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.

The purpose of this lecture is to explain the structure of human action. I need to do that for several

reasons. I need to show how the nature of action is consistent with

my account of the mind-body problem and my rejection of artificial intelligence, both of which I

discussed in earlier lectures. I need to explain the mental component of action and show how it

relates to the physical component. I need to show how the structure of action relates to the explanation of action,

and I need to lay a foundation for the discussion of the nature of the social sciences and the

possibility of the freedom of the will, both of which I'll discuss in my last two lectures.

I hope in the end that what I say will seem like a common sense account of the structure of

action. If I'm right, what I say should seem obviously right. But as usual, common sense is not

simple. In fact, it is remarkably complicated. And historically, what I think of as the

common sense account of action has not seemed obvious. For one thing,

the behaviorist tradition in philosophy and psychology has led many people to neglect the mental

component of actions. Behaviorists wanted to define actions and indeed all of our mental

life in terms of sheer physical movements. Somebody once characterized the behaviorist approach,

justifiably, in my view, as feigning anesthesia. The opposite extreme in philosophy has been to say

that the only acts we ever perform are inner mental acts of volition. On this view, we don't, strictly speaking, ever raise our arms.

All we do is volit that our arms go up. If they do go up, well, that's so much good luck,

but not really our action. Another problem is that until recently, the philosophy of action

was a somewhat neglected subject.

The Western tradition has persistently emphasized knowing as more important than doing.

...