John Searle: biography of this influential philosopher

John Searle (1932-) is an American philosopher recognized for his contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. His proposals have had important repercussions not only in these areas, but also in epistemology, ontology, the social study of institutions, practical reasoning, artificial intelligence, among many others.

We'll see now John Searle's biography, as well as some of his main works and contributions to philosophy.

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John Searle: Biography of a Pioneer in the Philosophy of Language

John Searle was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1932. He is the son of an executive and a physicist, with whom he moved several times until finally settling in the state of Wisconsin, where he began his university career.

After graduating as a doctor of philosophy from Oxford University in 1959, Searle He has dedicated himself to teaching in the philosophy faculty of the University of California at Berkeley.

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speech act theory

While studying at Oxford University, John Searle trained with the British philosopher John Langshaw Austin, who had developed the Theory of Speech Acts. Much of Searle's work has consisted in retaking and continuing the development of the latter.

Declarative acts and illocutionary acts

Through this theory, Austin criticized the trend of contemporary philosophers, specifically the philosophers of logical positivism, who propose that language is uniquely descriptive, that is, that the only possible language is one who makes descriptive statements, which may or may not be true only according to the context.

According to Austin, there are constative linguistic expressions (which are descriptive statements), but they only occupy a small part of the significant uses of language. More than constative statements, for Austin there are performative utterances (which he called "speech acts"). These speech acts have different levels, one of them is the "illocutionary acts" or "illocutionary acts". These are the statements that have functionalities and concrete effects in the social sphere.

For example, promises, orders, requests. That is to say, these are statements that, when named, display actions, or in other words, these are actions that are performed only when named.

The contributions of this thinker

John Searle took up the theory of speech acts, and has focused specifically on the analysis of illocutionary acts, in his propositional content and in the rules that follow (in the conditions necessary for a declaration to have effects performative).

According to Searle, a speech act is a situation that includes a speaker, a listener, and an utterance from the speaker. And an illocutionary or illocutionary act is the minimum unit of linguistic communication. For the philosopher, linguistic communication includes acts, and this is so because by themselves, noises and written signs do not establish communication.

For linguistic communication to be established, it is a necessary condition that certain intentions exist. The latter means that when we communicate (by asking or stating something) we act, we are part of a series of semantic rules.

John Searle elaborates this complex proposal through describe both the semantic rules, such as the different genres of illocutionary acts, their propositional contents, the situations in which speech occurs, among other elements.

Contributions to the philosophy of mind

In his academic and intellectual trajectory, John Searle has importantly related language to the mind. For him, speech acts are closely related to mental states.

Specifically, he has been interested in the relationship between intentionality and consciousness. He proposes that not all mental states are intentional, however, beliefs and desires, for example, have an intentional structure as long as they are connected to something concrete.

Likewise, it suggests that consciousness is an intrinsically biological process, with which it is not possible build a computer whose processor is the same as our consciousness. His contributions have been especially important to cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, and discussions about possibility of creating Strong Artificial Intelligence (the one that not only imitates the human mind, but actually play).

To call the latter into question, John Searle has proposed a thought experiment known as The Chinese Room, from which he explains how an operating system could imitate the human mind and behavior if given a set of rules to specifically order a set of symbols; without the operating system necessarily understanding what those symbols mean, and without developing intentionality and awareness of it.

John Searle has been an important contributor to the discussion of the division and relationship between the mind and the body. For him, these two are not radically different substances, as Descartes had established since the seventeenth century, nor are they reducible once. to the other (for example, the brain is not exactly the same as the mind), but rather they are phenomena that are intrinsically connected.

Bibliographic references:

• Fothion, N. (2018). John Searle. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved June 5, 2018. Available in https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Searle.
• Valdes, L. (1991) (ed.). The search for meaning. Philosophy of language readings. Technos: University of Murcia.