John Searle Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of John Searle's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Philosopher John Searle's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 36 quotes on this page collected since July 31, 1932! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
All quotes by John Searle: Cars Computers Consciousness Understanding more...
  • 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.

    "Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language". Book by John Searle, 1969.
  • Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.

    "The Rediscovery of the Mind". Book by John Searle, 1992.
  • You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.

  • 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". Book by John Searle, 1980.
  • I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.

    Car   Machines   Arguing  
    "Minds, Brains and Programs". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980.
  • Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The illusion could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purpose at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation required the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality

  • "Akrasia" [weakness of will] in rational beings is as common as wine in France.

    Wine   Weakness   France  
    "Rationality in Action". Book by John Searle, 2001.
  • 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.

    "Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language". Book by John Searle, 1969.
  • It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.

  • 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.

    Dog   Baby   Believe  
    "Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind". Book by John Searle, 1983.
  • Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

    "Consciousness and Language". Book by John Searle, 2002.
  • Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.

    "Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language". Book by John Searle, 1969.
  • In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on.

    "Minds, Brains and Programs". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980.
  • 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...Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill...At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

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

    Car   Machines   Lines  
    "Minds, Brains and Programs". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980.
  • 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."

    Mean   Assessment   Games  
    "Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language". Book by John Searle, 1969.
  • 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.

    Mean   Speech   Problem  
    "Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts". Book by John Searle, 1979.
  • If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself

    Ifs  
    John Searle (2010). “Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization”, p.8, Oxford University Press
  • 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.

    Simple   Style   Trying  
    "Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind". Book by John Searle, 1983.
  • How do we get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents?

    John Searle (2010). “Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization”, p.12, Oxford University Press
  • 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.

    "Professor recalls pros, cons of Free Speech Movement". Interview with Meriah Doty, www.cnn.com. January 9, 2004.
  • The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.

    "Consciousness, Explanatory Inversion, and Cognitive Science". The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13, 4, December 1990.
  • 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". Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 1980.
  • The Intentionality of the mind not only creates the possibility of meaning, but limits its forms.

    "Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind". Book by John Searle, 1983.
  • The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

    Mind   Computer   Reason  
    "Minds, Brains and Science". Book by John R. Searle, 1984.
  • You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.

    "The Storm Over the University". The New York Review of Books, www.ditext.com. December 06, 1990.
  • There is no success or failure in Nature.

  • Many people mistakenly suppose that the essence of consciousness is that of a control mechanism

  • We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.

  • 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.

    Matter   Taste   Abstract  
Page 1 of 2
  • 1
  • 2
  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 36 quotes from the Philosopher John Searle, starting from July 31, 1932! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
    John Searle quotes about: Cars Computers Consciousness Understanding