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I want to block some common misunderstandings about understanding: In many of these discussions one finds a lot of fancy footwork about the word understanding.

John Searle

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John Searle
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: July 31
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Linguist
Philosopher
University Teacher
Denver
Colorado
John Rogers Searle
John R. Searle
Fancy
Block
Word
Footwork
Understanding
Misunderstandings
Common
Discussions
Many
Misunderstanding
Finds
Discussion

More quotes by John Searle

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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.
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Whatever is referred to must exist. Let us call this the axiom of existence.
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Where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality.
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Berkeley had a liberal element in the student body who tended to be quite active. I think that's in general a feature of intellectually active places.
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The Intentionality of the mind not only creates the possibility of meaning, but limits its forms.
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Dualism makes the problem insoluble materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.
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The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenomenon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in principle accessible to consciousness.
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The assertion fallacy is the fallacy of confusing the conditions for the performance of the speech act of assertion with the analysis of the meaning of particular words occurring in certain assertions.
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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.
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I will argue that in the literal sense the programmed computer understands what the car and the adding machine understand, namely, exactly nothing.
John Searle
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The general nature of the speech act fallacy can be stated as follows, using good as our example. Calling something good is characteristically praising or commending or recommending it, etc. But it is a fallacy to infer from this that the meaning of good is explained by saying it is used to perform the act of commendation.
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In many cases it is a matter for decision and not a simple matter of fact whether x understands y and so on.
John Searle
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There are clear cases in which understanding literally applies and clear cases in which it does not apply and these two sorts of cases are all I need for this argument.
John Searle
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The problem posed by indirect speech acts is the problem of how it is possible for the speaker to say one thing and mean that but also to mean something else.
John Searle
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You do not understand your own tradition if you do not see it in relation to others.
John Searle
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We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.
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There is no success or failure in Nature.
John Searle
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My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business
John Searle