32 Facts About John Searle

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy.

John Searle received all his university degrees, BA, MA, and DPhil, from the University of Oxford, where he held his first faculty positions.

John Searle was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010.

John Searle called for the realization that the United States is in a more-or-less permanent state of war with these forces.

John Searle has five honorary-doctorate degrees from four countries and is an honorary visiting professor at Tsing Hua University and at East China Normal University.

John Searle refers to the first as having the "word-to-world" direction of fit, since the words are supposed to change to accurately represent the world, and the second as having the "world-to-word" direction of fit, since the world is supposed to change to match the words.

In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, John Searle prominently uses the notion of the "illocutionary point".

In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, John Searle applies the principles of his account of illocutionary acts to the investigation of intentionality, which is central to John Searle's "Philosophy of Mind".

For John Searle, intentionality is exclusively mental, being the power of minds to represent or symbolize over, things, properties and states of affairs in the external world.

John Searle introduces a technical term the Background, which, according to him, has been the source of much philosophical discussion.

John Searle calls Background the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have that are not themselves intentional states but that generate appropriate such states on demand.

John Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because "a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the speech act".

For John Searle, ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for attributing it any meaning at all.

John Searle argues that, starting with behaviorism, an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle dismisses, much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success.

John Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that, on one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience.

John Searle says simply that both are true: consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain.

John Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who he claims insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error.

John Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality".

John Searle thereby means to contradict what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.

In 1980, John Searle presented the "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI.

John Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire.

Since they do not exist at a physical level, John Searle argues, they cannot have causal efficacy and thus cannot cause consciousness.

John Searle extended his inquiries into observer-relative phenomena by trying to understand social reality.

John Searle's ideas are thus open to the same criticisms as Durkheim's.

Lawson emphasizes the notion of social totality whereas John Searle prefers to refer to institutional facts.

Furthermore, John Searle believes that emergence implies causal reduction whereas Lawson argues that social totalities cannot be completely explained by the causal powers of their components.

In Rationality in Action, John Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed.

John Searle insists he would never take such a bet and believes that this stance is perfectly rational.

John Searle thinks that whether one really has free will or not is an open question, but considers its absence highly unappealing because it makes the feeling of freedom of will an epiphenomenon, which is highly unlikely from the evolutionary point of view given its biological cost.

Second, John Searle believes that people can rationally do things that do not result from their own desires.

For example, John Searle believes that the promise of doing something means that one must do it, because by making the promise one participates in the constitutive rules that arrange the system of promise-making itself; a "shouldness" is implicit in the mere factual action of promising.

Third, John Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting patterns of desires, which are often inconsistent, to decide between outcomes, not the other way around.