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thesis
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nothing is proven about whatever actual property is referred to by those concepts. In a review<br />
of The Conscious Mind, Levine says (1998, 878):<br />
The problem… lies with a crucial assumption that is not adequately defended; namely, that<br />
competence with a concept automatically affords us a priori access to a description of its pri-<br />
mary intension (or, better, the properties that determine its primary intension).<br />
However, the possibility is considered by Chalmers. He only demands that, should we<br />
embrace it, we face the metaphysical consequences (129):<br />
I should also note that although I call the view a variety of dualism, it is possible that it could<br />
turn out to be a kind of monism. Perhaps the physical and the phenomenal will turn out to be<br />
two different aspects of a single encompassing kind, in something like the way that matter and<br />
energy turn out to be two aspects of a single kind. Nothing that I have said rules this out, and<br />
in fact I have some sympathy with the idea. But it remains the case that if a variety of monism<br />
is true, it cannot be a materialist monism. It must be something broader.<br />
In an ever stronger objection, Searle insists that the entire framework for the debate is<br />
outdated (1997, 50):<br />
Where the mind is concerned, we have inherited a Cartesian vocabulary and with it a set of<br />
categories that include “dualism,” “monism,” “materialism,” and all the rest of it. If you take<br />
these categories seriously, if you think our questions have to be asked and answered in those<br />
terms, and if you also accept modern science (is there a choice?), I believe you will eventually<br />
be forced to some version of materialism. But materialism in its traditional forms is more or<br />
less obviously false, above all in its failure to account for consciousness.<br />
One could summarise our metaphysical vocabulary’s aetiology as follows: in the begin-<br />
ning, there was animism and the Aristotelian ‘dualism’ of matter and form. When the search<br />
for law-like objective scientific principles took off, we formed a view of the world that ex-<br />
cluded subjective entities. But the self was clearly left out so a dualism of the mental and the<br />
physical ensued. Then, a failure to make scientific sense of this dualism led naturalists to<br />
monism. And since the science of the physical world is so well understood, a materialist<br />
monism was adopted. But now that we face the problem of consciousness, Searle suggests<br />
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