Episode 28: John Searle discusses human reality and basic reality
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What is the background of John Searle’s philosophical career and the shift from ordinary‑language philosophy?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman. And I'm Jamie Edwards. With us today is John Searle, Slesser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. And he's here to talk with us about human reality and basic reality. John Searle, welcome.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Professor Searle, you completed your graduate work at Oxford in the late fifties at quite an extraordinary time for Oxford philosophy.
Yes.
You became a Berkeley professor in nineteen fifty nine, and you have worked steadily since then in a range of areas in philosophy. Could you say something about how the philosophical landscape has and hasn't changed since your time as a student in Oxford?
Yeah, it's changed quite dramatically. Uh the dominant mode of philosophizing when I was a a student in Oxford was what was called linguistic philosophy, and the Oxford branch of it was sometimes called ordinary language philosophy as opposed to a formal symbolic mathematical logic languages. The central aim in philosophy at that time was to try to describe the relations between language, reality, and experience. We thought of philosophy as largely a conceptual enterprise, and there are great disputes within that conception as to whether or not the best way to pursue it was to examine the operation of ordinary languages like English in day-to-day operation, or to think of a mathematical, formalized.
Languages such as the uh predicate calculus and uh set theory and various other formal languages. Since then, there has been a tremendous decline in uh the interest in the philosophy of language. In those days, the philosophy of language was regarded as the center of philosophy. Now it's an important part of philosophy. But other subjects that had been in in some decline, which somewhat neglected, have come back to the force. So there's a big interest now in metaphysics, uh which did not exist in the fifties. And people now try to do substantive ethics. In the fifties, uh people did not think it was really the philosopher's job to tell people how they ought to live or how society ought to be organized.
But there's much more interest in that now than there was a at that time. However, I'm really the wrong guy to ask about this 'cause I don't m I'm out of sympathy with much of what's happening in contemporary philosophy. I think that in the subjects that interest me, like the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of society, Most of the stuff that goes on in the mainstream isn't worth a damn. And it's partly because people are over-obsessed with a certain type of formalized method of analysis.
How does Searle contrast the rise of formal‑symbolic methods with the older conceptual approach to language and reality?
So in the philosophy of language, they think what you'd want to do is construct formal models of possible worlds in order to explain the use of counterfactuals in ordinary English. And in epistemology, They think you ought to construct uh mathematical or formal models of uh probabilistic reasoning and such things as that. I think there's a place for that kind of stuff, but I think the main questions of philosophy are really too interesting to get swamped by the mathematical stuff. So I am pursuing in my own work a line of investigation, and I don't really know uh to what extent it is influential in the mainstream. But it's what obsesses me, and that is we need to give an account of ourselves, of the human reality, where we think of ourselves as conscious, mindful, rational, speech, act, performing, social, political, aesthetic, etc.
We need to give an account of that with what we know about how the world exists as a physical-chemical system. We have to show how, in a world consisting entirely of physical particles and fields of force. There can be consciousness, intentionality, language, society. That for me is the central question in philosophy. So I would say two things in answer to your question. There has been a shift. away from the philosophy of language and in a sense philosophy is more interesting now than it was.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the background of John Searle’s philosophical career and the shift from ordinary‑language philosophy?
0:19–3:08
2
How does Searle contrast the rise of formal‑symbolic methods with the older conceptual approach to language and reality?
3:08–6:52
3
Why does Searle think the modern focus on formal models (possible‑world semantics, Tarski’s truth theory) misses the point of philosophy?
6:52–10:36
4
What is Searle’s view on the relationship between brain processes and conscious mental states?
10:36–15:44
5
How does Searle explain the problem of free will and the “gap” between reasons and decisions?
15:44–21:15
6
What is the role of language in creating social institutions such as money, property, and marriage?
21:15–24:53
7
How do “status‑function declarations” generate deontic power and shape human civilization?
24:53–30:02
8
Why does Searle argue that social‑ontology insights are a missing piece in contemporary philosophy?
30:02–38:33
Speakers
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