“Individual Intentionality”

After his well-known study on Speech Acts, which stands in the tradition of Wittgenstein and Austin, Searle turned to the topic of Intentionality. According to the intersubjetivistic critics of this turn such as Apel and Habermas, he fell back on that former standpoint which had come under suspicion since Wittgenstein and Austin, and which his own speech act theory had helped to overcome; the focus of his thinking is now solitary consciousness. While Searle denies that there is any break between Speech Acts and Intentionality, Schmid suggests that Searle’s path from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind initially only skipped a middle link which he later delivered with his philosophy of the social. Consequently, Searle’s social ontology will decide whether he is able to parry his critics’ reproach of having given away the dimension of the intersubjective. I will argue, however, that a more fine-grade distinction needs to be made here: on one hand, Searle is indeed not able to parry the said reproach, but on the other hand he does not even attempt to do so. Despite or even because of his social ontology, Apel and Habermas are right in their assumption. The concept of the social is not a necessary condition for that of the mental, as can be seen in Searle’s view of individual intentionality, but conversely the concept of the mental is a necessary condition for that of the social. Schmid is therefore wrong; in Searle’s view, individual intentionality is solitary consciousness.