Searle as a Closet Dualist ?

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Sometimes, you think you know an author. And then you wonder.

Take John Searle. There is nothing ambiguous about his monism: that mental stuff like intentionality is a physical phenomenon is of utmost evidence. The only reason why we talk about it is that previous philosophers have been arguing about it for the last few millenia (to be fair, Searle stops at Descartes). If we didn't, then we'd see the light without problem. In "Intentionality and its place in nature", 

"One group of philosophers sees  itself as defending the progress of science against residual superstitions.  The other group sees itself as asserting obvious facts that any moment  of introspection will reveal. But both accept the assumption that naive mentalism and naive physicalism must be inconsistent. Both accept the assumption that a purely physical description of the world could not mention any mental entities." p.9

But then, he goes on to say that mental stuff and physical stuff beg for different explanations:

"In  any  causal  explanation,  the  propositional  content  of  the  explanation specifies a cause. But in intentional explanations the cause  specified is itself an intentional state with its own propositional content."

As a matter of fact, he claims that intentional explanations have very specific features. For instance, they repeat the explanandum. Why did I go to Rome? Because I wanted to go to Rome. Furthermore, they generally aren't covered by laws (in the scientific sense) and they frequently take final causes (the end) as complete explanans.

"These features have no analogue in the standard physical sciences. If I explain the rate of acceleration of  a falling body in terms of gravitational attraction together with such other forces  as  friction  operating  on  the  body,  the  propositional  content  of  my explanation  makes reference to features of the event such as gravity and friction,  but the features themselves are  not propositional contents or parts of propositional contents."

Ok, let's repeat this. Intentional and mental stuff is real. It has causal powers. But the explanations that account for them are radically different.

Let's consider again this other sentence he said on p.9: "Both accept the assumption that a purely physical description of the world could not mention any mental entities." Would a purely physical description of the world be made of purely physical explanations? One would expect so. So we could call Searle's description of the world, with intentionality, "not purely physical".

Of course, he could claim that he accounts for intentionality in a way which puts it in the causal loop. But the causality, it seems, is different, since it requires a description of a different kind, which physical sciences would never accept. Descartes—dualism incarnated to Searle—also accounted for a form of causality in his res cogitans, although, just like Searle's, it was of a particular kind.

Anyway, I rest my case. From this article, Searle's a closet dualist.