“We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.”

— John Rogers Searle

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and…" by John Rogers Searle?

John Rogers Searle 37

American philosopher 1932

Related quotes

“My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.”

John Rogers Searle (1932) American philosopher

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

“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 (1932) American philosopher

Minds, Brains and Programs (1980)

“Solicitation and effort or conation belong properly to animate beings alone. When they are attributed to other things, they must be taken in a metaphorical sense; but a philosopher should abstain from metaphor.”

George Berkeley book De Motu

Paragraph 3.
De Motu (1721)

“We have now but to prove a third attribute: I mean the faculty of feeling”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) French physician and philosopher

Source: The Natural History of the Soul (1745), Ch. VI Concerning the Sensitive Faculty of Matter
Context: We have now but to prove a third attribute: I mean the faculty of feeling which the philosophers of all centuries have found in this same substance.... [T]he Cartesians have made, in vain, to rob matter of this faculty. But in order to avoid insurmountable difficulties, they have flung themselves into a labyrinth from which they have thought to escape by this absurd system "that animals are pure machines."
An opinion so absurd has never gained admittance among philosophers... Experience gives us no less proof of the faculty of feeling in animals than of feeling in men.

“When we link things metaphorically we recognise similarity in difference, we think one thing in terms of attributes of another.”

Christopher Tilley (1955) British postprocessual archaeologist.

[Buchli (Ed.), Victor, Christopher, Tilley, The Material Culture Reader, 2002, Berg, 1-85973-559-2, Oxford]

“I have come to associate a kind of success that we are referring to, to individuals who have a combination of attributes that are often associated with creativity. In a way they are mutants, they are different from others. And they follow their own drummer.”

Jonas Salk (1914–1995) Inventor of polio vaccine

Academy of Achievement interview (1991)
Context: I have come to associate a kind of success that we are referring to, to individuals who have a combination of attributes that are often associated with creativity. In a way they are mutants, they are different from others. And they follow their own drummer. We know what that means. And are we all like that? We are not like that. If you are, then it would be well to recognize that there were others before you. And, people like that are not very happy or content, until they are allowed to express, or they can express what's in them to express. It's that driving force that I think is like the process of evolution working on us, and in us, and with us, and through us. That's how we continue on, and will improve our lot in life, solve the problems that arise. Partly out of necessity, partly out of this drive to improve.