John Searle

1932–2025 · American philosopher

Topics: artificial intelligence, learning, science

• Finally, and perhaps most importantly, you need to acquire the skills of writing and speaking that make for candor, rigor, and clarity. You cannot think clearly if you cannot speak and write clearly.

  — John Searle

• 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.

  — John Searle

• One of the most depressing things about educated people today is that so few of them, even among professional intellectuals, are able to follow the steps of a simple logical argument.

  — John Searle

• My car and my adding machine understand nothing: they are not in that line of business.

  — John Searle

• 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.

  — John Searle

• The sense in which an automatic door "understands instructions" from its photoelectric cell is not at all the sense in which I understand English.

  — John Searle

• 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

• We often attribute "understanding" and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

  — John Searle

• You need to know enough of the natural sciences so that you are not a stranger in the world.

  — John Searle