John Rogers Searle: Quotes about reason

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

“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.

“The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English.”

John Rogers Searle

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

“It is apparently very congenial for some people who are professionally concerned with fictional texts to be told that all texts are really fictional anyway, and that claims that fiction differs significantly from science and philosophy can be deconstructed as a logocentric prejudice, and it seems positively exhilarating to be told that what we call "reality" is just more textuality. Furthermore, the lives of such people are made much easier than they had previously supposed, because now they don't have to worry about an author's intentions, about precisely what a text means, or about distinctions within a text between the metaphorical and the literal, or about the distinction between texts and the world because everything is just a free play of signifiers. The upper limit, and I believe the reductio ad absurdum, of this "sense of mastery" conveyed by deconstruction, is in Geoffrey Hartman's claim that the prime creative task has now passed from the literary artist to the critic.”

John Rogers Searle

"The Word Turned Upside Down", The New York Review of Books, Volume 30, Number 16, October 27, 1983.

“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.

“I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.”

John Rogers Searle

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)