John Searle: biography of this influential philosopher.

This is one of the most influential philosophers in the philosophy of mind.

John Searle (1932-) is an American philosopher recognized for his contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. His proposals have had important repercussions not only in these areas, but also in epistemology, ontology, the social study of institutions, practical reasoning, artificial intelligence, among many others.

The following is a biography of John Searle John Searle's biographyas well as some of his main works and contributions to philosophy.

John Searle: Biography of a pioneer in the philosophy of language.

John Searle was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1932. He is the son of an executive and a physicist, with whom he moved several times until finally settling in the state of Wisconsin, where he began his university career.

After graduating with a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford in 1959, Searle has devoted himself to teaching on the philosophy faculty of the University of California at Berkeley..

The theory of speech acts

While studying at Oxford University, John Searle trained with the British philosopher John Langshaw Austin, who had developed Speech Act Theory. Much of Searle's work has consisted in taking up and continuing the development of the latter.

Declarative acts and illocutionary acts

Through this theory, Austin criticized the tendency of contemporary philosophers, specifically the philosophers of logical positivism.Austin, who proposes that language is only descriptive, i.e., that the only possible language is that which makes descriptive statements, which may or may not be true only according to the context.

According to Austin, there are constatative linguistic expressions (which are descriptive statements), but they occupy only a small part of the meaningful uses of language. More than constatative statements, for Austin there are performative utterances (which he called "speech acts"). Such speech acts have different levels, one of them being "illocutionary acts" or "illocutionary acts". These are statements that have concrete social functions and effects.

For example, promises, orders, requests. That is to say, they are statements that, when they are named, display actions, or, in other words, they are actions that are carried out by themselves, they are actions that are carried out only when they are named..

The contributions of this thinker

John Searle took up the theory of speech acts, and has focused specifically on the analysis of illocutionary acts, on their propositional content and on the rules they follow (on the conditions necessary for an utterance to have performative effects).

According to Searle, a speech act is a situation involving a speaker, a hearer, and an utterance by the speaker. And an illocutionary or illocutionary act is the minimal unit of linguistic communication. For the philosopher linguistic communication includes actsThis is so because, on their own, noises and written signs do not establish communication.

For linguistic communication to be established, it is a necessary condition that certain intentions exist. The latter means that when we communicate (by asking or stating something) we act, we are part of a series of semantic rules.

John Searle elaborates this complex proposition by means of describe both the semantic rulesThe different genres of illocutionary acts, their propositional contents, the situations in which speech occurs, among other elements.

Contributions to the philosophy of mind

In his academic and intellectual trajectory, John Searle has related language with the mind in an important way. For him, speech acts are closely related to mental states..

Specifically, he has been interested in the relation between intentionality and consciousness. He proposes that not all mental states are intentional; however, beliefs and desires, for example, have an intentional structure in that they are connected to something concrete.

He also suggests that consciousness is an intrinsically Biological process, which means that it is not possible to is not possible to build a computer whose processor is the same as that of our consciousness.. His contributions have been especially important for cognitive sciences, philosophy of mind and discussions about the possibility of creating Strong Artificial Intelligence (that which not only imitates the human mind, but truly reproduces it).

To bring the latter into question, John Searle has proposed a thought experiment known as The Chinese Room, from which he explains how an operating system could mimic the human mind and human behavior if given a set of rules to specifically order a series of symbols; without the operating system necessarily understanding what those symbols mean, and without necessarily developing an intentionality and an awareness of it..

John Searle has made an important contribution to the discussion of the division and relationship between mind and body. For him, these two are not radically different substances, as Descartes had argued since the seventeenth century, nor are they reducible to each other (for example, the brain is not exactly the same as the mind), but are intrinsically connected phenomena.

Bibliographical references:

• Fotion, N. (2018). John Searle. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved June 05, 2018. Available at https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Searle.
• Valdés, L. (1991) (Ed.). The search for meaning. Lecturas de filosofía del lenguaje. Tecnos: University of Murcia.