John Rogers Searle (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 notable concepts is the Chinese room argument against strong artificial intelligence.
Searle's father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T Corporation, while his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician. John Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he obtained a doctorate in philosophy.

Politics

While an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of Students against Joseph McCarthy.[1] McCarthy was then the junior Senator from Wisconsin. In 1959 he began to teach at Berkeley, and was the first tenured professor to join the 1964-5 Free Speech Movement.[2] In 1969, while serving as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California,[3] he supported the university in its dispute with students at People's Park.
In The Campus War A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971).[4] Searle investigates the causes behind the campus protests of the era. In it he declares that I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and ... several radical polemicists ... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred — one might almost say terror — of close analysis and dissection of argument. He asserts that My wife was threatened that I (and other members of the administration) would be assassinated or violently attacked.[1] Shortly after 911 Searle wrote an article claiming that the attack was part of a struggle whose only solution is rooting out governments that support terrorism.[5]

Philosophy
 
Speech acts
Searle's early work, which did a great deal to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues including J. L. Austin (the term illocutionary act), Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.C.J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules), and his own thesis, in 'Speech Acts,' that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of P.F. Strawson, John Rawls, and H. Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), Hare and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), and William P. Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence, and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act, (b) means what one says, and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity. In his 1969 book Speech Acts, Searle sets out to combine all of these elements to give his account of 'illocutionary acts', which Austin had introduced in How To Do Things with Words.
Despite his announced intention[6] to present a full dress analysis of the illocutionary act, Searle in fact does not give one.[citation needed] Instead, he provides an analysis of what he considers the prototypical illocutionary act of promising, and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further illocutionary act types (1969, 57-71).
Among the concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the 'illocutionary force' and the 'propositional content' of an utterance. Searle does not precisely define the former as such, but rather introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences
Sam smokes habitually.
Does Sam smoke habitually
Sam, smoke habitually!
Would that Sam smoked habitually!
each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (a statement, a question, a command, and an expression of desire, respectively) (1969, 22).
According to a later account, which Searle presents in Intentionality (1983) and which differs in important ways from the one suggested in Speech Acts, illocutionary acts are characterised by their having conditions of satisfaction (an idea adopted from Strawson's (1971) paper Meaning and Truth [8]) and a direction of fit (an idea adopted from Elizabeth Anscombe). 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 way because the propositional content is presupposed, as in I'm sorry I ate John's candy bars.)
In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic[7] (1985, with Daniel Vanderveken), Searle prominently uses the notion of illocutionary point. (Although Searle does not mention earlier uses of the concept, it originates from Alexander Sesonske's article Performatives.)
Searle's speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers, and in a variety of ways. Collections of articles referring to Searle's account are found in Burkhardt 1990[8] and Lepore  vanGulick 1991.[9]

Searle-Derrida debate

See also Limited Inc
In the early 1970s Searle had a brief debate with Jacques Derrida regarding Speech Act theory. The debate was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers, each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood his basic points.[10][citation needed] Searle was particularly hostile to the deconstructionist framework of Derrida and much later refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection of the papers in the debate, Limited Inc. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach legitimate philosophy or even intelligible writing. Searle argued that he did not want to dedicate any attention to the deconstructionist point of view, so as not to legitimize it. Some critics[who] have consequently considered the debate a non-debate, and rather simply a series of elaborate misunderstandings,[11] while others[who] have seen either Derrida or Searle as having gained the upper hand.[12] The level of hostility in the debate can be seen from the fact that Searle in his reply stated that It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions, to which Derrida replied that that sentence was the only sentence of the reply to which I can subscribe.[13] The debate has nonetheless frequently been interpreted as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytical and continental philosophy by commentators.
The debate began in 1972, when Jacques Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act in his paper Signature Event Context. While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes force, Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. He argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a structure of absence - the words that are left unsaid, because of contextual constraints, and by iterability, the constraints on what can be said, given by what has been said in the past. Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech act theory was misguided, because intentionality is restricted to be intentional about that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious or parasitic speech, and wondered whether this exclusion was because Austin had considered these speech genres governed by different structures of meaning, or simply by a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida, Reiterating the Differences A Reply to Derrida, Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory attempted to give a full account of language and meaning, when in fact its aim was much narrower, Searle considered leaving out parasitic discourse forms justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry.[14][15] Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but Searle did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus.[12] This in turn caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality.[16] Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on his having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction, and his failure to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics[who] have suggested that Searle was at fault for the unsuccessful nature of the exchange, by being so grounded in the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with the continental phenomenological tradition represented by Derrida.[16]
Derrida in his response to Searle, Limited inc, abc..., ridiculed Searle's positions, suggesting that Searle had formed a Société à responsabilitélimitée (the French term for Limited Liability Corporation) with Austin, because of the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of the reply, since a clear sender of the message could not be established. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to normality in the analytical tradition to be problematic.[12][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]
In 1995 Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in The Construction of Social Reality, in which he called Derrida's conclusion preposterous and stated that Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts. ...[24]

Intentionality and the Background

Searle defines Intentionality as the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs in the world.[25] The nature of intentionality is an important part of discussions of Searle's Philosophy of Mind. Searle emphasizes that the word ‘intentionality, (the part of the mind directed tofromabout objects and relations in the world independent of mind) should not be confused with the word ‘intensionality’ (the logical property of some sentences that do not pass the test of 'extensinalidade').[26] In Intentionality An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle applies certain elements of his account(s) of illocutionary acts to the investigation of intentionality. Searle also introduces a technical term the Background,[27] which, according to him, has been the source of much philosophical discussion (though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years, Searle writes,[28] many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it.) Background he calls 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 his reference to 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[29]) 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 possibilities won't have occurred to either player,[30] Searle thinks the Background must be unconscious, though elements of it can be called to consciousness (if the fire alarm does go off, say).
In his debate with Derrida, Searle argued against Derrida's notion that a statement can be disjoined from the original intentionality of its author, for example when no longer connected to the original author, while still being able to produce meaning. Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the (intentional) speech act. For Searle ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for attributing it any meaning at all.[31][32]

Consciousness

Building upon his views about Intentionality, Searle presents a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). He argues that, starting with behaviorism (an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle also dismisses), 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
No one would think of saying, for example, Having a hand is just being disposed to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping (manual behaviorism), or Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects (manual functionalism), or For a system to have a hand is just for it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs and outputs (manual Turing machine functionalism), or Saying that a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance toward it (the manual stance). (p. 263)

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.
Searle says simply that both are true consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain. (A view which he suggests might be called biological naturalism.)

Ontological subjectivity

Searle has argued[33] that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.
Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, McKinley is prettier than Everest is epistemically subjective, whereas McKinley is higher than Everest is epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.
Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) that are ontologically subjective, i.e. can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is an objective fact of medical science.[34] But the pain itself is ontologically subjective it is only experienced by the person having it.
Searle goes on to affirm that where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.[35] His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objectivesubjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

Artificial intelligence

See also Chinese room and philosophy of artificial intelligence
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, defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.[36]
In 1980, Searle presented the Chinese room argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI.[37] (Familiarity with the Turing test is useful for understanding the issue.) 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, translate what it says onto 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. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the thought experiment suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English all which the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations.[38]
StevanHarnad argues that Searle's Strong AI is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the real targets of his critique.[39] Functionalists claim that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows 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.[40]

Social reality

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 ...).
Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (1995) addresses the mystery of how social constructs like baseball or money can exist in a world consisting only of physical particles in fields of force. Adapting an idea by Elizabeth Anscombe in On Brute Facts, Searle distinguishes between brute facts, like the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, like the score of a baseball game. Aiming at an explanation of social phenomena in terms of Anscombe's notion, he argues that society can be explained in terms of institutional facts, and institutional facts arise out of collective intentionality through constitutive rules with the logical 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.

Rationality
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 doubts this picture of rationality holds generally.
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 take such a bet and believes that this stance is perfectly rational.
Most of his attack is directed against the common conception of rationality, which he believes is badly flawed. First, he argues that reasons don't cause you to do anything, because having sufficient reason wills (but doesn't force) you to do that thing. So in any decision situation we experience a gap between our reasons and our actions. For example, when we decide 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. Similarly, every time a guilty smoker lights a cigarette they are aware of succumbing to their craving, not merely of acting automatically as they do when they exhale. 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  All rational activity presupposes free will .[41]
Second, 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 ('Hume's Law'). By contrast, in so far as a fact is understood as relating to an institution (marriage, promises, commitments, etc.), which is to be understood as a system of constitutive rules, then what one should do can be understood as following from the institutional fact of what one has done; institutional fact, then, can be understood as opposed to the brute facts related to Hume's Law. For example, Searle believes the fact that you promised to do something means you should do it, because by making the promise you are participating in the constitutive rules that arrange the system of promise making itself, and therefore understand a shouldness as implicit in the mere factual action of promising. 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),[42] remains highly controversial, but even three decades later Searle continued to defend his view that ..the traditional metaphysical distinction between fact and value cannot be captured by the linguistic distinction between 'evaluative' and 'descriptive' because all such speech act notions are already normative.[43]
Third, 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. Hence, 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.