“How do we come from electrons to elections and protons to presidents?” Filosopher and emeritus professor at Berkeley John Searle (1932-2025) wrote in the preface of his book Making the Social World from 2010.
It was a characteristic question for a philosopher who devoted his life to the small, but never lost sight of the big one. The American thinker developed an increasingly complex vision of language and reality that is still influential in discussions in cognition sciences and artificial intelligence in particular. John Searle died on September 17 at the age of 93.
As the son of an electrical engineer and general practitioner, Searle started his Philosophy study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Thanks to a prestigious grant, he ended up in Oxford, where he obtained his PhD in 1959 at the age of 27 on the language philosophy in the philosopher’s science and logicist Peter Geach. At that time he started teaching, first on Oxford, then at Berkeley. There he was the first professor in the mid -sixties with a complete appointment openly mixed in the Free Speech Movementa student revolge that wanted to break with the ban on political expressions on the university campus.
Early in his career, Searle worked in his best -known book, Speech acts (1969), a language -philosophical distinction from that was conceived by JL Austin, that of ‘Taaldaden’. In addition to the linguistic expression we hear or read, the locationhe distinguished with Austin de illocution of a sentence – that what is ‘done’ with the sentence, such as claiming, questions, promising or preaching – and what they called the perlocutionthe effect of the language act in reality. The teacher who says a class “it’s a break” (location and illocution), is the break (perlocution). Such as the pastor who performs a marriage by pronouncing the words ‘I declare you husband and woman’.
Debate with Derrida
Searle made a fame in the philosophical world that communicative, a real language philosophy. It would also be the reason for one of the most famous polemics from modern philosophy, which between Searle and the French-Algerian thinker Jacques Derrida in the 1970s and eighties. Derrida, who didn’t wear much with the analytical tradition that searle was in, wondered what, if such language views cut wood, would then be the role of the signature or proper name under official documents – what ‘do’ there?
Years later Searle would be the French school to which Derrida belonged ‘Continental obscurantism’ blame: According to him, thinkers in that movement would not be taken seriously in the French public debate if at least part of their theory would be virtually illegible. That illegibility made them Salonhfähig for the French bohème.
Although that intellectual struggle was never settled in favor of one of the two – it remained especially with dazzles – the polemic once again underlined the big questions that existed since the ‘turn to language philosophy’ in the early twentieth century: to the essence and origin of language, the relationship between meaning and interpretation and the language of knowledge.
Intentionality
Searles Later work focused on what is called ‘intentionality’ or the ‘focus’ of thinking. Have thoughts and events as we distinguish them ‘aboutness‘, a certain representative content, he writes Intentionality (1983). They are about something. Computers – or in line with artificial intelligent systems – do not have that intentionality. Strictly speaking, they are not about anything, because they are not closed, not reality -oriented systems.
To make that point, Searle came up with his best -known thought experiment. “The Chinese room.” In an enclosed room – that is the machine – is a person who is not powerful, but does have the decision about a style book containing the corresponding answer in Chinese for every Chinese sentence he gets. Outside the room, two people who do speak Chinese give the machine in separate sentences input. They don’t know what is going on in the room, but always get the right one output. The question then is: can they conclude that the person in the room understands the Chinese language?
Searle answers with a resounding no. Answers based on a prescribed set of rules have no ‘intention’; They miss intentionality, know in addition to the location no illocution. They are not about anything. No matter how trivial that conclusion sounds, the thought experiment from Searle is still a bump for the interpretation of the more complex algorithms that underlie language models such as Chatgpt. The steps that such a program takes internally to come to an answer simply exceeds us as a user. But is that intelligence – and if so, why?
Persona non grata
His contributions to philosophy yielded Searle in 2004, among other things, the National Medal of Humanities. That year he also received the venerable Mind and Body Prize from the Center for Cognition Sciences at the University of Turin. In 2019 he was distinguished by the American Philosopher’s Association with the Quinn Prize, for his lifelong contributions to philosophy.
In 2016, one of Searle’s former students contacted With (news) medium Buzzfeed About alleged sexual cross -border behavior. Searle was already with retirement, but still taught a large part of the curriculum in Berkeley. Although the details were never made public, the complaint led the University of Searle’s honorary doctorate and powers on campus.
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