John Searle b. 1932
John Searle (born 1932) is an American philosopher of the Contemporary era, associated with Analytic Philosophy.
John Searle is an American philosopher long associated with the University of California, Berkeley, whose work has shaped the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. Speech Acts and Expression and Meaning developed a systematic account of speech-act theory inherited from his teacher J. L. Austin, while The Construction of Social Reality offered a philosophical theory of institutional facts grounded in collective intentionality and constitutive rules. His 1980 paper Minds, Brains, and Programs introduced the Chinese Room argument against the strong artificial intelligence claim that running the right program is sufficient for thought.
John Rogers Searle was born at Denver, Colorado, in July 1932. He took his bachelor's at the University of Wisconsin and went up to Christ Church, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1952, where he studied under J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson, took the BA in 1955, the MA, and a DPhil in 1959 with a thesis on sense and reference. After three years as a lecturer at Christ Church, he moved in 1959 to the University of California, Berkeley, where he became Slusser Professor of Philosophy and remained for the rest of his career; the title of Professor Emeritus was revoked in 2019 following a campus finding of sexual misconduct.
His books include Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), Expression and Meaning (1979), Intentionality (1983), Minds, Brains and Science (1984, the Reith Lectures), The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), The Construction of Social Reality (1995), Mind, Language and Society (1998), Rationality in Action (2001), Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004), Making the Social World (2010), and Seeing Things as They Are (2015).
Searle developed Austin's speech-act theory into a systematic taxonomy of illocutionary acts, including the indirect speech acts; his 1980 Chinese Room argument became the most discussed objection to strong artificial intelligence, contending that syntactic manipulation alone cannot constitute genuine understanding. His later work elaborated a 'biological naturalism' on which consciousness is a higher-level biological feature of the brain and an ambitious account of social ontology in terms of collective intentionality and status functions enacted by declarations.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic Philosophy
Selected quotes
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Attributed to John Searle:
“Syntax is not sufficient for semantics.”
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Attributed to John Searle:
“Money is whatever we collectively count as money.”
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Attributed to John Searle:
“There is a difference between simulating a phenomenon and duplicating it.”
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Attributed to John Searle:
“Consciousness is a real biological phenomenon, not an illusion to be explained away.”
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Attributed to John Searle:
“The Chinese Room shows that no formal program, by itself, is enough to constitute understanding.”
John Searle by topic
Frequently asked about John Searle
- When was John Searle born?
- John Searle was born in 1932.
- Where was John Searle from?
- John Searle is an American philosopher of the Contemporary era.
- What philosophical movements is John Searle associated with?
- John Searle is associated with Analytic Philosophy.
- What is John Searle known for?
- John Searle is an American philosopher long associated with the University of California, Berkeley, whose work has shaped the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind.
- How many quotes are attributed to John Searle?
- There are 26 attributed quotations from John Searle in the 1001Philosophers collection, organized by topic.