52 Quotes by John Searle

The Intentionality of the mind not only creates the possibility of meaning, but limits its forms.

How do we get from electrons to elections and from protons to presidents?

My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard...Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill...At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.

You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.

You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.

Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.