52 Quotes by John Searle

Where questions of style and exposition are concerned I try to follow a simple maxim: if you can't say it clearly you don't understand it yourself

Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed

I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing

In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y; and so on

Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples

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.

The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.

Materialism ends up denying the existence of any irreducible subjective qualitative states of sentience or awareness.

Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The illusion could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purpose at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation required the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality