John Searle

1932-present · American · Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Social Ontology, Philosophy of Action

Syntax is not the same as, nor is it by itself sufficient for, semantics.

John Searle arrived at Oxford in the mid-1950s to study under J. L. Austin, who had turned professional attention to what we do when we speak, not merely what we say. From those lectures Searle built speech act theory into a systematic architecture: promises, orders, and declarations share a structure — illocutionary point, direction of fit, expressed psychological state — yielding five basic types of linguistic act.

Topics John Searle addresses

• the Chinese Room argument
• biological naturalism
• speech act theory
• collective intentionality
• status functions
• institutional facts
• the Background
• the Network
• direction of fit
• illocutionary acts
• syntax and semantics
• irreducibly first-person ontology
• the construction of social reality
• constitutive rules
• deontic powers
• observer-independent reality
• intentionality
• intrinsic intentionality
• derived intentionality
• the representation intention
• the communication intention
• external realism
• the Enlightenment vision
• conditions of satisfaction

Converse with John Searle on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in John Searle's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.