John Searle

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Searle (2005)

John Rogers Searle ( IPA : [ / sɜrl / ]) (born July 31, 1932 in Denver , Colorado ) is an American philosopher . His main areas of work are the philosophy of language , the philosophy of the mind , social ontology and parts of metaphysics . Searle was a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley .

Life

Searle's father was GW Searle, an electrical engineer at AT&T , and his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a medical professional. Searle began studying philosophy, political science, and economics at the University of Wisconsin in 1949 at the age of seventeen . From 1952 he continued it with a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford University . Here he attended events by John Langshaw Austin and Peter Strawson . In Oxford, Searle taught at Christ Church College from 1956 to 1959 . With his dissertation on meaning and reference supervised by Peter Geach , Searle earned his Ph.D. In the same year, when he was not even 30, he was appointed professor at the renowned University of California, Berkeley . He was a member of the philosophy faculty there for more than 50 years.

In Berkeley, Searle supported the emerging student protests and became the first full-time professor to participate in the Free Speech Movement . In 1969 Searle published his main work Speech Acts on the philosophy of language , which, among other things, had a deep impact on linguistics . In the following years, Searle turned to other topics, including the philosophy of mind, in which he repeatedly criticized reductionist approaches. In 2000 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize for his work in this field . In 2013 he was appointed to the Albertus Magnus Professorship at the University of Cologne . He was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977 and the American Philosophical Society in 2010.

Sexualized violence

In March 2017 it became public that Searle was accused of sexual violence against a 24-year-old employee. In this context, several other corresponding cases became known. The director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology said Searle had had sexual relationships with female students on multiple occasions in exchange for academic and financial benefits. UC Berkeley was charged with inappropriately responding and covering up the incidents. In 2019, UC Berkeley's board of directors found Searle guilty of molesting a former student and staff member in 2016, after which he was stripped of his university membership and professor emeritus status.

Services

Philosophy of language

Speech acts and everyday language

Together with John L. Austin , William P. Alston , Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish, Searle is considered to be an important proponent of speech act theory .

Speech act theory, according to Searle, is critical to a theory of linguistic meaning based on assumptions such as the following: “To speak is to perform speech acts - acts such as speaking. B. make assertions, give orders, ask questions, make promises, etc., and on a more abstract level acts such as pointing and predicting - and that the possibility of these acts in general is based on certain rules for the use of linguistic elements and the execution of these acts on these Rules follow. "

Language rules

In his remarks on speech acts, Searle often speaks about rules and is thus probably in the tradition of Wittgenstein , who linked the meanings of speech acts with their rules of use. It adopts the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules introduced by GCJ Midgley in Linguistic Rules (1959). According to this, constitutive rules constitute new modes of behavior, while regulative rules regulate existing modes of action. For example, road traffic is guided by rules, but none of these rules is a necessary condition for road traffic. In contrast to this, the rules of the game of chess are constitutive: Whoever does not follow the rules of playing chess cannot play chess, at best he can play another game on a chess board. Also following Midgley's "Linguistic Rules", Searle also claims that language is also constituted by constitutive rules, which makes the concept of rule the central element of Searle's theory of meaning. He explains that "speaking a language means performing speech acts in accordance with systems of constitutive rules."

Although the recourse to rules is probably based on Wittgenstein's late philosophy, there are important differences between the two philosophers: Searle would like to formulate a system of linguistic rules, while Wittgenstein would have rejected such a systematic approach to everyday language as illusory. The systematic efforts of Searle have been very productive for linguistic research, but remain controversial as a language-philosophical project.

To this day, the claim that linguistic meaning consists in the existence of (constitutive or other) rules remains controversial. It can be asked how one should imagine the origin and validity of such linguistic rules. These rules, it can be argued, were never explicitly formulated or recorded (in contrast to game or traffic rules). Rather, the language rules must be implicit in practice . A competent speaker can follow the rules of his language without knowing these rules explicitly. These problems have led Donald Davidson , for example , to reject the term rule. Robert Brandom , on the other hand, sticks to the concept of rules and tries to show how linguistic rules result from communal practice. In his work, Matthias Ohler explicitly referred to the methodological status of the concept of rules as an offer of comparison in Wittgenstein's philosophy and to the systematic problems that one deals with when one turns it into a technical concept of rules, as is the case in Searle's speech act theory and related schools of thought (Noam Chomskys Universal grammar, for example) happens. In this way, the absurd claim must be made that one can follow rules without being able to formulate them (regardless of any degree of accuracy of the formulation) (cf. Ohler, Matthias: Sprache und their rationale. Wittgenstein contra Searle, Cologne 1988).

Illocutionary acts

Following John L. Austin, Searle claims that the illocutionary act is a central aspect of any speech act. What exactly this aspect consists of remains unclear with Searle. In any case, this aspect is supplemented by a propositional structure, the investigation of which the philosophy of language had limited itself for a long time. In speech act theory, a proposition is understood to be the content of a speech act that relates to the world. In German, propositions can be expressed with the clause that p . Examples are that Napoleon was cruel or that grass is green . For a complete description of the speech act, a specification of an illocutionary act type must be added to the specification of the proposition. Some examples: One can hope, assert, promise, or fear that p . Due to these different illocutionary aspects, very different speech acts can be carried out with the same proposition. Searle makes this clear with the following example:

  1. Sam is a habitual smoker.
  2. Does Sam habitually smoke?
  3. Sam, habitually smoke!
  4. Wouldn't Sam habitually smoke?

All of these descriptions express the same proposition that Sam is a habitual smoker. However, they differ in their illocutionary aspects: In the first sentence it is asserted , in the following it is asked , ordered and desired . Searle now tries to work out the rules of the various illocutionary acts. To this end, he presents his analysis of an (assumed) illocutionary act, namely, the promise . For an act of speech to be a promise, numerous conditions must be met. Some examples: In order to be able to promise p to a person, the addressee must prefer p to the absence of p - otherwise we would be dealing with a threat and not a promise. A promise also includes the intention to perform an action. According to Searle, all these conditions contain the constitutive rules of language, which have to be discovered and described.

Propositional acts

Searle's definition of the propositional act does not coincide with Austin's concept of the rhetorical act . The main difference is that Austin's rhetorical act is an aspect of pure "saying something", while Searle's propositional act is an aspect of the speech act (it is generally accepted that a speech act is performed 'with the aid of' saying something, so it goes much further than that ). The propositional act can be determined "as what the communication act is about", (that is, what is asked about a question, what is asserted in an assertion, etc.) one also speaks of the "propositional content". The propositional act is divided into the two acts of reference and predication .

Philosophy of mind

Intentionality

Franz Brentano introduced the problem of intentionality into modern philosophy

The phenomenon of intentionality is, according to Searle's own view, the link between his philosophy of language and his philosophy of mind. The concept of intentionality was introduced into the modern philosophical debate by Franz Brentano . Brentano defined “intentionality” as the characteristic of the directionality of mental states. What this means is that mental states on issues in the world relate , then about concerns the idea that Napoleon was a politician to the facts that Napoleon was a politician. Thoughts can only be true or false through this form of reference : If the thought relates to an existing state of affairs, then it is true. If the facts do not exist (for example the thought that Napoleon was a giant), then the thought is wrong.

In his book Intentionality (1987), published in 1983 , Searle, following the works of Paul Grice and others, focuses his attention on the phenomenon of intentionality. In speech acts, too, says Searle, intentionality plays a central role, since speech acts without the intentional reference of the communication participants could have no meaning. If the utterances of the speakers were to arise by chance in the universe without an intentional causer, then these would only be sound waves without meaning. Intentionality is therefore a necessary condition for meaning and at the same time only given to certain living beings .

The debate about intentionality has been dominated in the last 20 years by the question of reductionism in particular . Reductionists propose that all phenomena can ultimately be explained by a scientific description. The reductionist thesis also includes consciousness and intentionality. Searle has strongly opposed reductionist efforts: On the one hand, he has criticized the attribution of intentionality to computers or robots. According to Searle, such claims are fundamentally wrong. On the other hand, Searle tries to bind intentional states so closely to experience ( qualia ) that the assumed irreducibility of experience states is transferred to intentional states.

Artificial intelligence

The correct understanding of the phenomenon of intentionality has implications for the basic theory of artificial intelligence (AI). The computer pioneer Alan Turing formulated the Turing test in 1950 as an answer to the question of whether machines can think. According to Turing, a computer can think precisely when, in a written conversation (a chat ), it can deceive a person that he is not a person. According to Searle, this Turing test is not enough to speak thoughts to a computer. According to Searle, such a computer would only behave like a person , but would not mean or think anything itself. For such mental processes, according to Searle, intentionality is necessary that goes beyond behavior. To support this critical perspective, Searle has developed an argument to prove the failure of the Turing Test. This thought experiment , known as the Chinese room, begins with the assumption of a library. In this library there is a person who is handed pieces of paper with Chinese characters. The person doesn't understand Chinese. However, there are transformation rules in the books in the library: The person searches the books for the character string on the slip of paper and writes the new character string specified in the book on a new slip of paper. She is now giving it out from the library. The joke about the thought experiment is that the books match the incoming Chinese sentences with other Chinese sentences. For a Chinese observer outside the library, this creates the impression of correct communication: Correct Chinese sentences, such as questions, are written on pieces of paper handed to the library. The pieces of paper handed out from the library have appropriate Chinese sentences, such as the answers to the questions. The Chinese room would therefore pass the Turing test.

Yet nobody in the library understands Chinese, neither the person nor the library. According to Searle, the library and the person together do not understand Chinese either. According to Searle, this shows that passing the Turing test is not enough to understand language. In principle, a computer does nothing else than the Chinese room: it transforms character strings into new character strings according to given, purely syntactic rules, without understanding their semantics . But if, in the case of the Chinese room, this is not enough for thought, then it is not foreseeable how a thinking computer will ever come into being.

Searle draws the conclusion from his thought experiment that a distinction must be made between a weak and a strong AI. Weak AI tries to simulate human behavior and solve problems that humans can only cope with with intelligence . According to Searle, such a project is perfectly legitimate. The strong AI, on the other hand, wants to build thinking computers. Artificial intelligence advocates reacted differently, if at all, to this argument. Some researchers limit themselves to the weak AI. Others reject Searle's thought experiment. Some say, for example, that the Chinese room as a whole would actually understand Chinese. Opposing intuition is based on the fact that one does not understand the complexity of such a system.

Theory of Consciousness

As a result of his work on intentionality and artificial intelligence, Searle has also increasingly sought a general theory of consciousness . On the one hand, he sees himself in the tradition of naturalism and claims that consciousness should be viewed as a completely normal, biological phenomenon. At the same time, Searle is a sharp critic of reductionism and explains that the subjective perspective of experience can never be dealt with through a scientific description. Because of his naturalistic beliefs, Searle wants to distance himself from dualistic philosophers who see consciousness as an immaterial phenomenon. However, its anti-reductionist orientation also prohibits the identification of mental states with neural processes. Searle tries to avoid this dilemma by explaining that mental states are caused by biological states.

However, the causal interaction of mind and brain is a typical element of dualistic theories, as René Descartes claimed that the biological processes at a certain point in the brain (pineal gland) act on the mind. Searle wants to distance himself from such theories and explains that in the case of consciousness one has to start from another form of causation. Consciousness is a higher level property of complex biological systems and not an immaterial entity . At the same time, however, Searle sharply rejects epiphenomenalist views and describes himself as a representative of naive realism .

Such a position is attractive because it promises to circumvent the problems of dualism and physicalism. Despite this attractiveness, it is often objected that Searle's biological naturalism cannot be coherently combined with his anti-reductionism. If consciousness - as Searle claims - is an unproblematic biological phenomenon, then it is incomprehensible how consciousness can have a subjective component that cannot be grasped by biology.

criticism

One of the critics to be mentioned is Hubert Dreyfus . Dreyfus was particularly concerned with the reception of Heidegger's work in the USA . He juxtaposes a “Husserl-searleschen” line of tradition and its understanding of intentionality with Heidegger's concept of the world and of being-in-the-world.

In Being and Time, Heidegger tried to show that Dasein (man) is never a worldless subject, self-sufficient as it were, which only then directs its mind to things in the world. Heidegger makes this clear above all by emphasizing the primacy of practice over theory: humans first deal with things by handling and using them; only under certain circumstances does he even develop an awareness of this self-image. Dreyfus gives the following example: When we leave a room, we naturally turn the door handle, open the door and go outside. Only when the door handle is broken (Heidegger describes such a case as a “deficient mode of at-hand”) do we become aware that we are trying to get out . Only in such a situation does the world break up for us into an intentional subject (with the desire to get out) and an object (the defective door handle). Only then is a theory of the spirit built on, which is directed to things in the world. Dreyfus emphasizes that Heidegger would not say what Searle states is wrong, but Heidegger claims to investigate a more primal phenomenon.

Dreyfus also opposes Searle's concept of the background of understanding to Heidegger's being-in-the-world. Searle also assumes that we need a background of understanding in order to deal with things appropriately, but with Searle this is again only a mental content. From Heidegger's perspective, this would not solve the problem of how the mental understanding background relates in turn to the world. On the other hand, Heidegger wants to break radically with such structures by combining world and existence as one: Dasein always has a world - in other words: the world is only when there is also existence. The main difference here is that Heidegger represents an ontological concept.

In the paper Limits of Phenomenology , Searle takes a position on Dreyfus' criticism. He points out that this is primarily due to misunderstandings with regard to his philosophy, for example that it neither fits into a Husserlian tradition nor that his investigation of intentionality starts from a self- sufficient subject who is opposed to an independent object. Likewise, actions taken for granted, of which one is not directly aware, do not constitute unconscious, i.e. H. This is how a tennis player, who is asked what he has just done, can precisely and confidently explain that he has played tennis, even if he has thought of something else while playing.

Searle goes further by reproaching phenomenology in general, and Heidegger's use of it in particular, for exhibiting considerable weaknesses as a philosophical method. By only asking how something appears to the agent, phenomenology stops early instead of investigating the phenomenon further, thereby simply ignoring questions that logical analysis raises. Heidegger is also accused of a systematic ambiguity between phenomenology and ontology, which leads to contradictions with regard to the reality of the world.

other topics

The construction of social realities

Searle describes the central theme of his ontology of social phenomena as follows:

“A puzzling phenomenon of social reality is the fact that it only exists because we think it exists. It's an objective fact that the piece of paper in my hand is a $ 20 bill, that I am a citizen of the United States, or that the Giants beat the Athletics 3-2 in yesterday's baseball game. All of these are objective facts in the sense that they do not depend on my opinion. If I believe the opposite, I'm just wrong. But these objective facts only exist through mutual acceptance or recognition. "

Searle's goal is to understand how objective facts in the world can depend on human approval and how such facts arise in the first place. He makes use of the philosophical tools that he has developed in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of spirit to explain. In particular, the concepts of intentionality and the constitutive rule appear again at a central point in Searle's philosophy of society. Searle claims to be able to explain the construction of social realities through three basic processes:

  1. Collective Intentionality: The ability to cooperate and have a common intention. Examples: playing an instrument as part of an orchestra, playing football as part of a team.
  2. Attribution of functions: Ascribing a function to an entity that it does not have by itself. Examples: ascribing the function of a chair to a tree stump, stone as a hammer.
  3. Constitutive rules: In contrast to regulative rules, constitutive rules enable the behavior that they regulate. In a community, constitutive rules result from the interplay of collective intentionality and the ascription of functions: One can ascribe a function to an object that is not based on physical properties, but on the common recognition of the object as something else. Example: Due to its physical properties, a wall can be assigned the function of a border. But one can also ascribe this function to a line if the community recognizes the line as a limit. The limit would thus only be constituted by a social rule.

Realism and relativism

The central role of the concept of construction in Searle's ontology of social phenomena suggests that he can also be called a constructivist in general . However, this is not the case; Searle would like constructivist theses to be limited to the realm of social reality. The decisive factor here is Searle's distinction between observer- dependent and observer- independent phenomena. The social world consists of observer-dependent phenomena, which is why one can speak of the construction of social realities. In contrast, the natural sciences describe observer independent phenomena that are consequently not constructed.

This critical attitude towards generally constructivist positions refers to a general philosophical position for which Searle has campaigned strongly in recent years: Searle tries to defend traditional and strong readings of the concepts of truth , reality and rationality against relativising philosophical currents. He considers some forms of real or supposed relativism by authors such as Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida to be not only philosophically implausible, but also politically dangerous, while he explicitly defends other forms - such as conceptual relativism . Philosophically, Searle argues in particular that without our traditional concepts of truth, reality and rationality our linguistic practices would not be understandable at all. Rorty countered this transcendental argument with the following:

"Wherever Searle sees conditions of intelligibility or prerequisites, I see rhetorical flourishes, which are intended to give the users of the practices in question the feeling that they are loyally clinging to a mighty and strong cause, namely the inner essence of reality."

Fonts

  • Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University, London 1969.
    • German: Speech Acts: An essay on the philosophy of language. Translated by R. and R. Wiggershaus. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1971.
  • Editor of The Philosophy of Language. Oxford University, London 1971, ISBN 0-19-875015-3 .
  • A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts. Laut, Trier 1976.
  • Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1979, ISBN 0-521-22901-4 .
    • German Translation by Andreas Kemmerling: Expression and meaning: Studies on speech act theory. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp 1982, ISBN 3-518-27949-1 .
  • Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Reidel, Dordrecht 1980, ISBN 90-277-1043-0 .
  • Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983, ISBN 0-521-22895-6 .
    • German Translation: Intentionality: A Treatise on the Philosophy of Mind. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1987, ISBN 3-518-57814-6 .
  • Minds, Brains and Science. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1984, ISBN 0-674-57631-4 .
    • German Translation by Harvey P. Gavagai: Mind, Brain and Science. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 1984. ISBN 978-3-518-28191-8 .
  • with Daniel Vanderveken: Foundations of Illocutionary Logic. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985, ISBN 0-521-26324-7 .
  • The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press 1992, ISBN 0-262-69154-X .
    • German Translation by Harvey P. Gavagai: The Rediscovery of the Mind. Artemis and Winkler, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-7608-1944-3 .
  • Rationality and Realism, or What's at Stake. In: Mercury. German magazine for European thinking. 48th volume - issue 542 May 1994 ( online-merkur.de ).
  • The Construction of Social Reality. Free Press, New York 1995, ISBN 0-02-928045-1 .
    • German Translation: The Construction of Social Reality: On the Ontology of Social Facts. Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-55587-5 .
  • Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World. Basic Books, Philadelphia 1997, ISBN 0-465-04521-9 .
    • German Translated by Harvey P. Gavagai: Spirit, Language and Society. Philosophy in the real world. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-518-29270-6 .
  • The Mystery of Consciousness. Granta Books, London 1997, ISBN 1-86207-074-1 .
  • Rationality in Action. MIT Press, Cambridge 2001, ISBN 0-262-19463-5 .
  • Consciousness and Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002, ISBN 0-521-59237-2 .
  • Freedom and neurobiology. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2004, ISBN 3-518-58398-0 .
  • Mind: A Brief Introduction. Oxford University Press, New York 2004, ISBN 0-19-515733-8 .
    • German Translated by Sibylle Salewski: Geist: An introduction. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 2006, ISBN 3-518-58472-3 .
  • Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2010.
    • German Translated by Joachim Schulte: How we make the social world: The structure of human civilization, Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-518-58578-9 .
  • Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception. Oxford University Press, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-938515-7 .

Secondary literature

  • Jacques Derrida: Limited Inc. Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2001, ISBN 3-85165-055-7 .
  • Friedrich Christoph Doerge: Illocutionary Acts - Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It.Tübingen University, Tübingen ( download ).
  • Nick Fotion: John Searle. Acumen, Teddington 2000, ISBN 1-902683-08-0 .
  • Michael Kober, Jan G. Michel: John Searle. mentis, Paderborn 2011, ISBN 978-3-89785-509-0 .
  • David Koepsell, Laurence S. Moss (Eds.): John Searle's Ideas about Social Reality: Extensions, Criticisms and Reconstructions. Blackwell, Malden, MA. 2003, ISBN 1-4051-1258-1 .
  • Matthias Ohler: Language and its rationale. Wittgenstein versus Searle. janus, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-938076-24-0 .
  • John Preston, Mark Bishop (Eds.): Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence. Clarendon Press, Oxford 2002, ISBN 0-19-925277-7 .
  • Stephen R. Schiffer: Meaning. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1973, ISBN 0-19-824367-7 .
  • Barry Smith (Ed.): John Searle. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-521-79288-6 .
  • Dirk Franken, Attila Karakus & Jan G. Michel (Eds.): John R. Searle: Thinking about the Real World. ontos, Frankfurt 2010, ISBN 978-3-86838-096-5 .

Web links

Commons : John Searle  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
Wikiquote: John Searle  - Quotes

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Individual evidence

  1. ^ Andreas Kemmerling: John R. Searle . In: Julian Nida-Rümelin (ed.): Philosophy of the Present in Individual Representations. From Adorno to v. Wright (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 423). Kröner, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-520-42301-4 , p. 551.
  2. ^ University of Cologne, Faculty of Philosophy, Albertus Magnus Professorship , accessed on May 7, 2013
  3. ↑ Tessa Watanabe: Lawsuit alleges did a UC Berkeley professor sexually assaulted his researcher and cut her pay When She rejected him . In: Los Angeles Times , March 23, 2017. Retrieved March 28, 2017. 
  4. ↑ Malaika Fraley: Berkeley: Renowned philosopher John Searle accused of sexual assault and harassment at UC Berkeley . In: East Bay Times , March 23, 2017. Retrieved March 28, 2017. 
  5. ^ Katie JM Baker, UC Berkeley Was Warned About Its Star Professor Years Before Sexual Harassment Lawsuit . In: BuzzFeedNews , April 7, 2017. Retrieved April 8, 2017. 
  6. ↑ Katie JM Baker: A Former Student Says UC Berkeley's Star Philosophy Professor Groped Her And Watched Porn At Work . In: BuzzFeedNews , March 24, 2017. Retrieved March 28, 2017. 
  7. ↑ Emily Tate: Earlier Complaints on Professor Accused of Harassment . In: Inside Higher Ed , April 10, 2017. 
  8. ^ Justin Weinberg, Searle Found to Have Violated Sexual Harassment Policies (Updated with further details and statement from Berkeley). In: Dailynous. June 21, 2019, accessed June 23, 2019 .
  9. ↑ a b Searle: Speech Acts. P. 30.
  10. ^ Searle: Speech Acts. P. 61.
  11. ↑ Donald Davidson: Communication and Convention In: Truth and Interpretation Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1986, ISBN 3-518-28496-7 .
  12. ^ Robert Brandom: Expressive Reason: Justification, Representation and Discursive Determination Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-518-58360-3 .
  13. ^ Searle: The rediscovery of the mind. P. 178.
  14. ^ Searle: Minds, brains and science.
  15. ^ Searle: Limits of Phenomenology ( RTF ; 56 kB).
  16. ^ Searle: Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles ( Memento of the original from May 1, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ( MS Word ; 103 kB). @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / ist-socrates.berkeley.edu
  17. ^ Searle: Rationality in action.
  18. ^ M. Seidel, A. Weber: Trivial, Platitudinous, Boring? Searle on Conceptual Relativism. In: Franken, D. et al .: John R. Searle. Frankfurt am Main: Ontos, pp. 143–162.
  19. ^ Richard Rorty: Searle on Realism and Relativism. In: Truth and Progress. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-518-29220-X .
  20. ↑ Review by Adam Gifford Jr. In: Journal of Bioeconomics 14, 2012, pp. 95-99.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on May 28, 2006 .
personal data
SURNAME Searle, John
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Searle, John Rogers (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH July 31, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Denver , Colorado