Naturalist fundamental ontology of John Searle

Searle’s fundamental ontology is a position of a scientific naturalist representative: for Searle the world is not only a substance that exists independently from our representations, but the world, in his opinion, fits the picture of the world of natural science. Searle’s commitment to scientific naturalism is fundamental in the sense that this naturalistic fundamental ontology defines what should be considered as a philosophical problem. The mind for Searle is a biological phenomenon, a feature of the physical world that can be described by natural sciences. These two assumptions add new color to the traditional philosophical problem of the mind, the problem of how to reconcile the subjective nature of mind with the objective nature of the physical world in the light of studies of natural sciences. From the standpoint of a scientific naturalist, our fundamental view of the world and how it is described by natural sciences is largely correct, even if there is some disagreement about the details.

Searle, fundamental ontology, scientific naturalism, mind, biological phenomenon, the first-class aspect, cognitive science, materialistic concepts, problem of location, reality