John Searle Quotes on Knowledge
John Searle’s Speech Acts (1969), Intentionality (1983), and the late The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Mind, Language, and Society (1998) give late twentieth-century analytic philosophy of mind and language one of its most distinctive systematic projects. The central commitments — the analysis of meaning through illocutionary speech acts, the irreducibility of intentionality to its causal-functional simulations (the famous Chinese Room argument against strong AI), and the construction of institutional facts through collective intentionality and constitutive rules — articulate a non-reductive account of mental and social reality that resists both eliminative materialism and Cartesian dualism. The framework, drawing on Austin, Wittgenstein, and the broader Oxford ordinary-language tradition, shaped the analytic philosophy of language and the contemporary social ontology through Searle’s many students and the broader engagement with collective intentionality.
Quotes
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Attributed to John Searle:
“Syntax is not sufficient for semantics.”
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Attributed to John Searle:
“The Chinese Room shows that no formal program, by itself, is enough to constitute understanding.”
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“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)