinct mysteries. Now we have the result that


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in order to solve the first we have to solve the second and invoke one of the most mysterious aspects of the third to solve the first two. My aim in this chapter is to continue the line of attack begun in my earlier writings and to follow out the competing lines of reasoning as far as they will go. There is, I am sure, much more to be said.


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The Western philosophical tradition has an especially influential component of political philosophy. The clas-sics in the field, from Plato’s Republic through Rawls’s Theory of Justice, have an importance in our general cul-ture that often exceeds even most other philosophical classics. The subjects discussed in these works include descriptions of the ideal society, the nature of justice, the sources of sovereignty, the origins of political obli-gation, and the requirements for effective political lead-ership. One could even argue that the most influential single strand in the Western philosophical tradition is its political philosophy. This branch of philosophy has

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CHAPTER T WO

Social Ontology and Political Power1

. I am grateful to Bruce Cain, Felix Oppenheim and Dagmar Searle for comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

an extra interest because it has had at various times an influence on actual political events. The Constitution of the United States, to take a spectacular example, is the expression of the philosophical views of a number of Enlightenment thinkers, some of whom were among the framers of the Constitution itself.

In spite of its impressive achievements, I have always found our tradition of political philosophy in various ways unsatisfying. I do not think it is the best expression of Western philosophy. The problem with the tradition is not that it gives wrong answers to the questions it asks, but rather it seems to me that it does not always ask the questions that need to be asked in the first place. Prior to answering such questions as, “What is a just society?” and, “What is the proper exercise of political power?” it seems to me we should answer the more fundamen-tal questions: “What is a society in the first place?” and, “What sort of power is political power anyhow?”

In this chapter I do not attempt to make a contribution to the continuing discussion in the Western philosophical tradition, but rather I shall attempt to answer a different set of questions. My aim is to explore some of the rela-tions between the general ontology of social reality and the specific form of social reality that is political power.

I. Social Ontology

I want to begin the discussion by summarizing some of the elements of a theory I expounded in The Construc-

SOCIAL ONTOLOGY AND POLITICAL POWER

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tion of Social Reality (995). I say almost nothing about politics in that book, but I believe that if we take that book together with my later book, Rationality in Action (200), there is an implicit political theory contained in these analyses, and in this chapter I want to make that theory explicit, if only in an abbreviated form. I also want to do it in a way that will make fully explicit the role of language and collective intentionality in the constitution of social reality and correspondingly in the constitution of political power.

This project is a part of a much larger project in con-temporary philosophy. The most important question in contemporary philosophy is this: How, and to what extent, can we reconcile a certain conception that we have of ourselves as conscious, mindful, free, social and political agents with a world that consists entirely of mindless, meaningless particles in fields of force? How, and to what extent, can we get a coherent account of the totality of the world that will reconcile what we believe about ourselves with what we know for a fact from physics, chemistry and biology. The question I tried to answer in The Construction of Social Reality was a ques-tion about how there can be a social and institutional reality in a world consisting of physical particles. This chapter extends that question to the question, How can there be political reality in a world consisting of physi-cal particles?

To begin, we need to make clear a distinction on which the whole analysis rests, the distinction between those


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features of reality that are observer (or intentionality) independent and those that are observer (or intention-ality) dependent. A feature is observer-dependent if its very existence depends on the attitudes, thoughts and intentionality of observers, users, creators, designers, buyers, sellers and conscious intentional agents gener-ally. Otherwise it is observer (or intentionality) indepen-dent. Examples of observer-dependent features include money, property, marriage and language. Examples of observer-independent features of the world include force, mass, gravitational attraction, the chemical bond, and photosynthesis. A rough test for whether a fea-ture is observer-independent is whether it could have existed if there had never been any conscious agents in the world. Without conscious agents there would still be force, mass and the chemical bond, but there would not be money, property, marriage or language. This test is only rough, because, of course, consciousness and intentionality themselves are observer-independent even though they are the source of all observer-depen-dent features of the world.

To say that a feature is observer-dependent does not necessarily imply that we cannot have objective knowl-edge of that feature. For example the piece of paper in my hand is American money, and as such is observer-dependent: It is only money because we think it is money. But it is an objective fact that this is a ten-dollar bill. It is not, for example, just a matter of my subjective opinion that it is money.


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This example shows that in addition to the distinc-tion between observer-dependent and observer-inde-pendent features of the world we need a distinction between epistemic objectivity and subjectivity, on the one hand, and ontological objectivity and subjectivity, on the other. Epistemic objectivity and subjectivity are features of claims. A claim is epistemically objective if its truth or falsity can be established independently of the feelings, attitudes and preferences, and so on, of the makers and interpreters of the claim. Thus the claim that van Gogh was born in Holland is epistemically objec-tive. The claim that van Gogh was a better painter than Manet is, as they say, a matter of opinion. It is epistemi-cally subjective. On the other hand, ontological subjec-tivity and objectivity are features of reality. Pains, tick-les, and itches are ontologically subjective because their existence depends on being experienced by a human or animal subject. Mountains, planets and molecules are ontologically objective because their existence is not dependent on subjective experiences.

The point of these distinctions for the present discus-sion is this: Almost all of political reality is observer rela-tive. For example something is an election, a parliament, a president or a revolution only if people have certain attitudes toward the phenomenon in question. And all such phenomena thereby have an element of ontologi-cal subjectivity. The subjective attitudes of the people involved are constitutive elements of the observer-dependent phenomena. But ontological subjectivity does


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not by itself imply epistemic subjectivity. One can have a domain such as politics or economics whose entities are ontologically subjective, but one can still make epistemi-cally objective claims about elements in that domain. For example the United States presidency is an observer rel-ative phenomenon, hence ontologically subjective. But it is an epistemically objective fact that George W. Bush is now President.

With these distinctions in mind, let us turn to social and political reality. Aristotle famously said that man is a social animal. But the same expression in the Poli-tics, “zoon politikon”, is sometimes translated as “politi-cal animal”: “Man is a political animal.” Quite apart from Aristotelian scholarship, that ambiguity should be interesting to us. There are lots of social animals, but man is the only political animal. So one way to put our question is to ask: What has to be added to the fact that we are social animals to get the fact that we are political animals? And more generally: What has to be added to social reality to get to the special case of political real-ity? Let us start with social facts.

The capacity for social cooperation is a biologically based capacity shared by humans and many other species. It is the capacity for collective intentionality, and collective intentionality is just the phenomenon of shared forms of intentionality in human or animal cooperation. So, for example, collective intentionality exists when a group of animals cooperates in hunting their prey, or two people are having a conversation, or a


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group of people are trying to organize a revolution. Col-lective intentionality exists both in the form of coopera-tive behavior and in consciously shared attitudes such as shared desires, beliefs, and intentions. Whenever two or more agents share a belief, desire, intention or other intentional state, and wherever they are aware of so sharing, the agents in question have collective inten-tionality. It is a familiar point, often made by sociologi-cal theorists, that collective intentionality is the foun-dation of society. This point is made in different ways by Durkheim, Simmel and Weber. Though they did not have the jargon I am using, and did not have a theory of intentionality, I think they were making this point, using the nineteenth-century vocabulary that was avail-able to them. The question that—as far as I know—they did not address, and that I am addressing now, is: How do you get from social facts to institutional facts?

Collective intentionality is all that is necessary for the creation of simple forms of social reality and social facts. Indeed, I define a social fact as any fact involving the collective intentionality of two or more human or animal agents. But it is a long way from simple collec-tive intentionality to money, property, marriage, or gov-ernment, and consequently it is a long way from being a social animal to being an institutional or a political animal. What specifically has to be added to collective intentionality to get the forms of institutional reality that are characteristic of human beings, and in particu-lar characteristic of human political reality? It seems


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to me that exactly two further elements are necessary: First, the imposition of function and, second, certain sorts of rules that I call “constitutive rules”. It is this combination, in addition to collective intentionality, that is the foundation of what we think of as specifi-cally human society.

Let us go through these features in order. Human beings use all sorts of objects to perform functions that can be performed by virtue of the physical features of the objects. At the most primitive level, we use sticks for levers and stumps to sit on. At a more advanced level we create objects so that they can perform particular functions. So early humans chiseled stones to use them to cut with. At a more advanced level we manufacture knives to use for cutting, and chairs to sit on. Some ani-mals are capable of very simple forms of the imposition of function. Famously, Köhler’s apes were able to use a stick and a box in order to bring down bananas that were otherwise out of reach. And the famous Japanese macaque monkey, Imo, learned how to use seawater to wash sweet potatoes and thus improve their flavor by removing dirt and adding salt. But, in general, the use of objects with imposed functions is very limited among animals. Once animals have the capacity for collective intentionality and for the imposition of function, it is an easy step to combine the two. If one of us can use a stump to sit on, several of us can use a log as a bench or a big stick as a lever operated by us together. When we consider human capacities specifically we discover a


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truly remarkable phenomenon. Human beings have the capacity to impose functions on objects, which, unlike sticks, levers, boxes and salt water, cannot perform the function solely in virtue of their physical structure, but only in virtue of a certain form of the collective accep-tance of the objects as having a certain sort of status. With that status comes a function that can only be performed in virtue of the collective acceptance by the community that the object has that status, and that the status carries the function with it. Perhaps the simplest and the most obvious example of this is money. The bits of paper are able to perform their function not in vir-tue of their physical structure, but in virtue of the fact that we have a certain set of attitudes toward them. We acknowledge that they have a certain status, we count them as money, and consequently they are able to per-form their function in virtue of our acceptance of them as having that status. I propose to call such functions “status functions.”

How is it possible that there can be such things as status functions? In order to explain this possibility, I have to introduce a third notion, in addition to the already explained notions of collective intentionality and the assignment of function. The third notion is that of a constitutive rule. In order to explain it, I need to note the distinction between what I call brute facts and institutional facts. Brute facts can exist without human institutions; institutional facts require human institu-tions for their very existence. An example of a brute fact


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is that this stone is larger than that stone, or that the Earth is 93 million miles from the sun. Examples of institutional facts are that I am a citizen of the United States and that this is a twenty-dollar bill. And how are institutional facts possible? In general, institutional facts require human institutions. To explain such institutions we need to make a distinction between two kinds of rules, which, years ago, I baptized as “regulative rules” and “constitutive rules”. Regulative rules regulate ante-cedently existing forms of behavior. A rule such as “drive on the right-hand side of the road” regulates driving, for example. But constitutive rules not only regulate, they also create the very possibility of, or define, new forms of behavior. An obvious example is the rules of chess. Chess rules do not just regulate the playing of chess, but rather, playing chess is constituted by acting according to the rules in a certain sort of way. Constitutive rules typically have the form: “X counts as Y”, or “X counts as Y in context C”. Such and such counts as a legal move of a knight in chess, such and such a position counts as checkmate, such and such a person who meets certain qualifications counts as President of the United States, and so on.

The key element in the move from the brute to the institutional, and correspondingly the move from assigned physical functions to status functions, is the move expressed in the constitutive rule. It is the move whereby we count something as having a certain sta-tus, and with that status, a certain function. So the key


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element that gets us from the sheer animal imposition of function and collective intentionality to the imposi-tion of status functions is our ability to follow a set of rules, procedures or practices whereby we count certain things as having a certain status. Such and such a per-son who satisfies certain conditions counts as our presi-dent, such and such a type of object counts as money in our society, and, most important of all, as we shall see, such and such a sequence of sounds or marks counts as a sentence, and, indeed, counts as a speech act in our language. It is this feature, the distinctly human feature, to count certain things as having a status that they do not have intrinsically, and then to grant, with that sta-tus, a set of functions, which can only be performed in virtue of the collective acceptance of the status and the corresponding function, that creates the very possibility of institutional facts. Institutional facts are constituted by the existence of status functions.

At this point in the analysis a philosophical paradox arises. It has the form of a traditional paradox concern-ing the origin of obligations. Here is how it goes. If the existence of institutional facts requires constitutive rules or principles, then where do the constitutive rules or principles come from? It looks like their existence might itself be an institutional fact, and if so we would plunge into an infinite regress or circularity. Either way the analysis would collapse. The traditional form in which this paradox arises has to do with the obligation to keep promises. If, on the one hand, the origin of the


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obligation to keep a promise comes from the fact that everybody has made a promise to the effect that they will keep their promises, then the analysis is obviously circular. If, on the other hand, that is not the origin of the obligation to keep a promise, then it looks like we have not shown where the obligation to keep a prom-ise comes from. I hope it is clear that the form of the paradox for constitutive rules has the same logical form as the traditional puzzle about the nature of promises. For promises the puzzle is: How can the obligation of promises come into existence without a prior promise to abide by promises? For institutional facts the puzzle is: How can the constitutive rules that underlie institu-tional facts exist without some institution consisting of constitutive rules within which we can create constitu-tive rules?

In the case of the logical form of constitutive rules the problem can be stated without putting it in the form of a paradox. Even if the existence of the constitutive rule is not itself an institutional fact, at least it is an observer-relative fact. And that already makes it depen-dent on the consciousness and intentionality of agents, and one wants to know, what exactly is the structure of that consciousness and intentionality? How rich an apparatus is necessary in order to have the appropriate mental contents?

Here, I believe, is the solution to the paradox. Human beings have the capacity to impose status functions on objects. The imposition of those status functions can


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be represented in the form, “X counts as Y in C”. In primitive cases you do not require an established pro-cedure or rule in order to do this, consequently for the simplest kind of cases of the imposition of status func-tions, a general procedure in the form of a constitutive rule is not yet required. Consider the following sort of example. Let us suppose that the members of a primi-tive tribe simply regard a certain person as their chief or leader. We may suppose that they do this without being fully conscious of what they are doing, and even without having the vocabulary of “chief” or “leader”. For example, suppose they do not make decisions without first consulting him, his voice carries a special weight in the decision-making process, people look to him to adjudicate conflict situations, members of the tribe obey his orders, he leads the tribe in battle, and so on. All of those features constitute his being a leader, and leadership is a case of an imposed status function on an entity that does not have that function solely in virtue of its physical structure. They accord to him a status, and with that status a function. He now counts as their leader.

When the practice of imposing a status function becomes regularized and established, then it becomes a constitutive rule. If the tribe makes it a matter of pol-icy that he is the leader because he has such and such features, and that any successor as leader must have these features, then they have established a constitutive rule of leadership. It is especially important that there


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should be publicly available constitutive rules, because the nature of status functions requires that they be col-lectively recognized in order to do their work, and the collective recognition requires that there be some ante-cedently accepted procedure in accordance with which the institutional facts can be acknowledged. Language is the obvious case of this. That is, we have procedures by which we make statements, ask questions, and give promises. And these are made possible in a way that is communicable to other people only because of publicly recognized constitutive rules. But constitutive rules do not require other constitutive rules for their existence, at least not to the point of an infinite regress. So the solution to our initial puzzle is to grant that a regular-ized practice can become a constitutive rule, but there does not always have to be a constitutive rule in order that a status function be imposed in the simplest sorts of cases.

There are two things to notice about status functions. First, they are always matters of positive and negative powers. The person who possesses money, owns prop-erty, or is married has powers, rights, and obligations that he or she would not otherwise have. Notice that these powers are of a peculiar kind because they are not like, for example, electrical power or the power that one person might have over another because of brute physical force. Indeed, it seems to me a kind of pun to call both the power of my car engine and the power of George W. Bush as President “powers” because they are


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totally different. The power of my car engine is brute power. But the powers that are constitutive of institu-tional facts are always matters of rights, duties, obli-gations, commitments, authorizations, requirements, permissions and privileges. Notice that such powers only exist as long as they are acknowledged, recognized, or otherwise accepted. I propose to call all such powers deontic powers. Institutional facts are always matters of deontic powers.

The second feature to notice is that where status func-tions are concerned, language and symbolism have not only the function to describe the phenomena but are partly constitutive of the very phenomena described. How can that be? After all, when I say that George W. Bush is President, that is a simple statement of fact, like the statement that it is raining. Why is language more constitutive of the fact in the case where the fact is that George W. Bush is President than it is in the fact that it is raining? In order to understand this we have to understand the nature of the move from X to Y whereby we count something as having a certain status that it does not have intrinsically, but has it only relative to our attitudes. The reason that language is constitu-tive of institutional facts, in a way that it is not consti-tutive of brute facts, or other sorts of social facts, or intentional facts in general, is that the move from X to Y in the formula X counts as Y in C can only exist inso-far as it is represented as existing. There is no physical feature present in the Y term that was not present in the


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X term. Rather the Y term just is the X term represented in a certain way. The ten-dollar bill is a piece of paper, the president is a man. Their new statuses exist only insofar as they are represented as existing. But in order that they should be represented as existing there must be some device for representing them. And that device is some system of representation, or at the minimum some symbolic device, whereby we represent the X phenomenon as having the Y status. In order that Bush can be President, people must be able to think that he is President, but in order that they be able to think that he is President, they have to have some means for thinking that, and that means has to be linguistic or symbolic.

But what about language itself? Isn’t language itself an institutional fact, and would it not thereby require some means of representing its institutional status? Language is indeed the basic social institution, not only in the sense that language is required for the existence of other social institutions, but also that linguistic ele-ments are, so to speak, self-identifying as linguistic. The child has an innate capacity to acquire the language to which it is exposed in infancy. The linguistic elements are self-identifying as linguistic precisely because we are brought up in a culture where we treat them as lin-guistic, and we have an innate capacity so to treat them. But in that way, money, property, marriage, government and presidents of the United States are not self-identi-fying as such. We have to have some device for identify-ing them, and that device is symbolic or linguistic.


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It is often said, and indeed I have said it myself, that the primary function of language is to communicate, that we use language to communicate with other peo-ple, and, in a limiting case, to communicate with our-selves in our thinking. But language plays an extra role, which I did not see when I wrote Speech Acts (969), and that is that language is partly constitutive of all institutional reality. In order that something can be money, property, marriage, or government, people have to have appropriate thoughts about it. But in order that they have these appropriate thoughts, they have to have devices for thinking those thoughts, and those devices are essentially symbolic or linguistic.

So far I have gone, rather rapidly, through a summary of the basic ideas that I need in order to explore the nature of political power in its relation to language. In a sense our enterprise is Aristotelian, in that we are seeking pro-gressively more refined differentia, to get from the genus of social facts to progressively more refined specifications that will give us the species of political reality. We are now on the verge of being able to do that, though, of course, we need to remind ourselves that we are not following the essentialism that characterized Aristotle’s approach.

II. The Paradox of Political Power: Government and Violence

So far the account is fairly neutral about the distinc-tions between different sorts of institutional structures,


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and it might seem from such an account that there is nothing special about government, that it is just one institutional structure among others, along with fami-lies, marriages, churches, universities, and so forth. But there is a sense in which in most organized societies, the government is the ultimate institutional structure. Of course the power of governments varies enormously from liberal democracies to totalitarian states; but, all the same, governments have the power to regulate other institutional structures such as family, educa-tion, money, the economy generally, private property and even the church. Again, governments tend to be the most highly accepted system of status functions, rivaled by the family and the church. Indeed, one of the most stunning cultural developments of the past few centuries was the rise of the nation-state as the ultimate focus of collective loyalty in a society. People have, for example, been willing to fight and die for the United States, or Germany, or France, or Japan in a way that they would not be willing to fight and die for Kansas City or Vitry-le-François.

How do governments, so to speak, get away with it? That is, how does the government manage as a sys-tem of status function superior to other status func-tions? One of the keys, perhaps the most important key, is that typically governments have a monopoly on organized violence. Furthermore, because they have a monopoly on the police and the armed forces, they in effect have control of a territory in a way that corpo-


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rations, churches, and ski clubs do not control a ter-ritory. The combination of control of the land plus a monopoly on organized violence guarantees govern-ment the ultimate power role within competing sys-tems of status functions. The paradox of government could be put as follows: Governmental power is a sys-tem of status functions and thus rests on collective acceptance, but the collective acceptance, though not itself based on violence, can continue to function only if there is a permanent threat of violence in the form of the military and the police. Though military and police power are different from political power, there is no such thing as government, no such thing as political power, without police power and military power (more about this later).

The sense in which the government is the ultimate sys-tem of status functions is the sense that old-time politi-cal philosophers were trying to get at when they talked about sovereignty. I think the notion of sovereignty is a relatively confused notion because it implies transitiv-ity. But most systems of sovereignty, at least in demo-cratic societies, are not transitive. In a dictatorship, if A has power over B and B has power over C, then A has power over C, but that is not really true in a democracy. In the United States, there is a complex series of inter-locking constitutional arrangements between the three branches of government and between them and the citi-zenry. So the traditional notion of sovereignty may not be as useful as the traditional political philosophers had


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hoped it would be. Nonetheless, I think we will need a notion of the ultimate status function power in order to explain government.

Because I do not have a lot of space I am going to summarize some of the essential points about political power as a set of numbered propositions.

. All political power is a matter of status functions, and for that reason all political power is deontic power.

Deontic powers are rights, duties, obligations, autho-rizations, permissions, privileges, authority and the like. The power of the local party bosses and the village council as much as the power of such grander figures as presidents, prime ministers, the U.S. Congress, and the Supreme Court are all derived from the possession by these entities of recognized status functions. And these status functions assign deontic powers. Political power thus differs from military power, police power and the brute physical power that the strong have over the weak. An army that occupies a foreign country has power over its citizens but such power is based on brute physical force. Among the invaders there is a recognized system of status functions and thus there can be political relations within the army, but the rela-tion of the occupiers to the occupied is not political unless the occupied come to accept and recognize the validity of the status functions. To the extent that the


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victims accept the orders of the occupiers without accepting the validity of the status functions they act from fear and prudence. They act on reasons that are desire dependent.

I realize, of course, that all of these different forms of power—political, military, police, economic, and so on—interact and overlap in all sorts of ways. I do not suppose for a moment that there is a sharp dividing line, and I am not much concerned with the ordinary use of the word “political” as it is distinct from “economic” or “military”. The point I am making, however, is that there is a different logical structure to the ontology where the power is deontic from the cases where it is, for example, based on brute force or self-interest.

The form of motivation that goes with a system of accepted status functions is essential to our concept of the political, and I will say more about it shortly. Histor-ically, the awareness of its centrality was the underlying intuition that motivated the old Social Contract theo-rists. They thought that there is no way that we could have a system of political obligations, and indeed, no way we could have a political society, without some-thing like a promise, an original promise, that would create the deontic system necessary to maintain politi-cal reality.

2. Because all political power is a matter of status functions, all political power, though exercised from above, comes from below.


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Because the system of status functions requires collec-tive acceptance, all genuine political power comes from the bottom up. This is as much true in dictatorships as it is in democracies. Hitler and Stalin, for example, were both constantly obsessed by the need for security. They could never take the acceptance of their system of sta-tus functions for granted, as a given part of reality. It had to be constantly maintained by a massive system of rewards and punishments and by terror.

The single most stunning political event of the sec-ond half of the twentieth century was the collapse of communism. It collapsed when the structure of collec-tive intentionality was no longer able to maintain the system of status functions. On a smaller scale a similar collapse of status functions occurred with the abandon-ment of Apartheid in South Africa. In both cases, as far as I can tell, the key element in the collapse of the system of status functions was the withdrawal of accep-tance by large numbers of the people involved.

3. Even though the individual is the source of all political power, by his or her ability to engage in collective intentionality; all the same, the indi-vidual, typically, feels powerless.

The individual typically feels that the powers that be are not in any way dependent on him or her. This is why it is so important for revolutionaries to develop some kind of collective intentionality: class consciousness, identifi-


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cation with the proletariat, student solidarity, conscious-ness raising among women, or some such. Because the entire structure rests on collective intentionality its destruction can be attained by creating an alternative and inconsistent form of collective intentionality

I have so far been emphasizing the role of status func-tions and consequently of deontic powers in the consti-tution of social and political reality. But that naturally forces a question on us: How does it work? How does all this stuff about status functions and deontic powers work when it comes to voting in an election or paying my income taxes? How does it work in such a way as to provide motivations for actual human behavior? It is a unique characteristic of human beings that they can cre-ate and act on desire-independent reasons for action. As far as we know, not even the higher primates have this ability. This I believe is one of the keys to understanding political ontology. Human beings have the capacity to be motivated by desire-independent reasons for action. This leads to point number 4.

4. The system of political status functions works at least in part because recognized deontic powers provide desire-independent reasons for action.

Typically we think of desire-independent reasons for action as intentionally created by the agent, and promis-ing is simply the most famous case of this. But one of the keys to understanding political ontology and political


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power is to see that the entire system of status functions is a system of providing desire-independent reasons for action. The recognition by the agent, that is to say by the citizen of a political community, of a status function as valid gives the agent a desire-independent reason for doing something. Without this there is no such thing as organized political and institutional reality.

What we are trying to explain is the difference between humans and other social animals. The first step in explain-ing the difference is to identify institutional reality. Insti-tutional reality is a system of status functions, and those status functions always involve deontic powers. For example, the person who occupies an office near mine in Berkeley is the Chair of the Philosophy Department. But the status function of being Chair of the Department imposes rights and obligations that the occupant did not otherwise have. In such ways there is an essential con-nection between status function and deontic power. But, and this is the next key step, the recognition of a status function by a conscious agent such as me can give me reasons for acting, which are independent of my imme-diate desires. If my Chairman asks me to serve on a com-mittee then, if I recognize his position as Chairman, I have a reason for doing so, even if committees are boring and there are no penalties for my refusal.

More generally, if I have an obligation, for example, to meet someone at 9:00 A.M., I have a reason to do so, even if in the morning I do not feel like it. The fact that the obligation requires it gives me a reason to want to


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do it. Thus, in the case of human society, unlike ani-mal societies, reasons can motivate desires, instead of all reasons having to start with desires. The most obvi-ous example of this is promising. I promise something to you and thus create a desire-independent reason for doing it. But it is important to see that where political reality is concerned, we do not need to make or cre-ate desire-independent reasons for action explicitly, as when we make promises or undertake various other commitments. The simple recognition of a set of insti-tutional facts as valid, as binding on us, creates desire-independent reasons for action. To take an important contemporary example, after the year 2000 elections, many Americans did not want George W. Bush as Pres-ident, and some of them even thought he got the status function in an illegitimate fashion. But the important thing for the structure of deontic power in the United States is that with very few exceptions they continued to recognize his deontic powers and thus they recog-nized that they had reasons for doing things that they would not otherwise have a desire to do.

It is a consequence of what I am saying that, if I am right, not all political motivation is self-interested or prudential. You can see this by contrasting political and economic motivation. The logical relations between political and economic power are extremely complex: both the economic and the political systems are systems of status functions. The political system consists of the machinery of government, together with the attendant


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apparatus of political parties, interest groups, and the like. The economic system consists of the economic apparatus for creating, distributing, and sustaining the distribution of wealth. Though the logical structures are similar, the systems of rational motivations are inter-estingly different. Economic power is mostly a matter of being able to offer economic rewards, incentives, and penalties. The rich have more power than the poor because the poor want what the rich can pay them and thus will give the rich what they want. Political power is often like that, but not always. It is like that when the political leaders can exercise power only as long as they offer greater rewards. This has lead to any number of confused theories that try to treat political relations as having the same logical structure as economic relations. But such desire-based reasons for action, even when they are in a deontic system, are not deontological. The important point to emphasize is that the essence of political power is deontic power.

5. It is a consequence of the analysis so far that there is a distinction between political power and political leadership.

Roughly speaking, power is the ability to make people do something whether they want to do it or not. Lead-ership is the ability to make them want to do something they would not otherwise have wanted to do. Thus dif-ferent people occupying the same position of political


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power with the same official status functions may differ in their effectiveness because one is an effective leader and the other is not. They have the same official posi-tion of deontic power, but different effective positions of deontic power. Thus both Roosevelt and Carter had the same official deontic powers—both were presidents of the United States and leaders of the Democratic Party—but Roosevelt was far more effective because he maintained deontic powers in excess of his constitu-tionally assigned powers. The ability to do that is part of what constitutes political leadership. Furthermore, the effective leader can continue to exercise power and to maintain an informal status function even when he or she is out office.

6. Because political powers are matters of status functions they are, in large part, linguistically constituted.

I have said that political power is in general deontic power. It is a matter of rights, duties, obligations, autho-rizations, permissions and the like. Such powers have a special ontology. The fact that George W. Bush is Presi-dent has a different logical structure altogether from the fact that it is raining. The fact that it is raining consists of water drops falling out of the sky, together with facts about their meteorological history, but the fact that George W. Bush is president is not in that way a natural phenomenon. That fact is constituted by an extremely


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complex set of explicitly verbal phenomena. There is no way that fact can exist without language. The essential component in that fact is that people regard him and accept him as President, and consequently they accept a whole system of deontic powers that goes with that original acceptance. Status functions can only exist as long as they are represented as existing, and for them to be represented as existing there needs to be some means of representation, and that means is typically linguistic. Where political status functions are con-cerned it is almost invariably linguistic. It is important to emphasize that the content of the representation does not need to match the actual content of the logical structure of the deontic power. For example, in order for Bush to be President people do not have to think “We have imposed on him a status function according to the formula X counts as Y in C”, even though that is exactly what they have done. But they do have to be able to think something. For example, they typically think “He is President,” and such thoughts are sufficient to maintain the status function.

7. In order for a society to have a political reality it needs several other distinguishing features: First a distinction between the public and the private sphere with the political as part of the public sphere, second, the existence of nonviolent group conflicts and third, the group conflicts must be over social goods within a structure of deontology.


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I said I would suggest some of the differentia that dis-tinguish political facts from other sorts of social and institutional facts. But, with the important exception of the point about violence, the ontology I have given so far might also fit nonpolitical structures such as religions or organized sports. They too involve collective forms of sta-tus function and consequently collective forms of deontic powers. What is special about the concept of the political within these sorts of systems of deontic powers?

I am not endorsing any kind of essentialism, and the concept of the political is clearly a family resemblance concept. There is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that define the essence of the political. But there are, I believe, a number of typical distinguishing features. First, our concept of the political requires, I believe, a distinction between the public and private spheres, with politics as the paradigm public activity. Second, the concept of the political requires a concept of group conflict. But not just any group conflict is political. Organized sports involve group conflict, but they are not typically political. The essence of politi-cal conflict is that it is a conflict over social goods, and many of these social goods include deontic powers. So, for example, the right to abortion is a political issue because it involves a deontic power, the legal right of women to have their fetuses killed.

8. A monopoly on armed violence is an essential presupposition of government.


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As I suggested earlier, the paradox of the political is this: In order that the political system can function there has to be an acceptance of a set of status functions by a sufficient number of members of the group sharing collective intentionality. But, in general, in the political system that set of status functions can only work if it is backed by the threat of armed violence. This feature dis-tinguishes governments from churches, universities, ski clubs, and marching bands. The reason that the govern-ment can sustain itself as the ultimate system of status functions is that it maintains a constant threat of physical force. The miracle, so to speak, of democratic societies is that the system of status functions that constitutes the government has been able to exercise a control through deontic powers over the systems of status functions that constitute the military and the police. In societies where that collective acceptance ceases to work, as, for example, in the German Democratic Republic in 989, the government, as they say, collapses.

III. Conclusion

One way to get at the aim of this chapter is to say that it is an attempt to describe those features of human political reality that distinguish it from other sorts of collective animal behavior. The answer that I have pro-posed to this question proceeds by a number of steps. Humans are distinct from other animals in that they have a capacity to create not merely a social but an


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institutional reality. This institutional reality is, above all, a system of deontic powers. These deontic powers provide human agents with the fundamental key for organized human society: the capacity to create and act on desire-independent reasons for action.

Some of the distinguishing features of the political, within the system of desire independent reasons for action, are that the concept of the political requires a distinction between the public and the private spheres, with the political as the preeminent public sphere; it requires the existence of group conflicts settled by non-violent means, and it requires that the group conflict be over social goods. And the whole system has to be backed by a credible threat of armed violence. Govern-mental power is not the same as police power and mili-tary power, but with few exceptions, if no police and no army, then no government.


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Aristotle, 84Austin, J., 27

basic facts, 4

collective intentionality, 7; as biologically innate, 84–85; and class consciousness, 00–0

consciousness, definition, 5–6; as a basic fact, 5; as causally efficacious, 48–49, 67–68; as ontologically irreducible, 50; and its relation to neurobiol-ogy, 63–65

conscious robots, 65, 7

constitutive rules, 86–92; and regularized practices, 92; logi-cal form, 9

deontic powers, 35, 93Descartes, R., 26desire-independent reasons, 0;

and political ontology, 0–03determinism, arguments for,

43–44dualism, 2–22Durkheim, E., 85

Eccles, J., 2, 23epiphenomenalism, 66–70; and

counterfactuals, 69

INDEX

INDEX

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epistemic objectivity, 83epistemic subjectivity, 83

facts: brute, 87–88; institutional, 88–90; political, 07–08

fallacy of composition, 76free will: and determinism, 43;

as experience of alternative action, 4; as experience of the gap, 46; and illusion, 43; and the mind-body problem, 39–40; as a phenomenon of time, 65; the problem of, 0–, 37; and quantum indeterminism, 44

Frege, G., 2, 23, 30

gap, the, 46–55; and action expla-nations, 5–55; as experiential, 55; as linguistic, 55–56; and rational indeterminism, 74

government: and organized vio-lence, 96; as a system of status functions, 95–96

Habermas, J., 2Hume, D., 3, 33

imposition of function, 86–87intentionality, 6–7

judgment of Paris, 60–62

Kant, I., 43, 57

Kohler’s apes, 86

language, 8; as constitutive of facts, 93–95

materialism, 20Moore, G. E., 26

numbers, 25

observer-independent features, 82

observer-dependent features, 82ontological objectivity, 83ontological subjectivity, 83

Penrose, R., 2, 23Plato, 79political reality: as observer-

dependent, 83; as ontologically subjective, 83; possibility of, 8

political power, 3–34, 95–00, 04–05; and leadership, 04; as linguistically constituted, 05

Popper, K., 2, 23power, 95–00; and collective

acceptance, 00; deontic, 35, 93; political, 3–34, 95–00, 04–05

problem of universals, 25

quantum indeterminism, 44, 74–75; and randomness, 76;

INDEX

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and its relation to rationality, 75–76

Quine, W. V. O., 24

rationality: and intentionality, 8; and language, 9, 6

Rawls, J., 2, 4, 79reductionism, 20Russell, B., 26

self, 32–33, 55, 58, 72–73; and derivation of, 53; require-ments, 72–73

Simmel, G., 85Sperry, R., 48status functions, 34, 87; as

positive and negative pow-ers, 92

transcendental argument, 57trialism, 22–23

Wittgenstein, L., 26, 27, 56

Zeno’s paradox, 27–28

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