John Searle Quotes

#1. 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.

John Searle

#2. 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.

John Searle

#3. Akrasia [weakness of will] in rational beings is as common as wine in France.

John Searle

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

John Searle

#5. 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.

John Searle

#6. 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.

John Searle

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

John Searle

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

John Searle

#9. 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.

John Searle

#10. Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.

John Searle

#11. How do we get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents?

John Searle

#12. 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.

John Searle

#13. Many people mistakenly suppose that the essence of consciousness is that of a control mechanism

John Searle

#14. Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

John Searle

#15. You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.

John Searle

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

John Searle

#17. An utterance can have Intentionality, just as a belief has Intentionality, but whereas the Intentionality of the belief is intrinsic the Intentionality of the utterance is derived.

John Searle

#18. You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.

John Searle

#19. 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.

John Searle

#20. 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.'

John Searle

#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.

John Searle

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

John Searle

#23. There is no success or failure in Nature.

John Searle

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

John Searle

#25. 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.

John Searle

#26. Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

John Searle

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

John Searle