🚀 go-pugleaf

csa33@keele.ac.uk (H.S. Nwana) writes:

>Mentioning the name Searle seems to provoke so much bashing.

>We all know these arguments will go on and on. Perhaps spelling 
>out the implications of whatever belief/view we hold will be of more use.

I want to agree strongly with these last two thoughts.  I am strongly
persuasded by Benson Mates in his book Skeptical Essays that not only
will these arguments go on and on, but indeed they MUST because they
are philosophically intrinsically intractible, in the same way as the
Liar's Paradox IS a paradox.

Given that then I believe that ALL we seem able to do is "spell out
the implications" of one or another belief.  Now, that may seem 
too annoying to us to be working on things so fundamentally based
in belief; it doesn't look like science or like intellectual inquiry.
So, let's use the word axiom rather than belief, and perhaps that
will let us all pretend to be happy.

I happen to find working from Searle's axioms to be useful, interesting 
and satisfying, but then again I am a Dewey-based pragmatist.

--the ol' professor