Searle John R. (b.1932), American philosopher of language and mind (D. Phil., Oxford) influenced by Frege, Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin; a founder of speech act theory and an important contributor to debates on intentionality, consciousness, and institutional facts.
Language. In Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), Searle brings together modified versions of Frege’s distinctions between the force (F) and content (P) of a sentence, and between singular reference and predication, Austin’s analysis of speech acts, and Grice’s analysis of speaker meaning. Searle explores the hypothesis that the semantics of a natural language can be regarded as a conventional realization of underlying constitutive rules and that illocutionary acts are acts performed in accordance with these rules. Expression and Meaning (1979) extends this analysis to non-literal and indirect illocutionary acts, and attempts to explain Donnellan’s referential-attributive distinction in these terms and proposes an influential taxonomy of five basic types of illocutionary acts based on the illocutionary point or purpose of the act, and word-to-world versus world-toword direction of fit. Language and mind. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983) forms the foundation for the earlier work on speech acts. Now the semantics of a natural language is seen as the result of the mind (intrinsic intentionality) imposing conditions of satisfaction or aboutness on objects (expressions in a language), which have intentionality only derivatively. Perception and action rather than belief are taken as fundamental. Satisfaction conditions are essentially Fregean (i.e. general versus singular) and internal – meaning is in the head, relative to a background of non-intentional states, and relative to a network of other intentional states. The philosophy of language becomes a branch of the philosophy of mind. Mind. ‘Minds, Brains and Programs’ (1980) introduced the famous ‘Chinese room’ argument against strong artificial intelligence – the view that appropriately programming a machine is sufficient for giving it intentional states. Suppose a monolingual English-speaker is working in a room producing Chinese answers to Chinese questions well enough to mimic a Chinesespeaker, but by following an algorithm written in English. Such a person does not understand Chinese nor would a computer computing the same algorithm. This is true for any such algorithms because they are syntactically individuated and intentional states are semantically individuated. The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) continues the attack on the thesis that the brain is a digital computer, and develops a non-reductive ‘biological naturalism’ on which intentionality, like the liquidity of water, is a high-level feature, which is caused by and realized in the brain. Society. The Construction of Social Reality (1995) develops his realistic worldview, starting with an independent world of particles and forces, up through evolutionary biological systems capable of consciousness and intentionality, to institutions and social facts, which are created when persons impose status-features on things, which are collectively recognized and accepted. See also DIRECTION OF FIT, INTENTIONAL — ITY, MEANING , PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE , SPEECH ACT THEORY. R.M.H.