John Searle

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John Searle bigraphy, stories - American philosopher

John Searle : biography

July 31, 1932 –

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932) is 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.

Biography

Searle’s father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T Corporation, while his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician. John Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he obtained a doctorate in philosophy.

Politics

While an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy".http://www.ditext.com/searle/campus/1.html McCarthy was then the junior Senator from Wisconsin. In 1959 he began to teach at Berkeley, and was the first tenured professor to join the 1964-5 Free Speech Movement.http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/Free%20Speech%20Movement-1.htm In 1969, while serving as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California,http://www.ditext.com/searle/campus/4.html he supported the university in its dispute with students at People’s Park.

In The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971). Searle investigates the causes behind the campus protests of the era. In it he declares that: "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and … several radical polemicists … Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred — one might almost say terror — of close analysis and dissection of argument." He asserts that "My wife was threatened that I (and other members of the administration) would be assassinated or violently attacked." Shortly after 9/11 Searle wrote an article claiming that the attack was part of a struggle whose only solution is rooting out governments that support terrorism.http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/pdf/terrorism.pdf

Philosophy

Speech acts

Searle’s early work, which did a great deal to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues including J. L. Austin (the term "illocutionary act"), Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.C.J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules), and his own thesis, in ‘Speech Acts,’ that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of P.F. Strawson, John Rawls, and H. Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), Hare and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), and William P. Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence, and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act, (b) means what one says, and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity. In his 1969 book Speech Acts, Searle sets out to combine all of these elements to give his account of ‘illocutionary acts’, which Austin had introduced in How To Do Things with Words.

Despite his announced intention"Language Arts & Disciplines" (1969) by John R. Searle- Chapter 3 – "THE STRUCTURE OF ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS", p. 54 to present a "full dress analysis of the illocutionary act", Searle in fact does not give one. Instead, he provides an analysis of what he considers the prototypical illocutionary act of promising, and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further illocutionary act types (1969, 57-71).