Quotes from John Rogers Searle

there is a radical underdetermination of what is said by the literal meaning of the sentence. There is nothing in the literal meaning of the sentence "She gave him her key and he opened the door" to block the interpretation, He opened the door with her key by bashing the door down with the key; the key weighed two hundred pounds and was in the shape of an axe. Or, He swallowed both the door and the key and he inserted the key in the lock by the peristaltic contraction of his gut.

Moods are not to be confused with emotions. Moods will dispose you to having an emotion. Certain moods you're more likely to get angry than others, as we all know, but emotion is not the same as mood. Emotions, I think, always have to do with agitated forms of desire. Whenever you're in an emotional state, you have some sort of agitated desire. So, emotions are fairly special -- I am not always in some sort of emotional state or other, but I think I am always in some mood or other.

Prediction and explanation are exactly symmetrical. Explanations are, in effect, predictions about what has happened; predictions are explanations about what's going to happen.

One of the many marks of a philosophical sensibility is an obsession with problems which most sane people regard as not worth bothering about.

The best objects to think with are words, because that is part of what words are for. Indeed, it is a condition for something to be a word that it be thinkable. But

There is, in short, no way for us to picture subjectivity as part of our worldview because, so to speak, the subjectivity in question is the picturing.

Any intentional state only functions, that is, it only determines conditions of satisfaction, against a set of Background abilities, dispositions, and capacities that are not part of the intentional content and could not be included as part of the content.

language is precisely designed to be a self-identifying category of institutional facts. The

institutional facts in general require language because the language is partly constitutive of the facts. But

I do not think there is a sharp dividing line between either the institutional and the non-institutional or the linguistic and the prelinguistic, but to the extent that we think the phenomena are genuinely institutional facts, and not just conditioned forms of habitual behavior, to that very extent we must think of language as constitutive of the phenomena, because the move that imposes the Y function on the X object is a symbolizing move.

Falsafah tidak pernah terlepas daripada sejarah. Kadang-kadang saya terfikir ada bagusnya jika saya terus menyata kebenaran tentang sesebuah soalan kepada pelajar saya lalu mengakhiri syarahan. Tetapi pendekatan membelakangi sejarah sedemikian rupa cenderung menghasil kedangkalan falsafah.

So we started introducing BS majors, in an effort to make the university ready for them, rather than making them ready for the university.

Intentional states function only given a set of Background capacities that do not themselves consist in intentional phenomena. Thus, for example, beliefs, desires, and rules only determine conditions of satisfaction—truth conditions for beliefs, fulfillment conditions for desires, etc.—given a set of capacities that do not themselves consist in intentional phenomena. I

I have thus defined the concept of the "Background" as the set of nonintentional or preintentional capacities that enable intentional states of function. But

when we talk about the Background we are talking about a certain category of neurophysiological causation. Because we do not know how these structures function at a neurophysiological level, we are forced to describe them at a much higher level. There

The simplest argument for the thesis of the Background is that the literal meaning of any sentence can only determine its truth conditions or other conditions of satisfaction against a Background of capacities, dispositions, know-how, etc., which are not themselves part of the semantic content of the sentence. You

In a normal literal utterance of each of these sentences, each verb has a constant meaning. There is no lexical ambiguity or metaphorical usage involved. But in each case the same verb will determine different truth conditions or conditions of satisfaction generally, because what counts as cutting or growing will vary with the context. If

nothing in the literal meaning of those sentences blocks those wrong interpretations. In each case we understand the verb differently, even though its literal meaning is constant, because in each case our interpretation depends on our Background abilities.