John Searle

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John Rogers Searle (Denver (Colorado), 31 juli 1932) is an American philosopher and is professor at the department of philosophy on the University of California in Berkeley. He is famous about is contribuitons on the field of language philosophy and the philosophy of the mind. He has written extensively on the problem of consciousness and most of the time reflects on the problem of free will. Over decades, his position never changed in debates, but in a few essays on freedom en neurobiology he has tackled the problem more directly. Then, for the first time he embraces indeterminism as a positive factore (The information philosopher, n.d.). Searle made an important step toward the philosophy with his contributions to the concept of 'social reality'. In which he discusses facts of human agreements, he believes things exists only because we believe them to exist (Searle, 1995) .

Speech act

As a student of John Austin, John Searl was introduced with the term speech act. John searl went further with this term in the language philosophy. He created a further development of the theory of speech act, theory of institutions and social reaality (1996). He says that speech acts are the base of all insitutions. The social reality is not built by speech acts alone, but it plays an important role.

Works of John Searle:

• 1969, Speech Acts: An essay in the philosophy of language.
• 1971, The Campus War.
• 1979, Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts.
• 1983, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind.
• 1984, Minds, Brains and Science.
• 1985, The Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, met Daniel Vanderveken.
• 1992, The Rediscovery of the Mind.
• 1995, The Construction of Social Reality.
• 1997, The Mystery of Consciousness.
• 1998, Mind, Language and Society, Philosophy in the Real World.
• 2001, Rationality in Action.
• 2001, Conversations with John Searle, door Gustavo Feigenbaum.
• 2002, Consciousness and Language.
• 2004, Mind.

The book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) presents Searle’s view concerning consciousness. In the book he argues that starting with behaviorism, much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. From his point of view philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that on the one hand the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet on the other hand consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience. Searle thinks that both are true: consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical process of the brain.

In The Construction of Social Reality. Searle makes a distinction between two type of facts, namely 'brute facts' or 'noninstitulional facts' and 'institutional (social) facts'. Brute facts are those facts that can exist without people. An example of this is that the Mount everest is bigger than the Kilimanjaro. Institutional (social) facts are the opposite of brute facts, they do need people to exist. An example is this is that a €100 bill is worth 100 euro, but it is actually just a piece of paper. This institution is created by people. But even brute facts are questionable, all reality is somehow a human creation and so everything is depended on the human mind. We also give value to certain intrinsic facts, for example a stone. It becomes observer related if you see the same object as a paper weight (Searle, 1995). We impose a function on an object.

References:

• The Information Philosopher. (n.d.).

• Searle, John R., (1995) The Construction of Social Reality, Penguin Books, London (pp. 1-23)

• Zierhofer, W., (2002) Speech acts and space(s): language pragmatics and the discursive constitution of the social ( Department of Human Geography, University of Nijmegen)

See also

• John Searle [1]

Contributors

• Page published by Meryl Burger

• --GijsJansen 15:30, 27 October 2011 (CEST)

• Page edited by Loek Freulich 3004295 & Jorn Joosten

• Page edited by Lotte den Boogert, 7 oktober 2012

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• Picture added by Isis Boot - --IsisBoot 20:24, 24 October 2012 (CEST)