John Searle Quotes
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Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.
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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 Intentionality of the utterance is derived.
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Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.
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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 word 'understanding.'
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Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly.
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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.'
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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.
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You need to know enough philosophy so that the methods of logical analysis are available to you to be used as a tool. One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.
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The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.
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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 philosophical ice is cut by such examples.
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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.
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I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is: consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis-you know all the biological phenomena-and once you accept that, most, if not all about the hard problems of consciousness simply evaporate.
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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.
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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 yourself.
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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.
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The sense in which an automatic door 'understands instructions' from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English.
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All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher level, or system features. It's about as mysterious as the liquidity of water, right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H
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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.
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You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.
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Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this: you cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. That's the first feature of consciousness, it's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions.
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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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Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.
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Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.
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The Intentionality of the mind not only creates the possibility of meaning, but limits its forms.