Searle Quotes & Sayings

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business. — John Searle

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

She's talking about condominiums," my friend Betty Searle called up to say one day. "Obviously she's involved with someone."
Are you sure?" I said.
Of course I'm sure," said Betty. "The question is who." She thought for a minute. "Maybe it's Senator Campbell," she said. "He's talking condominiums, too."
Senators always talk about condominiums," I said.
That's true," said Betty. — Nora Ephron

Humphrey Searle writes music that sounds like the theme from 'Star Wars' played backwards through a washing machine. — Clive James

Prediction and explanation are exactly symmetrical. Explanations are, in effect, predictions about what has happened; predictions are explanations about what's going to happen. — John Rogers Searle

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. — John Searle

Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores. — John Rogers Searle

Take encouragement from how far you've come, not how far you have left to go. — Debra Searle

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

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

Enjoy the present, plot the progress, you'll still reach the goal — Debra Searle

But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding?
This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is no. — John Rogers Searle

A St. Trinian's girl would be sadistic, cunning, dissolute, crooked, sordid, lacking morals of any sort and capable of any excess. She would also be well-spoken, even well-mannered and polite. Sardonic, witty and very amusing. She would be good company. In short: typically human and, despite everything, endearing. — Ronald Searle

It [writing] has enormous meta-cognitive implications. The power is this: That you cannot only think in ways that you could not possibly think if you did not have the written word, but you can now think about the thinking that you do with the written word. There is danger in this, and the danger is that the enormous expressive and self-referential capacities of the written word, that is, the capacities to keep referring to referring to referring, will reach a point where you lose contact with the real world. And this, believe me, is very common in universities. There's a technical name for it, I don't know if we can use it on television, it's called "bullshit." But this is very common in academic life, where people just get a form of self-referentiality of the language, where the language is talking about the language, which is talking about the language, and in the end, it's hot air. That's another name for the same phenomenon. — John Rogers Searle

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. — John Searle

Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence. — John Searle

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. — John Searle

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. — John Searle

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 — John Searle

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule. — John Rogers Searle

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard ... Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill ... At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer. — John Searle

Elizabeth Searle writes with intelligence, passion and wit. She's one of the best young writers around. — Robert Boswell

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect. — John Searle

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. — John Searle

Miss Searle had always considered boredom an intellectual defeat. — Mary Renault

What are the problems associated with Asperger syndrome? People with Asperger syndrome describe the following associated problems and feelings: loneliness; despair; feeling isolated; being misunderstood; not being wanted in a team or group; feeling uninterested in relating to others socially and not really caring about it; feeling alone, even in the company of others, or in a relationship with someone; experiencing a feeling of missing out on the social interactions that most people consider to be so important; — Ruth Searle

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

But it was never possible to forget that Searle was in a room. Why? she kept asking herself. Or rather, why not? — Josephine Tey

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

Imagining and visualising the situation prepares you for any challenge — Debra Searle

Akrasia [weakness of will] in rational beings is as common as wine in France. — John Searle

Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality. — John Searle

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes. — John Rogers Searle

There is no success or failure in Nature. — John Searle

In general, I feel if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself. — John Rogers Searle

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

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

The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else. — John Searle

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. — John Searle

Bugs make you ill Aqua, not the cold. — T.L. Searle

Berkeley had a liberal element in the student body who tended to be quite active. I think that's in general a feature of intellectually active places. — John Searle

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. — John Searle

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

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. — John Searle

Well, what does "good" mean anyway ... ? As Wittgenstein suggested, "good," like "game," has a family of meanings. Prominent among them is this one: "meets the criteria or standards of assessment or evaluation. — John Searle

I entered Harvard in 1965 not really knowing what I wanted to do. This confusion seems to have lost me a fellowship. G. D. Searle and Company, the pharmaceutical firm, had their home office in Skokie, and they gave a fellowship each year to a graduate from my high school that was going to major in science in college. — Martin Chalfie

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.' — John Searle

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

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

Moods are not to be confused with emotions. Moods will dispose you to having an emotion. Certain moods you're more likely to get angry than others, as we all know, but emotion is not the same as mood. Emotions, I think, always have to do with agitated forms of desire. Whenever you're in an emotional state, you have some sort of agitated desire. So, emotions are fairly special
I am not always in some sort of emotional state or other, but I think I am always in some mood or other. — John Rogers Searle

The assertion fallacy ... is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions. — John Searle

You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others. — John Searle

If we were building a consciousness detector, Searle would want it to ascertain that it was squirting biological neurotransmitters. American philosopher Daniel Dennett (born in 1942) would be more flexible on substrate, but might want to determine whether or not the system contained a model of itself and of its own performance. That view comes closer to my own, but at its core is still a philosophical assumption. — Ray Kurzweil

Was it John Searle who called Jacques Derrida the sort of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name? — David Markson