(On) Searle on Conversation

(On) Searle on Conversation PDF

Author: John R. Searle

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1992-02-20

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 9027282919

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At an international conference held in 1981 at the Universidada Estudual of Campinas (Brazil), a controversial lecture was given by John Searle which presented two conceptual theses: that conversation does not have an intrinsic structure about which a relevant theory can be formulated, and that conversations are not subject to (constitutive) rules. This lecture was first published in 1986 under the title “Notes on Conversation”, and was revised several times afterwards. The present volume offers the most recent version. Because of the importance of the article for conversation analysis, and for pragmatics in general, the editors have put together Searle's target article, along with eight original comments. The volume closes with a 'reply to replies' by Searle. In sociolinguistic studies, intralingual code-switching has been given less attention than most other areas, and linguists' attitudes towards the use of non-standard varieties still often suffer from fallacies of prescriptivism. Czech, a clear case of a language having a Standard and a strong central vernacular with intensive shifting between them, offers many points of general interest to sociolinguists.

Conversations with John Searle

Conversations with John Searle PDF

Author: Gustavo Faigenbaum

Publisher: LibrosEnRed.com

Published: 2001-07

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9871022115

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These interviews with John Searle arguably today's most influential living analytic philosopher cover a wide scope. Among the topics discussed are: the Philosophy of Language, the Theory of Mind, and the nature of the social world. With a transparent and precise style, Prof. Searle reconstructs the different stages in the development of Speech Acts Theory. He also sums up twenty years of debate about the Chinese Room Argument, which he uses to challenge those Artificial Intelligence scholars who claim that the brain is a digital computer. As Searle himself points out, some of the hypotheses eloquently posited during the conversation about fields like as aesthetics, political theory, and modal logic are not published elsewhere.In easy-to-read, colloquial question-and-answer style, this volume includes many fascinating personal and historical details about Searles years at Oxford, his commitment with the Free Speech Movement, his forty years of experience as a professor at Bekeley, and his intellectual exchanges with scholars such as John Austin, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.Prof. John Searle is Mills Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California (Berkeley, California, USA). He is the author of Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Minds, Brains and Science (1984), The Construction of Social Reality (1995), among many other books and articles. Gustavo Faigenbaum graduated from the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and obtained his Ph. D. in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York, USA. He is Professor at the University of Palermo (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and researcher at the National Council for Scientific Research (CONICET Argentina).

John Searle

John Searle PDF

Author: Nicholas Fotion

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-12-18

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1317490150

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Direct, combative and wide-ranging, John Searle's philosophy has made fundamental and lasting contributions to thinking in language, mind, knowledge, truth and the nature of social reality. His account of language based on speech-acts, that mind is intentional, and the Chinese Room Argument, are just some of his most famous contributions to philosophical thinking. In this - the first introduction to John Searle's philosophy - Nick Fotion provides clear and assured exposition of Searles' ideas, while also testing and exploring their implications. The book begins by examining Searle's work on the philosophy of language: his analysis of speech acts such as promising, his taxonomy of speech acts and the wider range of indirect speech acts and metaphorical uses of language. The book then moves on to cover the philosophy of mind and outlines Searle's ideas on international states. It introduces his notions of 'background' and 'network', his claims for the often unrecognized importance of consciousness, and examines his attacks on other philosophical accounts of mind, such as materialism, functionalism and strong AI. The final section examines Searle's later work on the construction of social reality and concludes with more general reflections on Searle's position vis-a-vis ontology, epistemology, scepticism and the doctrine of 'external realism'.

Seeing Things as They are

Seeing Things as They are PDF

Author: John R. Searle

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0199385157

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This book provides a comprehensive account of the intentionality of perceptual experience. With special emphasis on vision Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience. The central question concerns the relation between the subjective conscious perceptual field and the objective perceptual field. Everything in the objective field is either perceived or can be perceived. Nothing in the subjective field is perceived nor can be perceived precisely because the events in the subjective field consist of the perceivings, whether veridical or not, of the events in the objective field. Searle begins by criticizing the classical theories of perception and identifies a single fallacy, what he calls the Bad Argument, as the source of nearly all of the confusions in the history of the philosophy of perception. He next justifies the claim that perceptual experiences have presentational intentionality and shows how this justifies the direct realism of his account. In the central theoretical chapters, he shows how it is possible that the raw phenomenology must necessarily determine certain form of intentionality. Searle introduces, in detail, the distinction between different levels of perception from the basic level to the higher levels and shows the internal relation between the features of the experience and the states of affairs presented by the experience. The account applies not just to language possessing human beings but to infants and conscious animals. He also discusses how the account relates to certain traditional puzzles about spectrum inversion, color and size constancy and the brain-in-the-vat thought experiments. In the final chapters he explains and refutes Disjunctivist theories of perception, explains the role of unconscious perception, and concludes by discussing traditional problems of perception such as skepticism.

The Mystery of Consciousness

The Mystery of Consciousness PDF

Author: John R. Searle

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780940322066

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It has long been one of the most fundamental problems of philosophy, and it is now, John Searle writes, "the most important problem in the biological sciences": What is consciousness? Is my inner awareness of myself something separate from my body? In what began as a series of essays in The New York Review of Books, John Searle evaluates the positions on consciousness of such well-known scientists and philosophers as Francis Crick, Gerald Edelman, Roger Penrose, Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers, and Israel Rosenfield. He challenges claims that the mind works like a computer, and that brain functions can be reproduced by computer programs. With a sharp eye for confusion and contradiction, he points out which avenues of current research are most likely to come up with a biological examination of how conscious states are caused by the brain. Only when we understand how the brain works will we solve the mystery of consciousness, and only then will we begin to understand issues ranging from artificial intelligence to our very nature as human beings.

John R. Searle

John R. Searle PDF

Author: Dirk Franken

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2013-05-02

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 3110326183

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John R. Searle is one of the world's leading philosophers. During his long and outstanding career, he has made groundbreaking and lasting contributions to the philosophy of language, to the philosophy of mind, as well as to the nature, structure, and functioning of social reality. This volume documents the 13th Münster Lectures on Philosophy with John R. Searle. It includes not only 11 critical papers on Searle’s philosophy and Searle's replies to the papers, but also an original article by John R. Searle on his overall philosophical enterprise entitled "The Basic Reality and the Human Reality". "I think Münster is probably unique among contemporary universities in its ability to produce such a high level of philosophical production from their philosophy students." - John R. Searle

Freedom and Neurobiology

Freedom and Neurobiology PDF

Author: John R. Searle

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 0231137524

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"In the second half of the book, Searle applies his theory of social reality to the problem of political power, explaining the role of language in the formation of our political reality. The institutional structures that organize, empower, and regulate our lives - money, property, marriage, government - consist in the assignment and collective acceptance of certain statuses to objects and people. Whether it is the president of the United States, a twenty-dollar bill, or private property, these entities perform functions as determined by their status in our institutional reality. Searle focuses on the political powers that exist within these systems of status functions and the way in which language constitutes them."--BOOK JACKET.

The Rediscovery of the Mind

The Rediscovery of the Mind PDF

Author: John R. Searle

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1992-07-08

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780262261135

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In this major new work, John Searle launches a formidable attack on current orthodoxies in the philosophy of mind. More than anything else, he argues, it is the neglect of consciousness that results in so much barrenness and sterility in psychology, the philosophy of mind, and cognitive science: there can be no study of mind that leaves out consciousness. What is going on in the brain is neurophysiological processes and consciousness and nothing more—no rule following, no mental information processing or mental models, no language of thought, and no universal grammar. Mental events are themselves features of the brain, "like liquidity is a feature of water." Beginning with a spirited discussion of what's wrong with the philosophy of mind, Searle characterizes and refutes the philosophical tradition of materialism. But he does not embrace dualism. All these "isms" are mistaken, he insists. Once you start counting types of substance you are on the wrong track, whether you stop at one or two. In four chapters that constitute the heart of his argument, Searle elaborates a theory of consciousness and its relation to our overall scientific world view and to unconscious mental phenomena. He concludes with a criticism of cognitive science and a proposal for an approach to studying the mind that emphasizes the centrality of consciousness to any account of mental functioning. In his characteristically direct style, punctuated with persuasive examples, Searle identifies the very terminology of the field as the main source of truth. He observes that it is a mistake to suppose that the ontology of the mental is objective and to suppose that the methodology of a science of the mind must concern itself only with objectively observable behavior; that it is also a mistake to suppose that we know of the existence of mental phenomena in others only by observing their behavior; that behavior or causal relations to behavior are not essential to the existence of mental phenomena; and that it is inconsistent with what we know about the universe and our place in it to suppose that everything is knowable by us.

Minds, Brains and Science

Minds, Brains and Science PDF

Author: John R. Searle

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 116

ISBN-13: 9780674576339

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Six lectures discuss the mind-body problem, artificial intelligence, the workings of the brain, the mental aspect of human action, prediction of human behavior, and free will.