Searle, John
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (clean auto-generated English transcript, with some mangled proper names such as "Burton Russell" for Bertrand Russell, "Fraga" for Frege, "Wickenstein" for Wittgenstein and "Klein" for Quine)
Core ideas
The interviewer opens with Russell's remark that he once treated language as "transparent," and argues that this century has developed an unprecedented self-consciousness about language. Searle first separates linguistic philosophy (a method: solving philosophical problems by examining the ordinary use of words like "know" or "believe") from the philosophy of language (a subject matter: how words relate to reality, what meaning, truth, reference and logical necessity are). He argues that language is central to philosophy, which is a conceptual inquiry, and to human life: forms of experience and social relations we regard as distinctively human would be impossible without it. He cites Wittgenstein's triangle seen first with one vertex as apex and then another (an experience a dog could not have for lack of the "conceptual apparatus") and La Rochefoucauld's remark that few people would fall in love if they had not read about it. He rejects the subjectivist view that language "makes the world," but holds that what counts as an object or as reality depends on the system of representation we bring to it, so that even seeing a glass of water requires the concepts "glass" and "water." Hence to study the philosophy of language is to study the structure of experience.
He notes that philosophers did not suddenly discover language in the twentieth century (Locke, Hume and Plato's Theaetetus all discuss it) but that language has become "problematic" rather than transparent, which he links to a loss of confidence in rationality at the end of the nineteenth century and to modernism in the arts. He sketches three lines of development. The first, from the early Wittgenstein through Frege, Russell and the logical positivists (Carnap) to Quine and Davidson, deals with meaning and truth conditions: Wittgenstein's picture theory, the verification principle, Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction and behaviourism about meaning, and Davidson's claim that a theory of truth is a theory of meaning. The second, from the later Wittgenstein through Austin and Grice (and Searle himself), treats language as human behaviour and asks about meaning and the speaker's intentions: speech acts. The third is Chomsky's linguistics, which has interacted with philosophy since 1957.
On speech acts, he explains Austin's route: utterances such as "I do" at a wedding, "I promise" or "I bet" are not true or false descriptions but actions (performatives), a distinction that collapsed into a general theory in which all utterances are speech acts, with the illocutionary act (statement, question, command, apology, thanks) distinguished from the perlocutionary effects on a hearer (convincing, boring, annoying). For Searle the basic unit of meaning is the illocutionary act, and the central question is how we get "from the physics to the semantics," from noises to such acts. He adds that Wittgenstein would have resisted this theoretical bent. His current work moves a step back, from speech acts to intentionality, the directedness of beliefs, fears and desires at objects and states of affairs: how does the mind impose intentionality on things (noises, marks, pictures) that are not intrinsically intentional, a question he wants to separate from Descartes's questions about consciousness. On Chomsky, he praises the revolution of putting syntax at the centre and the innate-universal-grammar answer to language learning, but argues that Chomsky ignores what syntactic forms are for and denies that communication is the purpose of language; a study of syntax will be incomplete "without a conception of what human beings use language to do." He predicts continued interaction between linguists and philosophers, a boom in Davidsonian formal semantics, and growing interest in usage and intentionality, including on the European continent, where Anglo-American and Continental philosophy had long been separated.
Excerpts
“I'm holding here a glass of water, and I'm having the simple experience of seeing a glass of water. Now for me to have the experience of seeing a glass of water, it's not enough for me simply to be having certain visual data. I've also got to have the concept glass and the concept water [...] and therefore I couldn't have the experience of seeing a glass of water without some linguistic equipment.”
“Physically it's all rather trivial, and yet the most remarkable things occur. We say that chap made a statement or asked a question or gave a command, an order, an explanation; that what he said was true or false, or interesting or boring. [...] The fundamental question is how is it that we get from the noises that come out of my mouth to all these semantic properties that we attribute to them.”
“The most interesting questions about syntax have to do with how form and function interact. I want to ask the question what are these syntactical forms for? Language for me is to talk with and to write [...] with. So I want to say that the study of the syntax will always be incomplete unless we get a study of linguistic use.”