John Rogers Searle: Act

John Rogers Searle is American philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on act.
John Rogers Searle: 74 quotes0 likes

“The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using “good” as our example. Calling something good is characteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of “good” is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation.”

John Rogers Searle Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

Source: Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), P. 139.

“It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.”

John Rogers Searle

Source: Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), P. 5.

“There is probably no more abused a term in the history of philosophy than “representation,” and my use of this term differs both from its use in traditional philosophy and from its use in contemporary cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence…. The sense of “representation” in question is meant to be entirely exhausted by the analogy with speech acts: the sense of “represent” in which a belief represents its conditions of satisfaction is the same sense in which a statement represents its conditions of satisfaction. To say that a belief is a representation is simply to say that it has a propositional content and a psychological mode.”

John Rogers Searle

Source: Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), P. 12.

“In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.”

John Rogers Searle Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

Source: Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), P. 45.

“The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.”

John Rogers Searle

Expression and Meaning, p. 31, Cambridge University Press (1979).

“The assertion fallacy … is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions.”

John Rogers Searle Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language

Source: Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), P. 141.