John Searle

Nicholas Fotion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317490159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

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'.

Part I
Philosophy of language

Chapter 1
Searle's speech act theory

Background

John Searle’s first major work, Speech Acts, appeared in 1969. By then, the tradition of language analysis within which it was framed had matured. Indeed, it was already in the second stage of development.

The first stage was strongly influenced by the many accomplishments of science. By the end of the nineteenth century, the revolutionary notion of “natural selection” developed by Charles Darwin in his The Origins of the Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871 had taken hold. Soon after, in 1905, Albert Einstein presented his special theory of relativity to the world, followed by his general theory in 1916. About the same time, electrons and other subatomic particles were discovered, and Max Planck and Niels Bohr developed their versions of the atomic and quantum theories. Science was on the move. If the changes in science that Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Harvey and others had brought about in earlier centuries were revolutionary, the more recent changes toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth were equally revolutionary.

The newer revolution differed from the older one in many ways. Science now was more mature. It had a history of success in many areas both on the theoretical as well as the practical level of engineering and medicine. Instruments of observation and measurement were more sophisticated than in the past. The newer science also had a broader base since psychology and the other social sciences had joined the family. Before the turn of the century, Wilhelm Wundt (1912) and others in Germany had taken the study of psychology out of the philosopher’s hands and placed it into those of the laboratory oriented psychologist.

However, it wasn’t long before Wundt’s form of laboratory research, which stressed introspection, was replaced by behaviourism. Now, John Watson (1919), the champion of behaviourism, could say that psychology is a proper science. Watson argued that the subject matter of psychology is external (human and animal) behaviour and that such a subject matter can be studied objectively. If, instead, psychology were defined as the study of inner mental phenomena or characterized in terms of what could only be known through (subjective) introspection, he thought that it was doomed never to be a science the way physics and chemistry are sciences.

Freud was also making his contributions to psychology at this time with his psychoanalytic theory. Although his work derived more from the medical setting rather than from the laboratory, and although it did not seem to be so objective as the work done by the behaviourists, it was, none the less, widely accepted as being both scientific and revolutionary. It was scientific insofar as what he discovered was based on clinical observations. But it was also revolutionary in that what he discovered suggested strongly that the mind possesses unconscious thoughts and forces, the importance of which had been grossly underestimated by almost everyone up to that time.

While all this was going on in psychology, Max Weber was doing what he could to turn sociology, if not into a laboratory science, at least into an empirical study. Understandably, in the glow of all these developments in the physical and the social sciences, there was optimism that all the individual sciences could be unified under the banner of science, and that scientific progress was inevitable. As part of this new revolution, there were even significant developments in fields of study related to but not strictly speaking part of science: viz., in logic and mathematics Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were among the many contributors. In addition to making direct contributions to these fields by presenting us with new systems of logic and mathematics, many of contributors to these fields (though not necessarily Russell and Whitehead) came to the view that claims made within these fields had a special status. They were viewed as nothing but language claims and, as such, not about any thing. What claims made within logic and mathematics tell us is how certain linguistic expressions relate to other linguistic expressions. Thus they were said to be quite different from those claims or assertions made within the sciences. The sciences use language to make “vertical” assertions about what is out there in the world. In contrast, logic and language were said to make “horizontal” assertions. So if one says “If x, then y” this is just another way of saying “If not y, then not x”, or if one says “Not not x” this is just another way of saying “x”. Also if one says “I have four apples” this is the same as, or equivalent to, saying “I have two apples plus two more”, or even “I have three apples plus one more”. These claims containing “if–then”, “and” and “plus” were taken as telling us something about the meaning of these expressions.

In so far, then, as the studies of logic, mathematics and even the meaning of terms are studies of language, and in so far as it was evident that these studies help us to think more clearly about whatever problems face us, it seemed plausible to pay more attention to language than had been done in the past. That is, if logic and mathematics are the instruments by which we think, it was thought that must be important to look carefully at these instruments in order to understand better how they work, and how they can help us to improve our thinking. It didn’t take much imagination to extend this outlook to language in general. What was also needed, it was said, was a better understanding of the meaning of all sorts of concepts that we use when we engage in serious thinking about any subject matter. An aspect of this outlook was that if we failed to engage in this analysis of language, we would probably fall into error when doing philosophy, theoretical work in the sciences and, in fact, when doing any sort of serious thinking.

Quite naturally many of those who took this “linguistic turn” (Rorty 1970) early in the twentieth century, directed their attention first and foremost to the language of science. After all, they had a strong admiration for science and, in fact, many of them were even making contributions to one or other of the sciences. Further, the startling successes of the various sciences suggested that the use of language within the sciences was different from, and probably superior to, the use of language found in the street. Street, or ordinary, language, was viewed as full of ambiguity, vagueness, inconsistency and was said as well to be replete with unscientific and anti-scientific concepts. As an instrument of thinking, ordinary talk was worse than unhelpful. It actually muddled our thinking. One of the many ways it did this was by encouraging us to reify concepts. Because expressions such as “the average man”, “the mind”, and “red” often appear as nouns in ordinary language sentences, it was said that we are tempted to suppose (wrongly) that the average man really exists someplace (surely someplace near the centre of our country), that there is such an entity as the mind or soul (that separates from the body at death), and that there is an entity such as redness out there some place (perhaps in the world of Ideas).

In contrast, when employed by the great scientists, scientific language adheres more closely to logical principles, uses mathematics properly, defines its terms more carefully, and closely ties our use of these terms to observation. Because it does all these things, scientific language approaches being an ideal language. Not surprisingly, when we use it rather than ordinary language, it was thought that we would be less prone to fall into error.

Quite naturally as well, if the focus of analysis at this time was on scientific uses of language, heavy emphasis was inevitably placed on understanding what scientists do when they describe some event or process. Science uses language mainly to issue descriptive claims about the past, present and the future. These claims can be specific in the form of a temperature reading, a report about the height of a plant or one concerning the number of people in a room. Or they can be general in the form of some law of science such as that gases expand when heated or that learning is facilitated the more it is rewarded. Scientific claims can be theoretical in nature as well. Indeed, much of the progress in the sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was measured by the proliferation of theories – the theory of evolution, relativity theory, atomic theory, quantum theory, psychoanalytic theory and so on. But no matter what kind of claims were being made within science, since they were based directly or indirectly on observation, they were thus assessable as either true or false. As such, they earned the status of synthetic (informative) claims.

But, as viewed at the time, there were also analytic claims to consider. These were also said to be assessable on a true–false dimension. However, their status on this dimension is determined not by observation but simply by an analysis of the terms in these claims, that is, by an internal (i.e. “horizontal”) analysis of the sentences themselves. Logical and mathematical claims were, of course, included under this analytic heading. But so were other claims. If my uncle really is my uncle, I know (analytically, that is, by the meaning of “uncle”) that he cannot be the mother of my cousins. Similarly, I know that nothing can be a square triangle, not by observation, but by analyzing the meaning of “triangle” and “square”. And, finally, I know (analytically) that if something is red it has to be coloured.

In the hands of those who formed what was called the Vienna Circle (e.g. Rudolph Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick. Friedrich Waisman), and some of their allies (e.g. A. J. Ayer, C. W. Morris) in the 1920s and 1930s many of these thoughts led to further thoughts – ones that sounded more radical. For these philosophers, who later came to be called Logical Positivists (or even Logical Empiricists), only certain claims counted as meaningful. They were willing to count the synthetic claims of science (and those of everyday observation) as meaningful since being able to make such claims is what contributed to science’s success. They could also count as meaningful the analytic claims of logic and mathematics since these, after all, formed the basis for how we think. But, for the Positivists, it seemed that if we made any other kinds of claim we would be talking nonsense. Listen to Ayer as he (in)famously tells us about his version of the Positivist principle of verification – the principle that was supposed to tell us which sentences are to count as meaningful, and which not.

The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express – that is, he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. If, on the other hand, the putative proposition is of such a character that the assumption of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever concerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it is, if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition. The sentence expressing it may be emotionally significant to him; but it is not literally significant.

(Ayer 1952: 35).

Thus, to Ayer’s way of thinking, claims made in art criticism, ethics, philosophy, and religion are meaningless. They are neither true nor false. This is to say that they are not rationally assessable in any fashion. They are allegedly more akin to screams of pleasure and displeasure than anything else. Those who make these meaningless claims think otherwise of course, but for Ayer all this shows is that they are not thinking clearly.

The second stage of the analytic movement was in clear reaction to such extreme claims. The criticism of the Positivists and their allies came from many directions. Even during the Positivist heyday there were some who thought that scientific language (and research) was not the exclusive possessor of meaningfulness. Early in the twentieth century, G. E. Moore and a bit later Gilbert Ryle thought that our street language made more sense than the Positivists would allow and, as a result, it too was worthy of study. After all, it was the language most of us use when we think about various matters in our lives. In addition, it didn’t seem to them that it was quite so flawed as the Positivists thought. So, giving barely a nod in the direction of the impressive developments in science, logic and mathematics, these philosophers came to the conclusion that much of the philosophy done in the past could be purged of many of its errors if more attention were to be paid to ordinary language. For them, ordinary linguistic (or conceptual) mistakes led to bad philosophy. Others joined this line of thinking after World War II including Paul Grice, R. M. Hare, H. L. A. Hart and Peter Strawson.

But, more than any others, it was Ludwig Wittgenstein, after he had broken with the Logical Positivists, and John Austin who saved ordinary language from the Positivist dustbin that they reserved for meaningless claims. Both argued that ordinary language can do more than enable us to make descriptive claims. Wittgenstein made this point by saying in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) that we can play what seemed like an indefinite number of “language games” within ordinary language. He said that engaging in scientific activity is not a single language game, but is itself a host of different games (i.e. linguistic activities). But, in addition, he said there are non-science games we can play with language. We can give directions, make promises and so on. Austin said much the same in How to do Things with Words (1975) in a more systematic way. In that book he argues that utterances such as “I promise to meet you at the park” are not assessable as either true or false. Yet he says that they are perfectly meaningful since they are assessable as well formed or ill-formed in other ways. He then tells his readers how to make these assessments. For example, a necessary condition for making a well formed promise is that the one making it possess the ability to carry it out. Another necessary condition is that what is promised takes place in the future. It would be an ill-formed promise if I promised today to do something for you yesterday. Commands such as “I command you to do as I say” are also meaningful, but they too are not assessable as true or false. Austin again goes on to tell us how they can be assessed. Thus a necessary condition for making a command is that the one issuing it must have some sort of authority over the one commanded. If the private “commanded” the general, we would either laugh or be seriously concerned about private’s career opportunities in the forces.

Austin goes on to argue that other allegedly meaningless utterances have meaning. He discusses “Hello”, “You are excommunicated”, “I pronounce you man and wife”, “Please help me” and scores more. Of course, for Austin, the favoured claims of the Positivists are also meaningful. He calls them constatives initially, and contrasts them with the variety of utterances to which he is fixing our attention. He calls all these other utterances, performatives. Performatives get their name because it seems to Austin that these uses of language are “doings” or linguistic performances. In making a promise Sam, the speaker, puts on a linguistic performance and, if the situation is right, suddenly finds himself bound to doing something in the future for someone – usually the one to whom the promise was made.

Late in the book Austin puts all his cards on the table. He says that constatives (true and false claims) are performatives as well, since uttering a true or false claim such as “(I say) the grass is green” is as much a doing as is “I promise to mow the lawn”. So, in the end, all uses of language are performatives. But, since it is clearer than before that there are different kinds of performatives, he feels obliged to identify what kinds there are in order to tell us how they are alike and unlike one another. It is as if, once he realized how subtle, diverse and powerful the language to which we are married is, what it needs is understanding, not divorce.

Enter John Searle

It is in this setting, then, that we begin to see what Searle is up to in Speech Acts. By 1969 the terminology but not the subject matter had changed. Instead of talking about performatives (in language use), the expression “speech acts” had come into fashion. Austin had discovered speech acts and told us many interesting things about them. He had done the exploratory work. Searle, Austin’s student, set himself the task of carrying on his mentor’s work by presenting a more complete and systematic account of speech acts.

Before examining Searle’s account of these acts it is helpful to make two preliminary comments. The first deals with subject matter. Searle makes it clear up front that the main focus of Speech Acts is the philosophy of language, not linguistic philosophy (1969: 3–4). The latter is a method for dealing with philosophic problems. If we engage in language analysis in order to understand better the mind/body problem, the relationship between science and ethics, the nature of reality (ontology) and how we come to know anything (epistemology), we are doing linguistic philosophy. The study of philosophy of language might eventually help us to do (linguistic) philosophy so it is certainly important to engage in such a study. Nonetheless, our attention in the study of philosophy of language is on language itself....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Philosophy of language
• 1 Searle's speech act theory
• 2 Searle's taxonomic theory
• 3 Non-standard speech acts and speech activity
• 4 Metaphor and fiction
• Part II Philosophy of mind
• 5 Intentionality of mind and language
• 6 Network and Background in mental states and language
• 7 Rediscovering the mind
• 8 Cognitive psychology and the unconscious
• III Philosophy of society and other matters
• 9 Social reality
• 10 Institutions
• 11 Ontology
• 12 Truth, representation and epistemology
• 13 Summing up
• Bibliography
• Index