thesis

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outdated (1997, 50):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