John Rogers Searle

1. John Rogers Searle LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL REALITY : CONTRIBUTIONS TO SPEECT ACT THEORY

2. John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932, in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and currently a Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. • Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959. • He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000 and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. • Among his notable concepts are the construction of social reality, language, and "Chinese room" argument against "strong" artificial intelligence.

3. For a comprehensive list of Searle’s works, see; • http://philpapers.org/s/John%20R.%20Searle

4. The claim is; • «Language is essentially constitutive of institutional reality» What does this mean?

5. Let’s start with his Speech Acts (1969): • Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe reality. • In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp.

6. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality.

7. REALITY: • physical reality (brute facts): providing foundation for the construction of social reality • social reality (institutional facts): the nature of its rules regulates the social world.

8. Social rules may be regulative or constitutive. • While regulative rules regulate an activity, constitutive rules may create the possibility of an activity, thus provide a structure for institutional facts.

9. Brute physical facts: rivers, trees, mountains, etc. • Mental facts: perceptions, feelings, judgements... Two important points: • Realism: There is a real world existing independently of our subjective ideas. • Correspondance Theory of Truth: The theory that statements are true if they correspond to facts in the real world and the shared facts.

10. Both physical and mental facts are required for the construct,on of social reality. • According to Searle, mental facts may be intentional or non-intentional : INTENTIONALITY • Intentional mental facts may be recognized by a single individual, or may be recognized by multiple individuals.

11. Intentional mental facts become social facts when they are recognized by many individuals. • Social facts are facts which are generally agreed upon, and which have collective intentionality. • While brute facts are objective, social facts may be both subjective and objective ( if they are commonly shared). • Think about a driver’s licence, a graduate’s diploma, etc.

12. Institutional reality requires language. • This means the existence of symbolic devices. • Therefore, there are language-dependent thoughts. They are bound to the social (as well as physical ) facts.

13. Searle: When you perform a speech act,then you create / maintaincertain institutional facts. (you create a miniature ‘civil society’).

14. Promises • ... are utterances which count as falling under the institutional concept act of promise, • The latter is itself logically tied to further concepts such as claim and obligation. • THEREFORE WE CAN DERIVE AN OUGHT FROM AN IS: • John promised to do p • John ought to do p

16. Social reality exists: • it is not a mere fiction

17. The Ontology of Social Reality • Social facts = facts involving collective intentionality • (manifestedalready among higher mammals) • Institutional facts = special kinds of social facts involving in addition a deontic component; • … they are facts which arise when human beings collectively award status functions to parts of reality, • which means: functions those parts of reality could not perform exclusively in virtue of their physical properties.

18. «You'll be more punctual in the future» • warning • threat • prediction • command • ???

19. This is theindependenceof Force and Content! • So what?

20. Can saying make it so?

21. Seven Components of Illocutionary Force • (1) Illocutionary point: This is the characteristic aim of each type of speech act. For instance, the characteristic aim of an assertion is to describe how things are; the characteristic point of a promise is to commit oneself to a future course of action.

22. 2. Degree of strength of the illocutionary point: • Two illocutions can have the same point but differ along the dimension of strength. For instance, requesting and insisting that the addressee do something both have the point of attempting to get the addressee to do that thing; however, the latter is stronger than the former.

23. 3. Mode of achievement: • This is the special way, if any, in which the illocutionary point of a speech act must be achieved. Testifying and asserting both have the point of describing how things are; however, the former also involves invoking one's authority as a witness while the latter does not. To testify is to assert in one's capacity as a witness. Commanding and requesting both aim to get the addressee to do something; yet only someone issuing a command does so in her capacity as a person in a position of authority.

24. 4. Propositional content conditions: • Some illocutions can only be achieved with an appropriate propositional content. For instance, I can only promise what is in the future and under my control. I can only apologize for what is in some sense under my control and already the case. For this reason, promising to make it the case that the sun did not rise yesterday is not possible; neither can I apologize for the truth of Snell's Law.

25. 5. Preparatory conditions: • These are all other conditions that must be met for the speech act not to misfire. Such conditions often concern the social status of interlocutors. For instance, a person cannot bequeath an object unless she already owns it or has power of attorney; a person cannot marry a couple unless she is legally invested with the authority to do so.

26. 6. Sincerity conditions: • Many speech acts involve the expression of a psychological state. Assertion expresses belief; apology expresses regret, a promise expresses an intention, and so on. A speech act is sincere only if the speaker is in the psychological state that her speech act expresses.

27. 7. Degree of strength of the sincerity conditions: • Two speech acts might be the same along other dimensions, but express psychological states that differ from one another in the dimension of strength. Requesting and imploring both express desires, and are identical along the other six dimensions above; however, the latter expresses a stronger desire than the former.

28. In addition to a given speech act, I am also performing an indirect speech act that seems to depend on my intentions. • My question whether you can pass the salt is also a request that you do so only if I intend to be so understood or if the listener conforms to my intention.

29. Forceof a speech act as an aspect of «Speaker Meaning»

30. In fact, Searle's account of indirect speech acts was in terms of conversational implicature. • The study of speech acts is in this respect intertwined with the study of conversations

31. In 1980, Searle presented the "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI. • Assume you do not speak Chinese and imagine yourself in a room with two slits, a book, and some scratch paper. Someone slides you some Chinese characters through the first slit, you follow the instructions in the book, write what it says on the scratch paper, and slide the resulting sheet out the second slit. To people on the outside world, it appears the room speaks Chinese—they slide Chinese statements in one slit and get valid responses in return—yet you do not understand a word of Chinese. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the thought experiment suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English: all which the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations.