In “Professional Detachment: The Executioner of Paris,” I concluded with the cheap and some would say libelous suggestion that lawyers might accurately be described as serial liars, because they repeatedly try to induce others to believe in the truth of propositions or in the validity of arguments that they believe to be false. Good lawyers have responded with some indignation that, in calling zealous advocacy “lying,” I have misdescribed the practice of law. I wish to explain why I believe that (...) it is the practice of lawyering that engages in misdescription. (shrink)

Searle's (1990) argument for the seems to rest on a confusion between ontological and epistemological claims. The potential consciousness of a mental state does not yield the same effect as does its actual consciousness, namely, the preservation of aspectual shape. Searle's distinction between the consciousness of an intentional object and that of a mental state, which is meant to counter the objection that deep unconscious rules cease to be deep once they become conscious, fails to do its appointed task.

Searle (1990) argues that unconscious intrinsic intentional states must be accessible to consciousness because (1) all intrinsic intentional states have aspectual shape, the of which cannot be explained in a third-person (e.g., neurophysiological) vocabulary, and (2) ontologically, unconscious mental states are neurophysiological processes. This argument confuses three senses of namely, factuality, individuative properties, and phenomenological presence.