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12 quotes by John Searle

John Rogers Searle (/sɜrl/; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy 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 Berkeley in 1959. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000; the National Humanities Medal in 2004; and the Mind & Brain Prize in 2006. Among his...
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We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but... →

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

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

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

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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... →

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

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

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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... →

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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... →

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

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I want to block some common misunderstandings about 'understanding': In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the... →

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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... →

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