Background
SEARLE, John was born in 1932 in Denver, Colorado, United States. Son of George W. Searle and Hester Beck Searle.
SEARLE, John was born in 1932 in Denver, Colorado, United States. Son of George W. Searle and Hester Beck Searle.
University of Wisconsin, Oxford University. Radical movt. 1964; unrest in Universities 1971, Reith Lecturer 1984.
Professor, of Philosophy University of California, Berkeley since 1959. Chairman Education TV series in California 1960-1974. Involved with student radical movt.
1964; Advisor to Nixon Admin, on student unrest in Universities 1971, Reith Lecturer 1984. Rhodes Scholar 1952.
Main publications:(1958) ‘Proper names’. Mind 68.(1964) ‘How to derive "ought" from "is"’. Philosophical Review 73.(1969) Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(1978) ‘Prima facie obligations’, in Joseph Raz (ed.). Practical Reasoning, Oxford: Oxford University Press.(1979) Expression and Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(1980) ‘Minds, brains, and programs’, The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3.(1983) Intentionality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(1984) Minds. Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures, London: British Broadcasting Corporation.(1985) (with Daniel Vanderveken) Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.(1992) The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press.Secondary literature:Lepore. Ernest and van Gulick. Robert (eds) (1991) John Searle and His Critics, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Parret. Herman and Vershueren. Jef (eds) (1992) Searle on Conversation, Amsterdam Press and John Benjamins.
Searle has tried to develop a comprehensive theory of language and the mind. Following Austin, he held that all speech consists of ‘speech acts’ and speech acts have different levels. Uttering a sentence—referring and predicating— Searle called a ‘propositional act’.
But in performing a propositional act one may thereby perform a further act: in uttering it one may be, for instance, commanding, apologizing, or whatever. Such further acts Searle called ‘illocutionary acts'. Much of Searle’s early work was devoted to clarifying the notions of propositional and illocutionary acts, and classifying the various sorts of illocutionary act.
A speech act is an action, and much of Searle’s more recent work has been an attempt to forge an account of the mental—in particular to give an account of intentionality.
His account places intentionality within the area of the biological: according to Searle, the mind is caused by and realized in the physical structure of the brain. Although he favours a naturalistic account he has resisted popular reductionist theories. Most famously, he has argued against the fashionable attempt to understand the mind as a computer program: in his famous ‘Chinese room' argument, he argued that computer programs are specified in purely syntactical terms, and thus cannot capture the semantic dimension that is essential to many mental phenomena.
One of Searle’s earliest, and most famous, articles already used some of the techniques of speechact theory, arguing that such linguistic practices as promising enabled one to derive, by normal logical means, evaluative conclusions form factual premises.
Searle’s work has, from the beginning, engendered considerable controversy—in the case of his rejection of computer models of the mind, from outside of the philosophical community. The conception of speech acts, however, has become part of common philosophical thought.
Philosophy of language: philosophy of mind.
Married Dagmar Carboch in 1958.