John Searle - Sense Quotes

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The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English.

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
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
There is probably no more abused a term in the history of philosophy than representation, and my use of this term differs both from its use in traditional philosophy and from its use in contemporary cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.... The sense of representation in question is meant to be entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts: the sense of represent in which a belief represents its conditions of satisfaction is the same sense in which a statement represents its conditions of satisfaction. To say that a belief is a representation is simply to say that it has a propositional content and a psychological mode.

John 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
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