John Searle
John Searle
John Rogers Searleis an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000; the National Humanities Medal in 2004; and the Mind & Brain Prize in 2006. Among his notable concepts is the "Chinese room" argument against "strong" artificial intelligence...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth1 December 1932
CountryUnited States of America
John Searle quotes about
You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.
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.
Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.
Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed
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.
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.