Searle, John (1932–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Rust
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
Chinese Room ◽  
Chinese Room Argument ◽  
The World ◽  
Basic Facts ◽  
In Virtue Of

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932) is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. This analytic philosopher has made major contributions to the fields of the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and social ontology. He is best known for his Chinese room argument, which aims to demonstrate that the formally described systems of computer functionalism cannot give rise to intentional understanding. Searle’s early work focused on the philosophy of language, where, in Speech Acts (1969), he explores the hypothesis that speaking a language is a rule-governed form of behavior. Just as one must follow certain rules in order to be considered to be playing chess, rules determine whether a speaker is making a promise, giving a command, asking a question, making a statement, and so forth. The kind of speech act that an utterance is depends on, among other conditions, its propositional content and illocutionary force. The content depicts the world as being a certain way, and the force specifies what a speaker is trying to do with that content. For example, for an utterance to qualify as a promise a speaker must describe a future act (content) and intend that the utterance place him or herself under an obligation to do that act (force). In Intentionality (1983), Searle argues that the structure of language not only mirrors but is derivative of the structure of intentional thought, so that core elements of his analysis of speech acts can be used as the basis for a theory of intentionality. Just as we can only promise by bringing certain propositional contents under a certain illocutionary force, intentional states such as belief, desire, fear, and joy can only be about the world in virtue of a representative content and a psychological mode. A theory of intentionality does not explain how intentionality is possible, given the basic facts of the world as identified by the natural sciences. Much of Searle’s work in the philosophy of mind, as found in Minds, Brains, and Science (1984) and The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), is dedicated to the question of how mental facts, including but not limited to intentional facts, can be reconciled with basic, natural facts. Searle’s Chinese room argument is formulated in the service of rejecting computer functionalism, a prominent attempt at such reconciliation. Searle’s positive view, which he describes as "biological naturalism," is that mental facts are both caused by and features of underlying neurophysiological processes. In Speech Acts (1969), Searle claims that using language is akin to playing chess, in that both activities are made possible by participants following what he describes as "constitutive rules," rules that must be followed in order for someone to be considered to be undertaking those activities. Other institutional facts, such as money or the U.S. presidency, are also created and maintained in virtue of our following certain constitutive rules. For example, someone can only count as a U.S. president if that person is, among other conditions, a U.S. citizen who receives a majority of electoral votes. This thought is extended and explored in Searle’s two book-length contributions to the field of social ontology, The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World (2010). In addition to the philosophy of language and social ontology, Searle has made book-length contributions to the philosophy of action (Rationality in Action (2001)) and the philosophy of perception (Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception (2015)). He also famously engaged Jacques Derrida’s critique of J. L. Austin’s discussion of illocutionary acts ("Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida" (1977)). Searle has summarized his various positions in Mind, Language, and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (1998) and Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004).

Beyond Concepts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Language Function ◽  
Natural Signs ◽  
Transmission Of Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Information ◽  
Natural Ontology

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? but viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in trying to get from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs including, especially, language. Novelties are the introduction of unitrackers and unicepts whose job is to recognize the same again as manifested through the jargon of experience, a direct reference theory for common nouns and other extensional terms, a naturalist sketch of uniceptual—roughly conceptual— development, a theory of natural information and of language function that shows how properly functioning language carries natural information, a novel description of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, a discussion of perception as translation from natural informational signs, new descriptions of indexicals and demonstratives and of intensional contexts and a new analysis of the reference of incomplete descriptions.

Introduction to Part I

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Keyword(s):  
Natural Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural Signs ◽  
Transmission Of Information ◽  
The World ◽  
Natural Ontology

This book weaves together themes from natural ontology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and information, areas of inquiry that have not recently been treated together. The sprawling topic is Kant’s how is knowledge possible? gbut viewed from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. The assumption is that we are evolved creatures that use cognition as a guide in dealing with the natural world, and that the natural world is roughly as natural science has tried to describe it. Very unlike Kant, then, we must begin with ontology, with a rough understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, only later developing theories about the nature of cognition within that world and how it manages to reflect the rest of nature. And in moving from ontology to cognition we must traverse another non-Kantian domain: questions about the transmission of information both through natural signs and through purposeful signs, including, especially, language.

scholarly journals The Oxford Handbook of Assertion

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Family ◽  
Computer Scientists ◽  
And Linguistics

Assertions belong to the family of speech acts that make claims regarding how things are. They include statements, avowals, reports, expressed judgments, and testimonies—acts which are relevant across a host of issues not only in philosophy of language and linguistics but also in subdisciplines such as epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics, and social and political philosophy. Over the past two decades, the amount of scholarship investigating the speech act of assertion has increased dramatically, and the scope of such research has also grown. The Oxford Handbook of Assertion explores various dimensions of the act of assertion: its nature; its place in a theory of speech acts, and in semantics and meta-semantics; its role in epistemology; and the various social, political, and ethical dimensions of the act. Essays from leading theorists situate assertion in relation to other types of speech acts, exploring the connection between assertions and other phenomena of interest not only to philosophers but also to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, lawyers, computer scientists, and theorists from communication studies.

scholarly journals Hacer cosas sin palabras.El “silencio comunicativo” en contextos interculturales

Tequio ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (8) ◽  
pp. 61-75
Author(s):  
Jorge Valtierra Zamudio
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Intercultural Communication ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Diversity ◽  
Illocutionary Force ◽  
Doctoral Research ◽  
Sociology Of Language

This paper aims to understand “silence”, its illocutionary force, its effects on the perception of oneself, and on the construction of the discourse on the other in multi/intercultural contexts, from topics that have been elaborated in the philosophy of language, such as speech acts and conversational cooperative principles, including some interculturalism issues. From my doctoral research (2013), a record of ethnographic information in Tojolabal communities is presented, as well as a conversational and conceptual analysis intended to contribute to the sociology of language, mainly on communicative silence in intercultural contexts, as a way to discern the communicative and sociocultural force which the communicative silence and other factors of everyday life entail. A series of proposals to comprehend intercultural communication processes will be presented, based on the analysis of intercultural contexts, defined as such, not only by linguistic diversity, but also by ideology and context.

History of Analytic Philosophy of Language

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Béatrice Godart-Wendling
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Linguistic Analysis ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Language Functions ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

The term “philosophy of language” is intrinsically paradoxical: it denominates the main philosophical current of the 20th century but is devoid of any univocal definition. While the emergence of this current was based on the idea that philosophical questions were only language problems that could be elucidated through a logico-linguistic analysis, the interest in this approach gave rise to philosophical theories that, although having points of convergence for some of them, developed very different philosophical conceptions. The only constant in all these theories is the recognition that this current of thought originated in the work of Gottlob Frege (b. 1848–d. 1925), thus marking what was to be called “the linguistic turn.” Despite the theoretical diversity within the philosophy of language, the history of this current can however be traced in four stages: The first one began in 1892 with Frege’s paper “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” and aimed to clarify language by using the rules of logic. The Fregean principle underpinning this program was that we must banish psychological considerations from linguistic analysis in order to avoid associating the meaning of words with mental pictures or states. The work of Frege, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), George Moore (1873–1958), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1921), Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), and Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) is representative of this period. In this logicist point of view, the questions raised mainly concerned syntax and semantics, since the goal was to define a formalism able to represent the structure of propositions and to explain how language can describe the world by mirroring it. The problem specific to this period was therefore the function of representing the world by language, thus placing at the heart of the philosophical debate the notions of reference, meaning, and truth. The second phase of the philosophy of language was adumbrated in the 1930s with the courses given by Wittgenstein (1889–1951) in Cambridge (The Blue and Brown Books), but it did not really take off until 1950–1960 with the work of Peter Strawson (1919–2006), Wittgenstein (1953), John Austin (1911–1960), and John Searle (1932–). In spite of the very different approaches developed by these theorists, the two main ideas that characterized this period were: one, that only the examination of natural (also called “ordinary”) language can give access to an understanding of how language functions, and two, that the specificity of this language resides in its ability to perform actions. It was therefore no longer a question of analyzing language in logical terms, but rather of considering it in itself, by examining the meaning of statements as they are used in given contexts. In this perspective, the pivotal concepts explored by philosophers became those of (situated) meaning, felicity conditions, use, and context. The beginning of the 1970s initiated the third phase of this movement by orienting research toward two quite distinct directions. The first, resulting from the work on proper names, natural-kind words, and indexicals undertaken by the logician philosophers Saul Kripke (1940–), David Lewis (1941–2001), Hilary Putnam (1926–2016), and David Kaplan (1933–), brought credibility to the semantics of possible worlds. The second, conducted by Paul Grice (1913–1988) on human communicational rationality, harked back to the psychologism dismissed by Frege and conceived of the functioning of language as highly dependent on a theory of mind. The focus was then put on the inferences that the different protagonists in a linguistic exchange construct from the recognition of hidden intentions in the discourse of others. In this perspective, the concepts of implicitness, relevance, and cognitive efficiency became central and required involving a greater number of contextual parameters to account for them. In the wake of this research, many theorists turned to the philosophy of mind as evidenced in the late 1980s by the work on relevance by Dan Sperber (1942–) and Deirdre Wilson (1941–). The contemporary period, marked by the thinking of Robert Brandom (1950–) and Charles Travis (1943–), is illustrated by its orientation toward a radical contextualism and the return of inferentialism that draws strongly on Frege. Within these theoretical frameworks, the notions of truth and reference no longer fall within the field of semantics but rather of pragmatics. The emphasis is placed on the commitment that the speakers make when they speak, as well as on their responsibility with respect to their utterances.

Philosophy of Language

Philosophy ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Propositional Attitudes ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Major Topic ◽  
Analytic Tradition ◽  
The World ◽  
In Virtue Of

The term “philosophy of language” is generally used more restrictively than newcomers to the discipline might expect. While philosophers of almost every stripe have something to say about language, people who speak of “philosophy of language” generally intend to restrict it to philosophers in the analytic tradition over the last one hundred years or so. This entry reflects that general convention. The entry also breaks the field down by major topic areas, with each later topic including at least one cornerstone work (usually more) and greater attention to recent papers of interest. The topics above (beyond the review of textbooks and supplements) may be thought of as falling into major groups based on a number of larger themes and questions in the field. After some historical review, we consider what our view on what languages must be: how do things become meaningful within a language and how do speakers adhere to the rules governing the language? We then look at how truth should be understood and, more narrowly, whether there are analytic truths (statements that are true in virtue of the meanings of their terms). Questions of how words themselves come to refer to or stand for parts of the world are then considered, both invariantly and in ways that are sensitive to context, including expressions of propositional attitudes. Two sections after that address more pragmatic matters in the philosophy of language: what is it to perform a speech act (and thus communicate with others) and what is it to use an expression metaphorically, deviating from accepted usage and yet being acknowledged by other speakers? We close with a review of an emerging debate between minimalists and contextualists over the degree to which the meanings of most of the language are fixed.

The Normative Structures of Human Civilization

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Acceptance ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Normative Expectations

John Searle´s social ontology seeks for nothing less than the fundamental "structure of human civilization". By trying to reconcile the description of the world by the natural sciences with our self-understanding as free, rational and conscious beings, he points to the core of meaningful social life with its institutions, rules and normative expectations. Searle´s often provocative project of explaining "the exact role of language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality" manifested in his book "Making the Social World" (2010) and outlined in this volume, is taken on by philosophers and social scientists in a critical encounter. Among the large range of topics discussed in these articles are Searle´s concept of collective intentionality, the status of social facts, the social acceptance of institutions, the magic of speech acts as well as Searle´s excursion into the world of power and human rights. Not least, these reflections help to clarify the sometimes conflict-laden relation of philosophy and social theory.

Die Idee einer Sprachhermeneutik

2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 576-602
Author(s):  
Dimitri Ginev
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Communication ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Historical Trends ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Inferential Semantics

Abstract Any conception in linguistics and linguistic philosophy that prioritizes the world-disclosing function over the world-representing function of language can be regarded as a kind of linguistic hermeneutics. The paper tries to specify this general thesis by picking up and analysing historical trends in the philosophy of language. It spells out the relationship between the situatedness of locutors in the medium of linguistic practices and the way in which they (through their speech acts) articulate this medium by actualizing possibilities for personal expressivity and interpersonal communication. It is argued that the starting point from the medium that always already transcends the particular speech acts offers an alternative to inferential semantics. From the perspective of linguistic hermeneutics, the world is disclosed and exposed to ongoing articulation in characteristic hermeneutic situations of language use. The concepts of linguistic medium and discursive articulation of the world are treated in terms of hermeneutic trans-subjectivity as enabling all forms of communicative intersubjectivity. If one ignores the fore-structuring role of the former, one would hypostatise the latter. With regard to this claim, the theory of formal pragmatics is critically discussed.

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