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This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia\'s quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (February 2008) |
| Western Philosophy Contemporary philosophy | |
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| Name | John Rogers Searle |
| Birth | July 31, 1932 (age 75) |
| School/tradition | Analytic |
| Main interests | Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Intentionality · Social reality |
| Notable ideas | Speech acts · Chinese room |
| Influenced by | J.L. Austin · Ludwig Wittgenstein Gottlob Frege · P.F. Strawson Bertrand Russell |
John Rogers Searle (born July 31 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). He is widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, and also for his account of social reality. He was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and the Jovellanos Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004.
Searle was also the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He later published a book on that period of campus unrest, The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look At the University in Agony (1971).
He frequently comments on philosophical and political topics for the New York Review of Books. His reviews on the topic of consciousness were collected as The Mystery of Consciousness (1997).
Searle was educated at Christ Church, Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. He often publishes under the name "J. R. Searle."
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Searle\'s early work, which to a great extent established his reputation as an estimable philosopher, was on speech acts. It built upon the efforts of his Oxford teachers J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson. In particular Searle\'s Speech Acts sets out to take up and develop Austin\'s account of illocutionary acts, as exposed in How To Do Things with Words.
According to Searle\'s original account in Speech Acts (1969), the core of which is an analysis of promising, illocutionary acts consist of an illocutionary force (the kind of illocutionary act the utterance constitutes, or the mode in which a given proposition is presented) and a propositional content (a propositional specification of the act, or the mode). Thus in Searle\'s analysis the sentences (Searle 1969, 22)
each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (a statement, a question, a command and an expression of desire, respectively).
In 1969, Searle does not provide any definition of the technical term "illocutionary force", nor of the technical notion of an "illocutionary act". (He does try to give a definition of both notions later, in Searle and Vanderveken 1985, but the account he and Vanderveken defend there is remarkedly different.) For this reason, the account does not support any scholarly answer to such a question as to whether answering a question, or expressing love, or cursing actually are illocutionary acts or not, and if (not) so, why (not).
According to Searle\'s later account presented in Intentionality (1983), which differs in several fundamental ways from the one suggested in Speech Acts, illocutionary acts are characterised by their having conditions of satisfaction and a direction of fit. 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.)
Searle\'s speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers, and in a variety of ways. A wide-ranging critique is in F C Doerge Illocutionary Acts.Doerge (Friedrich Christoph), Illocutionary Acts - Austin\'s Account and What Searle Made Out of It Tuebingen University (2006) [1] Whole collections of articles referring to Searle\'s account are: Burkhardt 1990Burkhardt, Armin (ed.), Speech Acts, Meaning and Intentions: Critical Approaches to the Philosophy of John R. Searle. Berlin / New York 1990. and Lepore / van Gulick 1991.Lepore, Ernest / van Gulick, Robert (eds): John Searle and his Critics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1991. See also Jacques Derrida\'s Limited Inc.Jacques Derrida. Limited Inc.. Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 1988, 2000. and Searle\'s brief reply in The Construction of Social Reality.Searle The Construction of Social Reality (1995) p.157-160
In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle sets out to apply certain elements of his account(s) of \'illocutionary acts\' to the investigation of intentionality. (Intentionality, not to be confused with intensionality-with-an-s, is a technical philosophical term meaning roughly aboutness. It refers to mental states and their associated objects, such as written words, which refer to things in the world. Thus being anxious about a deadline is an intentional state, while free-floating anxiety is a non-intentional one. Intending to do something is just one kind of intentionality in this sense.) To a certain extent, Searle\'s account of Intentionality consists of the transfer of certain features, which he had formerly presented as features of speech acts, to Intentional states. For example, believing John has two candy bars is an intentional state with the psychological mode of belief and the propositional content that John has two candy bars. Beliefs have the conditions of satisfaction that they are true and the mind-to-world direction of fit.
He also introduces a technical term, the Background,Searle, Intentionality (1983); The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) ch. 8 which has been the source of much philosophical discussion ("though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years," Searle writes,"Literary Theory and Its Discontents", New Literary History, 640 "many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it"). The Background is the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have and that are not themselves intentional states. Thus, when someone asks us to "cut the cake" we know to use a knife and when someone asks us to "cut the grass" we know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the actual request did not include this detail. Searle sometimes supplements the Background with the concept of the Network, one\'s network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense. Searle argues that the concept of a Background is similar to the concepts provided by several other thinkers, including Wittgenstein\'s private language argument ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background"Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) p.177) and Bourdieu\'s habitus.
To give an example, two chess players might be engaged in a bitter struggle at the board, but they share all sorts of Background presuppositions: that they will take turns to move, that no-one else will intervene, that they are both playing to the same rules, that the fire alarm won\'t go off, that the board won\'t suddenly disintegrate, that their opponent won\'t magically turn into a grapefruit, and so on indefinitely. As most of these possibilites won\'t have occurred to either player,ibid, p.185 Searle thinks the Background must be unconscious, though elements of it can be called to consciousness (if the fire alarm does go off, say).
Building upon his views upon Intentionality, Searle presented a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). Searle argues that, starting with behaviorism (a view which then actually was not very influential any more), much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. In Intentionality, he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand:
Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that on the one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience. Dualists deny the first, but our current knowledge of physics makes their position seem absurdly unlikely, so philosophy, starting with behaviorists, has denied the second. But denying the second has led to endless problems and thus to endless revisions of behaviorism (with functionalism being the one currently in vogue).
Searle says simply that both are true: conscious is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain. (A view which he suggests might be called biological naturalism)
Searle argues that critics like Dennett, who insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific (since science is supposed to be objective), are making a category error. Science\'s goal is to make statements which are epistemically objective, i.e. whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party. (By contrast, value judgments are epistemically subjective.) Thus, "McKinley is higher than Everest" is epistemically objective while "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is epistemically subjective.
But, in addition, there are certain things (including all conscious experiences) which are ontologically subjective, i.e. are experienced subjectively. For example, that someone suffers from back pain is epistemically objective -- whether someone is having back pain is something that medical science happily discusses -- but the pain itself is ontologically subjective; the pain is only experienced by the person having it.
A consequence of biological naturalism is that if we want to create a conscious being, we will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict to what he calls "Strong AI", which view is defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.
Searle is very well known for his so-called "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove strong AI is impossible: Assume you do not speak Chinese and imagine yourself in a room with two slits, a book, and some scratch paper. Someone slides you some Chinese characters through the first slit, you follow the instructions in the book, write what it says on the scratch paper, and slide the resulting sheet out the second slit. To people on the outside world, it appears the room speaks Chinese -- they slide Chinese statements in one slit and get valid responses in return -- yet you do not understand a word of Chinese. Ergo, no computer can ever understand Chinese, since all it can do is the same syntactic manipulations as a man in the Chinese room.
The argument is highly controversial. In particular, it is unclear whether what Searle says really represents any argument, and if so, what the argument actually is. Nevertheless, dozens of papers claim to refute it, which is connected with the fact that over the years quite a number of suggestions have been made as to what the argument actually amounts to. Among the many replies are that while the man does not understand Chinese, the "system as a whole" does (the systems reply). Searle responds that the person in the Chinese room could memorize all the rules and become the system yet without understanding what the symbols mean, but proponents of the systems maintain that there is the system within the person that does understand, while the person does not understand. Humans don\'t understand the brain and its underlying molecular processes, yet we do think, even if we don\'t understand how we think.
Since then, Searle has come up with another argument against strong AI. Strong AI proponents claim that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if we wrote a computer program that was conscious, we could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.
Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion you build on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well you simulate fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are observer-relative: observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have causal efficacy and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program.
Some Strong AI proponents respond by arguing that physics will eventually develop a way of discovering informational processes at the physical level.
Searle extended his inquiries into observer-relative phenomena by trying to understand social reality. Searle begins by arguing collective intentionality (e.g. "we\'re going for a walk") is a distinct form of intentionality, not simply reducible to individual intentionality (e.g. "I\'m going for a walk with him and I think he thinks he\'s going for a walk with me and thinks I think I\'m going for a walk with him and ..."). However, he believes collective intentionality is sustained by individual people: each person thinks "we\'re going for a walk", there\'s no "group mind" that has this thought.
Searle\'s The Construction of Social Reality (1997) addresses the mystery of how social constructs like "baseball" or "money" can exist in a world consisting only of fields of force. Searle distinguishes between brute facts, like the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, like the score of a baseball game. He argues institutional facts arise out of collective intentionality through logical rules of the form "X counts as Y in C". Thus, for instance, filling out a ballot counts as a vote in a polling place, getting so many votes counts as a victory in an election, getting a victory counts as being elected president in the presidential race, etc.
In Rationality in Action (2001), Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed. According to what he calls the Classical Model, rationality is seen as something like a train track: you get on at one point with your beliefs and desires and the rules of rationality compel you all the way to a conclusion.
Searle briefly critiques one particular set of these rules: those of mathematical decision theory. He points out that its axioms require that anyone who valued a quarter and their life would, at some odds, bet their life for a quarter. Searle insists he would never do this and believes that this is perfectly rational.
But most of his attack is against the larger model. He believes it is badly flawed in every detail. First, he argues that reasons don\'t cause you to do anything, in the sense that having the reasons is sufficient to force you to do the thing. This is because in any decision we have the experience of the gap between our reasons and our actions. When one decides to vote, we do not simply determine that we care most about economic policy and that we prefer candidate Jones\'s economic policy. We also have to make an effort to cast our vote. It is this gap that makes us think we have freedom of the will. Searle thinks whether we really have free will or not is an open question, but considers its absence highly unappealing because it makes the feeling of freedom of will an epiphenomenon, which is highly unlikely from the evolutionary point of view given its biological cost. He also says that all rational activity presupposes free will.
Second, he believes rationality is not a system of rules, but more of an adverb. We see certain behavior as rational, no matter what its source, and our system of rules derives from finding patterns in what we see as rational.
Third, Searle believes we can rationally do things that don\'t result from our own desires. It is widely believed that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", i.e. that facts about how the world is can never tell you what you should do. By contrast, Searle believes the fact that you promised to do something means you should do it. Furthermore, he believes that this provides a desire-independent reason for an action -- if you order a drink at a bar, you should pay for it even if you have no desire to. This argument, which he first made in his paper, "How to Derive \'Ought\' from \'Is\'" (1964),John Searle, "How to Derive \'Ought\' from \'Is\'", The Philosophical Review, 73:1 (January 1964), 43-58 is highly controversial.
Fourth, Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting our (often inconsistent) patterns of desires to decide between outcomes, not the other way around. While in the Classical Model, one would start from a desire to go to Paris greater than that of saving money and calculate the cheapest way to get there, in reality people balance the niceness of Paris against the costs of travel to decide which desire (visiting Paris or saving money) they value more.
In contrast to the works of many other philosophers, Searle\'s writings are largely (but not throughout) written in a clear and conversational style, supposedly with the goal that the educated layperson should be able to understand them and follow their argument. On the other hand, they also often introduce, or take up, new technical terms (as, e.g., "direction of fit", "illocutionary force", "preparatory condition"), the explanatory benefit of which may be doubted, particularly where a clear definition of them is missing.
Searle\'s accounts often make, or at least are presented as making, broad new claims (e.g., at the beginning of his book about Rationality in Action he introduces a set of assumptions which, according to his presentation, appeared as the essence of the conception of rationality until then, and continues by suggesting that each and every of these assumptions is mistaken).
The content of his views often appears as rather unstable. For instance, although he became famous as a leading theorist of speech acts, in his writings the view of what a \'speech act\' (or \'illocutionary act\') is actually supposed to be changes repeatedly and radically. In the end it is impossible to say whether Searle\'s conception of an \'illocutionary act\' is the conception of an act of meaning something, and/or a conventional act in the sense of Austin (1962) and Bach and Harnish (1979, Chapter 6), or an act of communicating something, and if so, whether it is an act of \'successful\' communication, or merely \'an attempt at\' communicating something, or any of all these, or some of these, and if so, which.
To a large extent, Searle\'s writings refer only rarely to the works of other philosophers, and they often fail to do so even where they heavily build upon them (e.g., although the reader may well overlook this, a great deal of Searle\'s account of speech acts, as exposed in chapter 3 of (1969), is borrowed from William P. Alston\'s "Linguistic Acts" (1964); one of the main principles of Searle\'s (1969, 16) account of speech acts, namely that the minimal unit of linguistic communication is the \'illocutionary act\', is tacitly borrowed from Max Black\'s "Austin on Performatives" (1963, 225); furthermore, in Searle\'s "Austin on Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts" both the main thesis and the main argument are tacitly adopted from Black\'s 1963 paper (225)).
Where they do refer to the works of other philosophers Searle\'s writings sometimes combine views from different authors in an elegant manner (as in chapter 3 of Searle (1969), where Alston\'s account of linguistic acts, Rawls\' conception of a constitutive rule, Austin\'s conception of an illocutionary act and Grice\'s notion of non-natural speaker meaning are combined as elements of an analysis of the act of promising).
Where there are quotations and references, they usually (though not without exceptions) are to especially well-known authors, rather than to present specialists in the field; the issues under discussion at the time of writing, in contrast, often remain untouched (e.g., in Speech Acts (1969), in Intentionality (1983), and in Rationality in Action (2001)).
Searle owns a large amount of property in Berkeley, California. He is well-known for his 1980s lawsuit which led the California Supreme Court to overturn the city\'s rent control policy in what came to be known as the "Searle Decision".See Searle v. City of Berkeley Rent Stabilization Bd. (1988) 197 Cal.App.3d 1251, 1253 [243 Cal.Rptr. 449] The city government claimed this led to "significantly increased rent levels in Berkeley".City of Berkeley, "Housing Element"
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