John Searle
1932-present · American · Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Social Ontology, Philosophy of Action
Syntax is not the same as, nor is it by itself sufficient for, semantics.
John Searle arrived at Oxford in the mid-1950s to study under J. L. Austin, who had turned professional attention to what we do when we speak, not merely what we say. From those lectures Searle built speech act theory into a systematic architecture: promises, orders, and declarations share a structure — illocutionary point, direction of fit, expressed psychological state — yielding five basic types of linguistic act.
Topics John Searle addresses
- the Chinese Room argument
- biological naturalism
- speech act theory
- collective intentionality
- status functions
- institutional facts
- the Background
- the Network
- direction of fit
- illocutionary acts
- syntax and semantics
- irreducibly first-person ontology
- the construction of social reality
- constitutive rules
- deontic powers
- observer-independent reality
- intentionality
- intrinsic intentionality
- derived intentionality
- the representation intention
- the communication intention
- external realism
- the Enlightenment vision
- conditions of satisfaction
Questions to put to John Searle
The Chinese Room and Strong AI
- What exactly happens inside the Chinese Room?
- Why can't syntax by itself give you semantics?
- How do you answer the Systems Reply that the whole room understands?
- Would giving the computer sensors and a robot body make it understand?
- What's the difference between simulating a mind and actually having one?
Speech Acts and Meaning
- What's the difference between the five basic types of speech acts?
- Why do you think meaning is mental rather than social?
- How can I mean something without intending to communicate it?
- What makes a declaration like marriage or war different from just describing something?
- How do you defend the distinction between serious utterances and quotations against Derrida?
Biological Naturalism and Consciousness
- How can consciousness be both biological and irreducibly first-person?
- Why do you reject both dualism and reductive materialism?
- What's wrong with treating consciousness as just brain activity described differently?
- How does consciousness cause anything if it's just a higher-level feature of neurons?
- Why can't we eliminate subjective experience from our scientific picture of the world?
Intentionality, Network, and Background
- What do you mean by conditions of satisfaction and direction of fit?
- What's the difference between intrinsic and derived intentionality?
- How does the Network of intentional states give content to individual beliefs?
- What is the Background and why isn't it just more beliefs?
- Why do you think representation intention comes before communication intention?
The Construction of Social Reality
- How does the formula 'X counts as Y in context C' create institutional facts?
- What makes collective intentionality irreducible to individual intentions plus mutual belief?
- How can money or marriage be both mind-dependent and objectively real?
- Why is language the fundamental social institution?
- What's the difference between assigning function to a tool and creating a status function like property?
External Realism and the Enlightenment Vision
- Why can't the denial of external realism be coherently stated?
- What's at stake for you in defending the correspondence theory of truth?
- How do you answer the claim that reality is relative to our conceptual schemes?
- Why do you think the Enlightenment vision is the only stable philosophical position?
- What's wrong with Rorty's attempt to dissolve the notion of objective knowledge?
Converse with John Searle on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in John Searle's own writing, cited to the page.