John Searle Quotes

27 quotes in 383 categories

• 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…
• Many people mistakenly suppose that the essence of consciousness is that of a control mechanism
• Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal…
• 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…
• It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results…
• 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…
• My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business
• In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on
• I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing
• Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed
• 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…
• You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.
• Berkeley had a liberal element in the student body who tended to be quite active. I think that's in general a feature of intellectually active…
• 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…
• 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.
• 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…
• Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.
• Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters…
• Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand…

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