John Searle Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

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 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.

Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The illusion could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purpose at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation required the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality

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

We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.

The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.

There is no success or failure in Nature.