I had not noticed that John Searle had passed last month. Some thoughts on his philosophy will suffice for my Thursday philosophy post this week. Searle's final years since 2017 were spent in dishonor after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and retaliation surfaced, leading him to be stripped of his emeritus status at the University of California, Berkeley.
His philosophical contributions can be neatly divided into three phases.
The Philosophy of Language (1960s-70s)
My knowledge of Searle comes from his early linguistic phase. There was a time in the 80s and 90s when a significant number of papers in biblical studies were using his categories to explore the biblical texts in fresh ways. We are talking here of course about speech-act theory.
There is somewhat of a trinity of philosophers of language, father, son, and grandson, so to speak. I always felt a little like the old sense that the ancients were the golden age... then the silver... then the bronze. In this personal analogy, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) would be the golden age. Then J. L. Austin (1911-1960) would be the silver. Then Searle would be the bronze.
Wittgenstein's work was not systematic, but he transformed the philosophy of language with his recognition that the meaning of words comes from how they are used in certain contexts. Before him, words were typically viewed as containers with somewhat fixed content in them. Wittgenstein's breakthrough was so obvious once understood that it revolutionized hermeneutics. It is fundamental to biblical exegesis properly done.
Austin then expanded that words do things. When a couple says, "I do," they are doing more than giving a statement. They are actually marrying each other. If I yell, "Fire!" I am not simply pointing to something reddish-orange. I am telling you to get out of the building or to grab a fire extinguisher. Still, Austin's work was somewhat unsystematic.
Searle then brought out an analysis of language in terms of the locutionary, the illocutionary, and the perlocutionary. The locution is a statement itself. The "illocution" is the intention behind the statement. And the "perlocution" is the impact or effect of the statement. This was all the rage in the 80s and 90s in a cross-section of biblical studies papers. I think I first encountered it in Anthony Thiselton's New Horizons in Hermeneutics.
The Philosophy of Mind (1980s-90s)
In his middle decades, his interests turned to the philosophy of mind. His biggest contribution in this phase was the "Chinese Room argument" (1980).
In this thought experiment, someone who doesn't know Chinese sits in a room. Questions in Chinese are fed into the room. In the room, the person has a manual that tells them what symbols to put down on paper when certain symbols are fed into the room. He writes down these symbols and then passes them out of the room again.
To the outsiders, it appears as if the person in the room is answering the questions that are inputted. But in fact, the person in the room has no understanding of what he is writing down.
Searle's point -- which is very apt given recent developments in AI -- is that strong AI would still not have consciousness. ChatGPT doesn't know what it is outputting to me when I prompt it. It is simply stringing together symbols based on statistical patterns in its immense database.
Searle thus raises a highly significant question -- what is human consciousness? He was not a theist, and he did not believe that humans had any extra-physical spiritual component to their being. Yet he was trying to steer a path between a dualism of body/soul and some reductive materialism.
This is a great puzzle to me. What is my self-consciousness? It seems to be something more than simply a programmed response to stimuli.
As an aside, I asked ChatGPT what the most current responses to Searle's Chinese Room argument are. As it finished, it said, "My Assessment (as of today)... I think..." :-)
Social Ontology (1990s-2000s)
In the final phase of his career as a philosopher, he moved beyond individual consciousness to what we might call a "social" ontology. How do we as collective humans create things simply because we all agree they exist?
Searle called this "collective intentionality." We make money exist not because a piece of paper with certain marks on it is intrinsically anything but because we all have agreed that it is something. A dollar bill is not merely a social construct. We have actually made it exist because we all agree on it.
Here his concept is that "X counts as Y in context C." In this way we not only create money but governments, state lines, national borders, marriages, churches, universities, etc. The line between Mexico and the U.S. is not a brute fact of reality. It is a line that we have created by collectively agreeing that it exists.
If the individual mind transforms inputs and outputs into consciousness, societies collectively generate social institutions, a kind of social consciousness. Words do not merely describe the world. They make it.
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I am no expert on Searle, and it would seem that in some respects he may have been a deeply flawed man (don't judge all philosophers by a few). Nevertheless, it's clear that he made some major contributions to philosophical thought. Accordingly, his work seemed worth a Thursday post.
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