John Searle Short Quotes

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Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.

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

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

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

John Searle
You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.

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

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

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

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

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 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
Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly.

John Searle