John Searle Quotes

John Searle on Justice

• “An utterance can have Intentionality, just as a belief has Intentionality, but whereas the Intentionality of the belief is intrinsic the Intentionality of the utterance is derived.”

  Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind(1983) | P. 27.

John Searle on Knowledge

• “The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.”

  Expression and Meaning , p. 31, Cambridge University Press (1979).

• “It is apparently very congenial for some people who are professionally concerned with fictional texts to be told that all texts are really fictional anyway, and that claims that fiction differs significantly from science and philosophy can be deconstructed as a logocentric prejudice, and it seems positively exhilarating to be told that what we call "reality" is just more textuality. Furthermore, t”

  The Word Turned Upside Down", The New York Review of Books , Volume 30, Number 16, October 27, 1983.

• “A statement of the author’s “connection principle.”

  The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.

• “Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.”

  The Rediscovery of the Mind , p. 97, MIT Press (1992) ISBN 0-262-69154-X .

• “Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can’t say it clearly you don’t understand it yourself .”

  Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind(1983) | P. x.

• “You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.”

  The Storm Over the University(December 6, 1990)

• “I want to block some common misunderstandings about "understanding": In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word "understanding."”

  Minds, Brains and Programs(1980)

• “I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.”

  Minds, Brains and Programs(1980)

• “My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.”

  Minds, Brains and Programs(1980)

• “The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English.”

  Minds, Brains and Programs(1980)

• “There are clear cases in which "understanding" literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply; and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.”

  Minds, Brains and Programs(1980)

• “We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.”

  Minds, Brains and Programs(1980)

• “I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is: consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis—you know all the biological phenomena—and once you accept that, most, if not all about the hard problems of consciousness simply evaporate.”

  "Our shared condition — consciousness" (May, 2013)

Read all John Searle quotes on Knowledge

John Searle on Life

• “Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.”

  Consciousness and Language (2002) p. 47.

John Searle on Mind

• Attributed to John Searle:

  “Syntax is not sufficient for semantics.”

• Attributed to John Searle:

  “There is a difference between simulating a phenomenon and duplicating it.”

• Attributed to John Searle:

  “Consciousness is a real biological phenomenon, not an illusion to be explained away.”

• Attributed to John Searle:

  “The Chinese Room shows that no formal program, by itself, is enough to constitute understanding.”

• “Is the Brain’s Mind a Computer Program?", Scientific American (January 1990).”

  One can imagine a computer simulation of the action of peptides in the hypothalamus that is accurate down to the last synapse. But equally one can imagine a computer simulation of the oxidation of hydrocarbons in a car engine or the action of digestive processes in a stomach when it is digesting pizza. And the simulation is no more the real thing in the case of the brain than it is in the case of

• “The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.”

  A statement of the author’s “connection principle. | Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 4 (December 1990): 585-696.

• “Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science," The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 4 (December 1990): 585-696.”

  The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.

• “The Intentionality of the mind not only creates the possibility of meaning, but limits its forms.”

  Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind(1983) | P. 166.

• “Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly .”

  The Storm Over the University(December 6, 1990)

Read all John Searle quotes on Mind

John Searle on Nature

• “Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.”

  Minds, Brains and Programs(1980)

John Searle on Politics

• Attributed to John Searle:

  “Money is whatever we collectively count as money.”