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John Rogers Searle (was born 31 July 1932) is an American philosopher. He was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy, he began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959.

As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Searle was secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". He received all his university degrees, BA, MA, and DPhil, from the University of Oxford, where he held his first faculty positions.

In 2000 Searle received the Jean Nicod Prize; in 2004, the National Humanities Medal; and in 2006, the Mind & Brain Prize. Searle's early work on speech acts, influenced by J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, helped establish his reputation. His notable concepts include the "Chinese room" argument against "strong" artificial intelligence.

Philosophical work

Speech acts

The early period of D. Searle's scientific activity was associated with the theory of speech acts, put forward by his teacher, J. S. Serle. Austin.

In 1969, Searle's first and most famous work in the field, “What is a speech act”, was published. (“What is a Speech Act?”, 1969, TRANS. 1986). In it he often refers to his teacher and clarifies the very definition of a speech act. According to the scientist, the main root of all problems is the problem of everyday language. It is the Central problem of his work. First of all, the illocutionary act-the production (speech act) of a particular sentence under certain conditions, is called by Searle the minimum unit of language communication. D. Searle says that the Commission of an illocutionary speech act refers to those forms of behavior that are governed by rules, and therefore, when formulating the conditions and rules for at least one such act, a model for the analysis of other types of acts and the possibility of explication of the concept of a speech act in General will become available.

The scientist divides all kinds of rules into two groups - regulatory and constitutive. The former has the form of an imperative or have an imperative paraphrase, an example of them are the rules of etiquette: "Using a knife while eating, hold it in your right hand." Constitutive rules take a very different form. Such rules, as it were, define what they refer to and contain a tautology, thus defining what is said. And it is this tautology that is such a sign that the rule can be attributed to the type of constitutive. In some cases, rules of this kind can act as rules, and in others, as analytical truth. D. Searle says that one of the goals of his work is to formulate a set of constitutive rules for one type of speech acts, thus trying to prove the hypothesis that the basis of speech acts are the rules of the constitutive form. Eventually he comes to the conclusion that the semantics of a language is a system of constitutive rules and that illocutionary acts are performed by means of constitutive rules.

Searle's early work, which did a great deal to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues – including J. L. Austin (the "illocutionary act", from HowTo Do Things with Words), Ludwig Wittgenstein and G.C.J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules) – with his own thesis that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), Hare and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), P. F. Strawson, John Rawls and William Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act; (b) means what one says; and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity.

In his 1969 book Speech Acts, Searle sets out to combine all these elements to give his account of illocutionary acts. There he provides an analysis of what he considers the prototypical illocutionary act of promising and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further illocutionary act types. Among the concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the "illocutionary force" and the "propositional content" of an utterance. Searle does not precisely define the former as such, but rather introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences...

Sam smokes habitually.

Does Sam smoke habitually?

Sam, smoke habitually!

Would that Sam smoked habitually!

...each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (respectively, a statement, a question, a command and an expression of desire).

According to a later account, which Searle presents in Intentionality (1983) and which differs in important ways from the one suggested in Speech Acts, illocutionary acts are characterised by their having "conditions of satisfaction" (an idea adopted from Strawson's 1971 paper "Meaning and Truth") and a "direction of fit" (an idea adopted from Austin and Elizabeth Anscombe). For example, the statement "John bought two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if it is true, i.e. John did buy two candy bars. By contrast, the command "John, buy two candy bars!" is satisfied if and only if John carries out the action of purchasing two candy bars. 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. (There is also the double direction of fit, in which the relationship goes both ways, and the null or zero direction of fit, in which it goes neither way because the propositional content is presupposed, as in "I'm sorry I ate John's candy bars.")

In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985, with Daniel Vanderveken), Searle prominently uses the notion of the "illocutionary point".

Searle's speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers in a variety of ways. Collections of articles referring to Searle's account are found in Burkhardt 1990 and Lepore / van Gulick 1991.

References

John Searle on mind, matter, consciousness and his theory of perception – Interview on the 7th Avenue Project radio show

Conversations with Searle.

Interview in Conversations with History series. Available in webcast and 

podcast.

Video or transcript of an interview with John Searle on language, writing, mind, and consciousness

John Searle on IMDb

Webcast of Philosophy of Society lectures

The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with John Searle 2011-06-13

BBC Reith Audio Lectures – John Searle: Minds, Brain & Science (1984)

Searle's May 2013 TED talk, "Our shared condition – consciousness"

Figure/Ground interview with John Searle. November 19th, 2012