John Searle Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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

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

Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

There is no success or failure in Nature.

If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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