John Searle
John Rogers Searle (born December 1932) is Mills Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and is noted for contributions in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and consciousness, and on the characteristics of socially constructed versus physical realities.
| Table of contents |
|
2 Strong AI 3 Intentionality and social constructs 4 See also 5 External links 6 Further reading |
Searle's early works built on the efforts of his teachers, J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson. In particular Searle's Speech Acts developed Austin's analysis of performative utterances. Searle focused on what Austin had called illocutionary acts, acts performed in saying something. In this analysis the sentences (Speech Acts p. 22)
Searle explains how the illocutionary forces of a sentence can be described as obeying specifiable rules or conditions. These rules set out the circumstances and purpose of different illocutionary acts. Searle uses four general types of rules.
Usually an illocution will have some specifiable propositional content. For instance, a request will have some future act as its content, while a statement can have any proposition as its content. Some illocutions, such as greetings, have no propositional content.
Certain background conditions are necessary for the success of each type of illocution. For instance, to successfully perform a request, it is necessary that the hearer be able to perform the requested action and that the speaker believe that the hearer can perform the action. For a greeting to be successful, the hearer and the speaker will have either just met or just been introduced. Searle called these preparatory conditions.
A greeting can be insincere. But to really thank someone, it is necessary that the speaker be sincerely appreciative, and to sincerely ask a question, the speaker has to want the answer. Searle called this the sincerity condition.
Finally, and crucially, each illocution can be described in terms of what it is attempting to do. So an assertion counts as an undertaking that something really is the case. A question counts as an attempt to elicit some information. Thanking someone counts as an expression of gratitude. This assumed intent of the speaker, or the intentionality of the sentence, became a prime focus in SearleÃÂs later work.
The argument against what he calls "strong AI" is part of a broader positive position on the issue of the relations of mind and body. Searle opposes both dualism and reductionism in favor of a position he calls "biological naturalism." This view characterizes consciousness as an emergent phenomena of the organism that is an entirely physical property (analogous to the way the pressure of a gas in a container is an emergent property of many gas molecules collliding).
Intentionality lies at the heart of Searle's Chinese Room argument against artificial intelligence which proposes that since minds have intentionality, but computers do not, computers cannot be minds.
Searle has more recently applied his analysis of intentionality to social constructs. A five dollar note is a five dollar note only in virtue of collective intentionality. It is only because I think it is worth five dollars and you think it is worth five dollars that it can perform its economic function.
Illocutionary force
each have the same propositional content, Sam smoking, yet they differ in their illocutionary force, respectively a statement, a question, a command and an expression of desire.Strong AI
Intentionality and social constructs
External links
Further reading