X Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2018

John Rogers Searle ( born 31 July 1932) is an American philosopher. He is currently Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. Early lifeSearle’s father was a business executive and his mother a physician. After moving several times, the family finally settled in Wisconsin. As a 19-year-old junior at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. After receiving a doctorate in philosophy in 1959, he left Oxford to join the faculty of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was eventually appointed Mills Professor of Philosophy and later Slusser Professor of Philosophy. Philosophy Speech acts Searle’s early work in the philosophy of language was an outgrowth of his study at Oxford under the ordinary-language philosopher J.L. Austin. In his 1955 William James Lectures at Harvard University, published posthumously as How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin criticized the tendency of analytic philosophers, especially adherents of the school of logical positivism, for supposing that there is only one basic kind of language use: that of making descriptive utterances (in speech or in writing) that are either true or false depending on how the world is. Focusing as they did on scientific discourse, the logical positivists went so far as to claim that an utterance is meaningful only if it is a tautology or such that it can be confirmed or disconfirmed (in principle) through experience; all other utterances are literally nonsense (see verifiability principle). Austin pointed out that descriptive utterances hardly exhaust the range of meaningful uses of language. They are only one of many kinds of performative utterance, or speech act ,which consist of social acts performed by means of linguistic utterances in appropriate circumstances. Other examples are orders, requests, promises, greetings, resignations, warnings, and dozens more. For most speech acts, the utterance through which the act is performed—e.g., “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth”—is neither true nor false, though the performance may be infelicitous in various ways, as when a person who is not authorized to name the ship cracks a champagne bottle against the bow and utters “I name this ship the Generalissimo Stalin.”

Intentionality and the backgroundAn important feature of the majority of mental states is that they have an “intentional” structure: they are intrinsically about, or directed toward, something. Thus, believing is necessarily believing that something is the case; desiring is necessarily desiring something; intending is necessarily intending to do something. Not all mental states are intentional, however: pain, for example, is not, and neither are many states of anxiety, elation, and depression.Speech acts are intentional in a derivative sense, insofar as they are expressive of intrinsically intentional mental states, including expressed psychological states and propositional contents. According to Searle, the derived intentionality of language accounts for the apparently mysterious capacity of words, phrases, and sentences to refer not only to things in the world but also to things that are purely imaginary or fictional.Although not all mental states are intentional, all of them, in Searle’s view, are conscious, or at least capable in principle of being conscious. Indeed, Searle maintains that the notion of an unconscious mental state is incoherent. He argues that, because consciousness is an intrinsically biological phenomenon, it is impossible in principle to build a computer that is conscious.

ConsciousnessBuilding upon his views about intentionality, Searle presents a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). He argues that, starting with behaviorism (an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle also dismisses), much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. In Intentionality, he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand:No one would think of saying, for example, "Having a hand is just being disposed to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping" (manual behaviorism), or "Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects" (manual functionalism), or "For a system to have a hand is just for it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs and outputs" (manual Turing machine functionalism), or "Saying that a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance toward it" (the manual stance). Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that, on the one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience.Searle says simply that both are true: consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain. Ontological subjectivitySearle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, but are not necessarily ontologically objective.Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is "epistemically subjective", whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is "epistemically objective." In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) that are ontologically subjective, i.e. can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science". The pain itself, however, is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality". His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism. Artificial intelligenceA consequence of biological naturalism is that if we want to create a conscious being, we will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.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, transcribing characters as instructed onto 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.Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the real targets of his critique. Functionalists argue that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if we wrote a computer program that was conscious, we could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion you build on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well you simulate fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are observer-relative: observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have causal efficacy and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program. Social realityIn The Construction of Social Reality (1995), Searle addresses the mystery of how social constructs like "baseball" or "money" can exist in a world consisting only of physical particles in fields of force. Adapting an idea by Elizabeth Anscombe in "On Brute Facts," Searle distinguishes between brute facts, like the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, like the score of a baseball game. Aiming at an explanation of social phenomena in terms of Anscombe's notion, he argues that society can be explained in terms of institutional facts, and institutional facts arise out of collective intentionality through constitutive rules with the logical form "X counts as Y in C". Thus, for instance, filling out a ballot counts as a vote in a polling place, getting so many votes counts as a victory in an election, getting a victory counts as being elected president in the presidential race, etc.Many sociologists, however, do not see Searle's contributions to social theory as very significant. Neil Gross, for example, argues that Searle's views on society are more or less a reconstitution of the sociologist Émile Durkheim's theories of social facts, social institutions, collective representations, and the like. Searle's ideas are thus open to the same criticisms as Durkheim's. Searle responded that Durkheim's work was worse than he had originally believed and, admitting he had not read much of Durkheim's work, said that, "Because Durkheim’s account seemed so impoverished I did not read any further in his work." Steven Lukes, however, responded to Searle's response to Gross and argued point by point against the allegations that Searle makes against Durkheim, essentially upholding Gross' argument that Searle's work bears great resemblance to Durkheim's. Lukes attributes Searle's miscomprehension of Durkheim's work to the fact that Searle never read Durkheim. RationalityIn Rationality in Action (2001), Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed. According to what he calls the Classical Model, rationality is seen as something like a train track: you get on at one point with your beliefs and desires and the rules of rationality compel you all the way to a conclusion. Searle doubts this picture of rationality holds generally.Searle briefly critiques one particular set of these rules: those of mathematical decision theory. He points out that its axioms require that anyone who valued a quarter and their life would, at some odds, bet their life for a quarter. Searle insists he would never take such a bet and believes that this stance is perfectly rational.Most of his attack is directed against the common conception of rationality, which he believes is badly flawed. First, he argues that reasons don't cause you to do anything, because having sufficient reason wills (but doesn't force) you to do that thing. So in any decision situation we experience a gap between our reasons and our actions. For example, when we decide to vote, we do not simply determine that we care most about economic policy and that we prefer candidate Jones's economic policy. We also have to make an effort to cast our vote. Similarly, every time a guilty smoker lights a cigarette they are aware of succumbing to their craving, not merely of acting automatically as they do when they exhale. It is this gap that makes us think we have freedom of the will. Searle thinks whether we really have free will or not is an open question, but considers its absence highly unappealing because it makes the feeling of freedom of will an epiphenomenon, which is highly unlikely from the evolutionary point of view given its biological cost. He also says: " All rational activity presupposes free will ".Second, Searle believes we can rationally do things that don't result from our own desires. It is widely believed that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", i.e. that facts about how the world is can never tell you what you should do ('Hume's Law'). By contrast, in so far as a fact is understood as relating to an institution (marriage, promises, commitments, etc.), which is to be understood as a system of constitutive rules, then what one should do can be understood as following from the institutional fact of what one has done; institutional fact, then, can be understood as opposed to the "brute facts" related to Hume's Law. For example, Searle believes the fact that you promised to do something means you should do it, because by making the promise you are participating in the constitutive rules that arrange the system of promise making itself, and therefore understand a "shouldness" as implicit in the mere factual action of promising. Furthermore, he believes that this provides a desire-independent reason for an action—if you order a drink at a bar, you should pay for it even if you have no desire to. This argument, which he first made in his paper, "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'" (1964), remains highly controversial, but even three decades later Searle continued to defend his view that "..the traditional metaphysical distinction between fact and value cannot be captured by the linguistic distinction between 'evaluative' and 'descriptive' because all such speech act notions are already normative."Third, Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting our (often inconsistent) patterns of desires to decide between outcomes, not the other way around. While in the Classical Model, one would start from a desire to go to Paris greater than that of saving money and calculate the cheapest way to get there, in reality people balance the niceness of Paris against the costs of travel to decide which desire (visiting Paris or saving money) they value more. Hence, he believes rationality is not a system of rules, but more of an adverb. We see certain behavior as rational, no matter what its source, and our system of rules derives from finding patterns in what we see as rational. PoliticsWhile an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". McCarthy was then the junior senator from Wisconsin. In 1959 Searle began teaching at Berkeley, and he was the first tenured professor to join the 1964–65 Free Speech Movement.In 1969, while serving as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California, he supported the university in its dispute with students over the People's Park. In The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971), Searle investigates the causes behind the campus protests of the era. In it he declares that: "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and ... several radical polemicists ... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred – one might almost say terror – of close analysis and dissection of argument." He asserts that "My wife was threatened that I (and other members of the administration) would be assassinated or violently attacked."

In the late 1980s, Searle, along with other landlords, petitioned Berkeley's rental board to raise the limits on how much he could charge tenants under the city's 1980 rent stabilization ordinance. The rental board refused to consider Searle's petition and Searle filed suit, charging a violation of due process. In 1990, in what came to be known as the "Searle Decision", the California Supreme Court upheld Searle's argument in part and Berkeley changed its rent control policy, leading to large rent increases between 1991 and 1994. Searle was reported to see the issue as one of fundamental rights, being quoted as saying "The treatment of landlords in Berkeley is comparable to the treatment of blacks in the South...our rights have been massively violated and we are here to correct that injustice."The court described the debate as a "morass of political invective, ad hominem attack, and policy argument".

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Searle wrote an article arguing that the attacks were a particular event in a long-term struggle against forces that are intractably opposed to the United States, and signaled support for a more aggressive neoconservative interventionist foreign policy. He called for the realization that the United States is in a more-or-less permanent state of war with these forces. Moreover, a probable course of action would be to deny terrorists the use of foreign territory from which to stage their attacks. Finally, he alluded to the long-term nature of the conflict and blamed the attacks on the lack of American resolve to deal forcefully with America's enemies over the past several decades. Awards and recognitionsHe has five honorary doctorate degrees from four different countries and is an honorary visiting professor at Tsing Hua University and East China Normal University. Searle is an atheist.In 2000 Searle received the Jean Nicod Prize; in 2004, the National Humanities Medal; and in 2006, the Mind & Brain Prize.

Список используемой литературы:1) The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (political commentary; 1971)2) Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (essay collection; 1979)3) Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures (lecture collection; 1984)

4) Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (John Searle & Daniel Vanderveken 1985)

5) The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)

6) The Construction of Social Reality (1995)

7) The Mystery of Consciousness (review collection; 1997)

8) Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (summary of earlier work; 1998)

9) Rationality in Action (2001)

10) Consciousness and Language (essay collection; 2002)