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John Searle (1932 – fl 2013) is an American philosopher of theory of language and of mind at UC Berkeley. Consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis, … and once you accept that, most though not all, problems simply evaporate.

John Searle

John Searle, philosopher of language and of mind

Source of Quotations: WikiQuote, GoodReads, BrainyQuotes, QuotesDictionary, MachinesLikeUs, TED,

Quotations from John Searle

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

2. Consciousness has to become accepted as a genuine biological phenomena as much subject to scientific analysis as any other phenomena in biology or for that matter the rest of science.

3. Consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis, … and once you accept that, most though not all, problems simply evaporate.

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

5. With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

6. It [writing] has enormous meta-cognitive implications. The power is this: That you cannot only think in ways that you could not possibly think if you did not have the written word, but you can now think about the thinking that you do with the written word. There is danger in this, and the danger is that the enormous expressive and self-referential capacities of the written word, that is, the capacities to keep referring to referring to referring, will reach a point where you lose contact with the real world. And this, believe me, is very common in universities. There’s a technical name for it, I don’t know if we can use it on television, it’s called “bullshit.” But this is very common in academic life, where people just get a form of self-referentiality of the language, where the language is talking about the language, which is talking about the language, and in the end, it’s hot air. That’s another name for the same phenomenon.

7. Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God’s existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

8. But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding?”

9. This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is no.

10. Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

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

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

13. In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

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

15. 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.

16. 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.

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

18. Berkeley had a liberal element in the student body who tended to be quite active. I think that’s in general a feature of intellectually active places.

19. 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.’

20. 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.

21. 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.

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

23. 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.

24. It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.

25. There is probably no more abused a term in the history of philosophy than “representation,” and my use of this term differs both from its use in traditional philosophy and from its use in contemporary cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence…. The sense of “representation” in question is meant to be entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts: the sense of “represent” in which a belief represents its conditions of satisfaction is the same sense in which a statement represents its conditions of satisfaction. To say that a belief is a representation is simply to say that it has a propositional content and a psychological mode.

26. 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 car or the stomach. Barring miracles, you could not run your car by doing a computer simulation of the oxidation of gasoline, and you could not digest pizza by running the program that simulates such digestion. It seems obvious that a simulation of cognition will similarly not produce the effects of the neurobiology of cognition.

27. The assertion fallacy … is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions.

28. In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

29. Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. (‘What else could it be?’) I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

30. 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, the lives of such people are made much easier than they had previously supposed, because now they don’t have to worry about an author’s intentions, about precisely what a text means, or about distinctions within a text between the metaphorical and the literal, or about the distinction between texts and the world because everything is just a free play of signifiers. The upper limit, and I believe the reductio ad absurdum, of this “sense of mastery” conveyed by deconstruction, is in Geoffrey Hartman’s claim that the prime creative task has now passed from the literary artist to the critic.

31. The assertion fallacy … is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions.

32. The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using “good” as our example. Calling something good is characteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of “good” is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation.

33. Well, what does “good” mean anyway…? As Wittgenstein suggested, “good,” like “game,” has a family of meanings. Prominent among them is this one: “meets the criteria or standards of assessment or evaluation.”

34. The United States is, after all, a product of the European Enlightenment. However, you do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others. Works from other cultural traditions need to be studied as well.

35. 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.

Probaway’s COMMENTS on quotations from John Searle

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. This might have been a common-sense statement until John Searle encountered the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who is the master at the befuddlement of his interlocutors. A classic goal of education was to instruct youth to be able to listen and speak, to read and write. 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. 

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. Once upon a time, that is most of my life hanging out in Berkeley coffee-shops, I spoke with a comic duplicity. I thought of it as humor, but in my more advanced age I suspect that my friends thought of it as a form of nastiness, what is now termed passive aggressive. That habit did lead me to always be on the lookout for obscure innuendos, and that did have a positive effect when doing research. I’m not very tolerant of typical conspiracy theories but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t conspiracies, it’s just that the popular ones are pursued by people with a bizarre agenda.

Consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis, … and once you accept that, most though not all, problems simply evaporate. So much of what John Searle says seems like material I have accepted from my earliest childhood, and why does it take a great genius speaking from the platform of a major university to be heard when stating the most mundane things?

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