This chapter is concerned with the ontology of a certain class of social entities and the role of language in the creation and maintenance of such entities. The social entities I have in mind are such objects as the $20 bill in my hand, The University of California, and the President of the United States. I also include such facts as that Barack Obama is President of the United States; that the piece of paper I hold in my hand is a $20 bill; and that I am a citizen of the United States. I call such facts “institutional facts,” and it will emerge that the facts are logically prior to the objects (because the object is only institutional if it is created by a certain linguistic operation that creates an institutional fact). Under the concept of social entity, I also mean to include such institutions as money, property, government, and marriage. I believe that where the social sciences are concerned, social ontology is prior to methodology and theory. It is prior in the sense that unless you have a clear conception of the nature of the phenomena you are investigating, you are unlikely to develop the right methodology and the right theoretical apparatus for conducting the investigation.

I have also a polemical aim for wishing to discuss social ontology and that is that I believe we have a long tradition, going back to the ancient Greeks, of misconstruing the role of language in the creation and constitution of social and political reality.

DIFFERENT WAYS OF CONSTRUING THE TURING TEST

In spite of the fact that Turing's original article (Turing, 1950) is written in very clear and direct prose, there are a number of different ways to interpret the claims made in it. I am not, in this article, going to discuss what I think Turing's actual intentions were, but instead I will focus on three different ways of construing the results of the Turing Test that have been prominent in its application. I will assume for the sake of this article that the test itself is unambiguous. My discussion concerns the question: How do we interpret a positive result? On one natural construal, the test gives us a way of telling whether or not we have successfully simulated some human cognitive capacity, some human form of intelligent behavior that manifests thinking. If the machine can perform in such a way that an expert cannot distinguish the performance of the machine from the performance of a competent human, then the machine has successfully simulated the intelligent behavior of the human. Indeed, if our aim in Artificial Intelligence is to produce machines that can successfully simulate human intelligence then the Turing Test gives us a criterion for judging our own success and failure. I do not see how one could object to such a test. If the question is whether we have actually simulated, i.e., imitated, human behavior then, so construed, the Turing Test seems trivially right: If you can’t tell the difference between the original and the imitation, then the imitation is a successful imitation.

This article deals with an issue that much concerned Hans Kelsen, the “is”–“ought” distinction. It is a fragment of a much larger work I am preparing on the subject of rationality.

A number of binary distinctions are central to our philosophical tradition. One thinks of the distinctions between truth and falsity, good and evil, reality and illusion, freedom and determinism, mind and body, and fact and value. Sometimes the belief in these distinctions creates problems because it seems that the acceptance of a certain standard conception of one of the terms of the distinction rules out the possibility of anything satisfying the other term. I will illustrate this apparent difficulty with three examples: mind and body, freedom and determinism, and fact and value. The corresponding problems can be stated as follows: How can there be irreducible mental phenomena in a universe that consists entirely of non-mental material phenomena? How can there be events that are free human actions, and thus are events not caused by antecedent events, in a universe in which every event is caused by antecedent events? How can there be objective values binding on all rational agents in a world in which all objectivity is factual objectivity and in which values are not factual?

As formulated, none of these questions is answerable. That is, in each case the answer has to be: there can't be anything satisfying the conditions set by the phrasing of the question, because the phrasing of the question would make the hypothesis of the existence of any such phenomenon self-contradictory.

General ruminations on the state and future of philosophy often produce superficiality and intellectual self-indulgence. Furthermore, an arbitrary blip on the calendar, the beginning of a new century, would not seem sufficient, by itself, to override a general presumption against engaging in such ruminations. However, I am going to take the risk of saying some things about the current and future state of philosophy, even though I think it is a serious risk. A number of important overall changes in the subject have occurred in my lifetime and I want to discuss their significance and the possibilities they raise for the future of the subject.

PHILOSOPHY AND KNOWLEDGE

The central intellectual fact of the present era is that knowledge grows. It grows daily and cumulatively. We know more than our grandparents did; our children will know more than we do.

We now have a huge accumulation of knowledge which is certain, objective, and universal, in a sense of these words that I will shortly explain. This growth of knowledge is quietly producing a transformation of philosophy.

The modern era in philosophy, begun by Descartes, Bacon, and others in the seventeenth century, was based on a premise which has now become obsolete. The premise was that the very existence of knowledge was in question and that therefore the main task of the philosopher was to cope with the problem of skepticism.

I have argued in a number of writings that the philosophical part (though not the neurobiological part) of the traditional mind-body problem has a fairly simple and obvious solution: all of our mental phenomena are caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the brain and are themselves realized in the brain as higher-level, or system, features. The form of causation is “bottom up,” whereby the behaviour of lower-level elements, presumably neurons and synapses, causes the higher-level or system features of consciousness and intentionality. (This form of causation, by the way, is common in nature; for example, the higher-level feature of solidity is causally explained by the behaviour of the lower-level elements, the molecules.) Because this view emphasizes the biological character of the mental, and because it treats mental phenomena as ordinary parts of nature, I have labelled it “biological naturalism.”

To many people biological naturalism looks a lot like property dualism. Because I believe property dualism is mistaken, I would like to try to clarify the differences between the two accounts and try to expose the weaknesses in property dualism. This short paper then has the two subjects expressed by the double meanings in its title: why my views are not the same as property dualism, and why I find property dualism unacceptable.

I was asked to lecture at the Wittgenstein conference in Kirchberg in 2004 on the subject of phenomenology. This request surprised me somewhat because I am certainly not a scholar on the writings of phenomenological philosophers, nor have I done much work that I consider phenomenological in any strict sense. However, I was glad to accept the invitation because I have had some peculiar experiences with phenomenology. Also, it seemed worth discussing this issue at a Wittgenstein conference because the recent revival of interest in consciousness among analytic philosophers has lead to a renewed interest in phenomenological authors, since, of course, phenomenology is in large part concerned with consciousness.

I presented a lecture on the subject, the general thesis of which was that there is a type of idealism present in some of the leading phenomenologists, specifically later Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. It is idealism of a specific kind that I tried to define semantically – somewhat different from the traditional idealism of Berkeley, which is defined metaphysically, but close enough in family resemblance to the traditional conceptions of idealism to merit the term. The definition I used was this: A view is idealist in this semantic sense if it does not allow for irreducibly de re references to objects. All references to objects are interpreted as being within the scope of some phenomenological operator, such as Dasein or transcendental consciousness.