This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Minds, Brains and Science, given by John Searle, was originally broadcast in 1984.

In this lecture, I want to discuss one of the most vexing intellectual problems of the present era.

Why have the methods of the natural sciences not given us the kind of payoff in the study of

human behavior that they have in subjects like physics and chemistry? And what sort of social or

behavioral sciences can we reasonably expect anyhow? I'm going to suggest that there are certain

radical differences between human behavior and the phenomena

studied in the natural sciences. And I'll argue that these differences account both for the

failures and the successes that the methods of the natural sciences have had in the human sciences.

At the beginning, I want to call your attention to an important difference between the form

of common sense explanations of human behavior

and the standard form of scientific explanations.

According to the standard theory of scientific explanation,

explaining a phenomenon consists in showing

how its occurrence follows from certain scientific laws.

These laws are universal generalizations about

how things happen. For example, if you are given a statement of the relevant laws describing

the behavior of a falling body, and you know where it started from, you can actually deduce

what will happen to it. Similarly, if you want to explain a law, you can deduce the law

from some higher level law. On this account, explanation and prediction are perfectly symmetrical.

You predict by deducing what will happen, you explain by deducing what has happened.

Now, whatever merit this type of explanation may have in the

...