John Rogers Searle (July 31, 1932 – September 17, 2025) was an American philosopher and university teacher working within Western contemporary philosophy and analytic direct realism, born in Denver, Colorado, and deceased in Safety Harbor, Florida.^[57,30] He studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and at Christ Church, Oxford, completing his studies at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and earning his degree in 1959 with a thesis titled "Problems arising in the theory of meaning out of the notions of sense and reference" under the influence of J. L. Austin and Peter Strawson. Searle held academic appointments at Christ Church, Oxford, and served as the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language (also referred to as the Slusser Professor of Philosophy) at the University of California, Berkeley. He was married to Dagmar Carboch from 1958 until 2017, had two children, and supervised doctoral students including Bence Nanay and William Hirstein.^[58,59]

Searle is widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind and consciousness, practical reasoning, and social philosophy, including intentionality, social ontology, and the characteristics of social realities versus physical realities. His philosophical work developed concepts including indirect speech acts, biological naturalism, and the direction of fit. His early work on speech acts, influenced by J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, helped establish his reputation. His most famous philosophical contribution is the "Chinese room" thought experiment, which attempts to refute the thesis of "strong" artificial intelligence by demonstrating that human thought is not composed of simple computational processes.

Outside his academic activity, Searle was the first practicing professor to join the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. In 2000, he received the Jean Nicod Prize, was made a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and participated in the science-faith dialogue held in Vatican City as part of the Jubilee of Scientists.^[116] In 2013, he was selected to deliver the Albertus Magnus Professorship lecture series at the University of Cologne in Germany, a series previously held by thinkers such as Arthur C. Danto, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, Enrique Dussel, Noam Chomsky, and Martha Nussbaum.^[117]

Searle was born in Denver on July 31, 1932. His father, G. W. Searle, was an electrical engineer employed by AT&T, and his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician.^[62] In 1949, at the age of seventeen, he began his college education studying philosophy, political science, and economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In his junior year, from 1952, he continued as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he attended events by John Langshaw Austin and Peter Strawson.^[61,63] At Oxford, he obtained all his university degrees (BA, MA, and DPhil), completing his doctorate in 1959 under the supervision of Peter Geach, and held his first faculty positions, teaching at Christ Church College from 1956 to 1959.^[61,63]

In 1959, under the age of 30, Searle began teaching as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained a member of the philosophy faculty for more than 50 years throughout the rest of his career. At Berkeley, he supported emerging student protests and became the first full-time professor to participate in the Free Speech Movement. In 1969, he published his main work in the philosophy of language, Speech Acts, which had a major impact on linguistics, among other fields. In the following years, he turned to other areas including the philosophy of mind, in which he repeatedly criticized reductionist approaches.

Searle was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2010.^[1] In 2000, he received the Jean Nicod Prize; in 2004, the National Humanities Medal; and in 2006, the Mind & Brain Prize.^[66,64,65] In 2013, he was appointed Albertus Magnus Professor at the University of Cologne. He also received five honorary doctorate degrees from four countries and was an honorary visiting professor at Tsinghua University and East China Normal University.

He married fellow philosopher Dagmar Carboch in 1958 and had two sons; she worked as a lawyer and edited much of her husband's writing before her death in 2017.^[60] Outside academia, Searle enjoyed skiing, sailing, and wine tasting, and owned a vineyard in Napa Valley, California.^[69]

At the time of his retirement in 2014, Searle was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at UC Berkeley, and he continued teaching until 2016.^[67] In June 2019, his emeritus status was revoked after he was found to have engaged in sexual harassment and retaliation against a former student and employee in violation of university policies.^[68] Searle died at a hospital in Safety Harbor, Florida, on September 17, 2025, at the age of 93.^[60]

While an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Searle became the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy", who at that time served as the junior senator from Wisconsin.^[71,70] At UC Berkeley, he was the first tenured professor to join the 1964–65 Free Speech Movement.^[5] In 1969, while serving as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California, he supported the university in its dispute with students over the People's Park.^[6] In The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971), Searle investigated the causes behind the campus protests of the era. Reflecting on these controversies, Searle stated: "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and ... by several radical polemicists.... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred — one might almost say terror — of close analysis and dissection of argument."^[72]

In the late 1980s, Searle, along with other landlords, petitioned Berkeley's rental board to raise the limits on how much they could charge tenants under the city's 1980 rent-stabilization ordinance.^[73] After the rental board refused to consider their petition, the group filed suit, charging a violation of due process. In 1990, the California Supreme Court upheld Searle's argument in part and Berkeley changed its rent-control policy, leading to large increases in rent between 1991 and 1994. Searle was reported to see the issue as one of fundamental rights, being quoted as saying "The treatment of landlords in Berkeley is comparable to the treatment of blacks in the South... our rights have been massively violated and we are here to correct that injustice." The court described the debate as a "morass of political invective, ad hominem attack, and policy argument".^[71,9]

Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Searle wrote an op-ed arguing that the attacks were a particular event in a long-term struggle against forces that are intractably opposed to the United States, and signaled support for a more aggressive neoconservative interventionist foreign policy. He called for the realization that the United States is in a more-or-less permanent state of war with these forces. Moreover, a probable course of action would be to deny terrorists the use of foreign territory from which to stage their attacks. Finally, he alluded to the long-term nature of the conflict and blamed the attacks on the lack of American resolve to deal forcefully with America's enemies over the past several decades.^[74]

In March 2017, Searle became the subject of sexual assault allegations when it became public that he was accused of sexualized violence against a 24-year-old research assistant. The Los Angeles Times reported that a new lawsuit alleged university officials failed to properly respond to complaints that Searle sexually assaulted his research associate in July 2016 and cut her pay when she rejected his advances, with the University of California, Berkeley accused of failing to respond adequately and concealing the incident. The lawsuit, filed in a California court on March 21, 2017, alleged sexual harassment, retaliation, wrongful termination, and assault and battery, seeking damages both from Searle and from the Regents of the University of California as his employers.^[40,12] The lawsuit also claimed that Jennifer Hudin, the director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology—where the complainant had been employed as an assistant to Searle—stated that Searle had sexual relationships with students and others in the past in exchange for academic, monetary, or other benefits.^[40] In this context and after news of the lawsuit became public, several earlier complaints and allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Searle, on which Berkeley had allegedly failed to act, were brought to light.^[14,38,76]

Searle's early work, which did much to establish his reputation, was on speech acts and continued the work of his teachers John Langshaw Austin and P. F. Strawson. Specifically, Searle developed Austin's analysis of action or "performative" utterances and focused on what Austin had termed "illocutionary acts"—acts that are performed by saying something—from How To Do Things with Words. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues and thinkers with his own thesis that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. These influences included Ludwig Wittgenstein and G. C. J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules), Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), R. M. Hare and Erik Stenius (the distinction between illocutionary force and propositional content), P. F. Strawson, John Rawls, and William Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act, (b) means what one says, and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity.^[77]

In his 1969 book Speech Acts, Searle set out to combine all these elements to give his account of illocutionary acts. There, he provides an analysis of what he considers the prototypical illocutionary act of promising and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further illocutionary act types. Among the concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the "illocutionary force" and the "propositional content" of an utterance. Searle does not define illocutionary force directly, but introduces several possible forces by example. According to Searle, sentences such as "Sam [or Juan] smokes habitually," "Does Sam [Juan] smoke habitually?", "Sam [Juan], smoke habitually!", and "Would that Sam smoked habitually!" [or "I wish Juan smoked habitually"] each indicate the same propositional content (Sam or Juan smoking habitually) but differ in their illocutionary force, representing respectively an assertion or statement, a question, a command or order, and an expression of desire.^[78]

Searle assumes that the illocutionary forces of a sentence can be described following specific rules or conditions that establish the circumstances and the purpose of different illocutionary acts, using four general types of rules. Generally, an illocution will have a certain propositional content; for example, a request will have a certain future action in its content, while a statement can have any proposition as content, though some illocutions such as greetings do not have propositional content. Certain preconditions, which Searle terms preparatory conditions, are necessary for the success of each type of illocution; for instance, properly making a request requires that the hearer can perform the requested action and that the speaker believes this, while for a greeting to succeed, the hearer and speaker must have either just met or just been introduced. Another requirement is the sincerity condition: while a greeting may not be sincere, truly thanking someone requires the speaker to be sincere, and asking a sincere question requires the speaker to want to know the answer. Furthermore, each illocution can be described in terms of what it attempts to do: an assertion purports that something really is the case, a question attempts to elucidate certain information, and thanking purports to express gratitude. This intent of the speaker, or intentionality of a sentence, became a primary aspect of Searle's later work.

Although many believe otherwise, Searle has never proposed a clear definition of what illocutionary acts really are, and the concepts he suggested varied substantially over the years (such as in 1969, 1979, and 1983). According to a later account presented in Intentionality (1983), which differs in important ways from the one suggested in Speech Acts, illocutionary acts are characterised by having "conditions of satisfaction" (an idea adopted from Strawson's 1971 paper "Meaning and Truth") and a "direction of fit" (an idea adopted from Austin and Elizabeth Anscombe). For example, the statement "John bought two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if it is true (i.e., John did buy two candy bars), representing a "word-to-world" direction of fit where the words are supposed to change to accurately represent the world. By contrast, the command "John, buy two candy bars!" is satisfied if and only if John carries out the action of purchasing two candy bars, representing a "world-to-word" direction of fit where the world is supposed to change to match the words. There is also a double direction of fit, in which the relationship goes both ways, and a null or zero direction of fit, in which it goes neither way because the propositional content is presupposed, as in "I am sorry I ate John's candy bars." In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (1985, with Daniel Vanderveken), Searle prominently used the notion of the "illocutionary point."^[20,79] Searle's speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers in various ways, and collections of articles referring to his account are found in Burkhardt (1990) and Lepore / van Gulick (1991).^[80,19]

In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle applies the principles of his account of illocutionary acts to the investigation of intentionality, which is central to Searle's "Philosophy of Mind", subsequently generalizing this rule-based account of illocutionary force as a specific case of intentionality. Searle is at pains to emphasize that 'intentionality', the capacity of mental states to be about worldly objects, is not to be confused with 'intensionality', the referential opacity of contexts that fail tests for 'extensionality'.^[81] For Searle, intentionality is exclusively mental, being the power of minds to represent or symbolize over things, properties, and states of affairs in the external world.^[82] Causal covariance, about-ness, and the like are not enough: maps, for instance, only have a 'derived' intentionality, a mere after-image of the real thing. Searle also identifies a property of intentional phenomena called direction of fit. For example, when we see a flower our mental state fits the state of the world, and the direction of fit is mind-to-world, but if we reach out our hand to pick the flower our goal is to make the world fit our mental state, and in this case the direction of fit is world-to-mind.

Searle also introduces and develops the technical term the Background, which has been the source of much philosophical discussion ("though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years," Searle writes, "many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it").^[83] Basically, it is the context within which the intentional act occurs, and it significantly includes the actor's understanding of the world, as well as the participation of others in intentional activities. He calls Background the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have that are not themselves intentional states but that generate appropriate such states on demand. Thus, when someone is asked to "cut the cake," they know to use a knife and when someone is asked to "cut the grass," they know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the request did not mention this. Beginning with the possibility of reversing these two, an endless series of sceptical, anti-real or science-fiction interpretations could be imagined. Searle emphasizes that "there is a radical underdetermination of what is said by the literal meaning," with the Background filling the gap as the capacity always to have a suitable interpretation to hand, adding, "I just take a huge metaphysics for granted."^[85,84,86] Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the Background with the concept of the Network, one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense.

To give an example, two chess players might be engaged in a bitter struggle at the board, but they share all sorts of Background presuppositions: that they will take turns to move, that no one else will intervene, that they are both playing to the same rules, that the fire alarm will not go off, that the board will not suddenly disintegrate, that their opponent will not magically turn into a grapefruit, and so on indefinitely. As most of these possibilities will not have occurred to either player, Searle thinks the Background is itself unconscious as well as nonintentional.^[87] To have a Background is to have a set of brain structures that generate appropriate intentional states (if the fire alarm does go off, say), with Searle noting, "Those brain structures enable me to activate the system of intentionality and to make it function, but the capacities realized in the brain structures do not themselves consist in intentional states." It seems to Searle that Hume and Nietzsche were probably the first philosophers to appreciate, respectively, the centrality and radical contingency of the Background, remarking that "Nietzsche saw, with anxiety, that the Background does not have to be the way it is."^[88] Searle also thinks that a Background appears in the ideas of other modern thinkers: as the river-bed/substratum of Wittgenstein's On Certainty ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background, especially On Certainty") and Pierre Bourdieu's habitus.^[89,90]

In his debate with Jacques Derrida, Searle argued against Derrida's purported view that a statement can be disjoined from the original intentionality of its author, for example when no longer connected to the original author, while still being able to produce meaning. Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because "a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the (intentional) speech act". For Searle, ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for attributing it any meaning at all.^[92,91] In 2023 Pierre Jacob described Searle's view as "anti-intentionalist".^[93]

Building upon his views about intentionality, Searle presents a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). He argues that, starting with behaviorism, an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle also dismisses, much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. Searle opposes both dualism and materialism, arguing that both are mistaken from the Cartesian root that gave rise to them, as the categories "physical" and "mental" are loaded with an antagonistic meaning that must be discarded. While dualism makes the error of considering consciousness as a separate substance above the material, materialism makes the error of denying the basic facts of consciousness, including its very existence. In Intentionality, he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand: no one would think of saying, for example, "Having a hand is just being disposed to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping" (manual behaviorism), "Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects" (manual functionalism), "For a system to have a hand is just for it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs and outputs" (manual Turing machine functionalism), or "Saying that a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance toward it" (the manual stance) (p. 263).

Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that, on the one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience. Searle says simply that both are true, considering that the famous mind-body problem has a simple philosophical solution available for about a century: consciousness is a real subjective experience and a neurobiological phenomenon caused by the physical processes of the brain. The neurological solution is more complicated and we must wait for neuroscientists to do their work. This is an aspect of his theory of biological naturalism, which considers consciousness as a higher-level feature of the nervous system. Searle considers that, in the same way that H2O molecules have a third-person mode of being but generate higher-level characteristics such as solidity or liquidity, the brain analogously generates a system-level feature that is consciousness. Consciousness has a first-person ontology (mode of existence) whose main characteristic is being subjective, qualitative, and unified, unlike non-conscious objects whose ontology is third-person. This characteristic of consciousness makes it impossible to reduce it to mere neurobiological events, despite being caused by them.

Searle argues that critics like Daniel Dennett, who he claims insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error.^[80] Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party, but are not necessarily ontologically objective. Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is "epistemically subjective", whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is "epistemically objective". In other words, the latter statement is evaluable, in fact, falsifiable, by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like "the summit is so many meters above sea level". No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena, including all conscious experiences, that are ontologically subjective, i.e., can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an epistemically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science".^[80] The pain itself, however, is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it. Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality".^[80] His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism, because it allows epistemically objective judgments like "That object is a pocket calculator" to pick out agent-relative features of objects, and such features are, on his terms, ontologically subjective, unlike, say, "That object is made mostly of plastic."

Biological naturalism implies that if humans want to create a conscious being, they will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle's argument against what he calls "Strong AI" forms part of a broader position regarding the mind-body relationship. Strong AI is defined by the assumption that an appropriately programmed computer really is a mind—in the sense that computers given the right programs can literally be said to understand and possess other cognitive states—and its central thesis asserts that computer processes are identical to brain processes, implying that if the brain generates consciousness, computers must also be conscious.

In 1980, Searle presented the "Chinese room" thought experiment, which purports to refute and prove the falsity of strong AI.^[80,118] In the thought experiment, an individual who does not know any Chinese is placed inside a closed room. Regarding the physical setup, English Wikipedia states that the room has two slots (one for inputs and one for outputs), whereas Spanish Wikipedia describes a room closed to the outside in China using a single slot through which papers are both received and returned. The person inside is provided with scratch paper and a book or manual containing instructions in English (or their mother tongue) detailing input Chinese symbols alongside corresponding output symbols. Someone outside passes Chinese characters into the room, and the person inside locates the symbols, follows the manual's instructions to transcribe or produce different symbols onto paper, and slides the resulting sheet back out. While English Wikipedia describes the interaction as sliding in Chinese statements and receiving valid responses in English, Spanish Wikipedia describes the manual as mapping input Chinese symbols to corresponding output Chinese symbols so that Chinese people outside receive satisfactory responses.^[95,96]

To the people outside, it appears that the person or room speaks and understands Chinese because they receive satisfactory responses (cf. Turing Test), yet the room does not understand a word of Chinese. Searle considers that the same applies to computers: executing syntactic codes and symbolic manipulations has nothing to do with semantic understanding, suggesting that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English because translating or manipulating symbols does not entail understanding.^[95,96] Evidently, the concept of intentionality is at the bottom of Searle's Chinese room argument against artificial intelligence. Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, in their book The Mind's I, criticize Searle's view of AI, particularly the Chinese room argument.^[97]

Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the true targets of his critique.^[98] Functionalists argue that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain, meaning that anything carrying out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, under functionalism, if humans wrote a conscious computer program, they could run it on a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious because it was running the same information processes. Searle argues that this is impossible, contending that consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a computer simulation of digestion is, it will not digest anything, and no matter how well it simulates fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are observer-relative patterns picked out by observers rather than things-in-the-world themselves. Because they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they lack causal efficacy and cannot cause consciousness. Searle insists there is no physical law that can recognize equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program.^[80]

Searle extended his inquiries into observer-relative phenomena by applying his analysis of intentionality to social construction and social reality. His interest focuses on the way in which certain aspects of our world materialize as a result of the combined intentionality of those who use them. Searle begins by arguing that collective intentionality (e.g., "we are going for a walk") is a distinct form of intentionality, not simply reducible to individual intentionality (e.g., "I am going for a walk with him and I think he thinks he is going for a walk with me and he thinks I think I am going for a walk with him and..."). In The Construction of Social Reality (1995), Searle addresses the mystery of how social constructs like "baseball" or "money" can exist in a world consisting only of physical particles in fields of force. Searle's approach to social construction is very different and divergent from those who suggest that no mind-independent reality exists and that what we call reality is a social construction. His arguments do not focus on the social construction of reality, but rather on the construction of social reality, presenting an argument in favor of realism toward the end of The Construction of Social Reality.

Adapting an idea by Elizabeth Anscombe in "On Brute Facts", Searle distinguishes between brute facts, like the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, like the score of a baseball game. Aiming at an explanation of social phenomena in terms of Anscombe's notion, he argues that society can be explained in terms of institutional facts, which arise out of collective intentionality through constitutive rules with the logical form "X counts as Y in C". He argues that both the value of a five-euro bill and the institution of the university have been created by three primitive principles: collective intentionality, the assignment of function, and constitutive rules. For example, a five-euro bill is a five-euro bill only by virtue of collective intentionality; it can perform its economic function because someone thinks it is worth five euros and someone else also thinks it is worth five euros, regardless of whether the government backs the value of the currency. If one tries to buy something from someone who does not recognize the value of the bill, all that exists is a piece of colored paper unless they are convinced of its value, whereas an object not backed by any government, such as an antique stamp, can be a valid object in a commercial transaction if both participants agree to it. Such socially constructed objects permeate our lives, and the language we use, the concept of property, and relationships with others fundamentally depend on such implicit intentionalities. Searle also extends his analysis of social reality to the creation of institutions such as marriage and universities. Thus, for instance, filling out a ballot counts as a vote in a polling place, getting so many votes counts as a victory in an election, and getting a victory counts as being elected president in the presidential race. Furthermore, in an article called Social Reality and Linguistic Representation, Searle argues that "all social reality possesses a linguistically constituted logical structure".

Many sociologists, however, do not see Searle's contributions to social theory as very significant. Neil Gross, for example, argues that Searle's views on society are more or less a reconstitution of the sociologist Émile Durkheim's theories of social facts, social institutions, collective representations, and the like, leaving Searle's ideas open to the same criticisms as Durkheim's.^[80] Searle responded that Durkheim's work was worse than he had originally believed and, admitting he had not read much of Durkheim's work, said: "Because Durkheim's account seemed so impoverished I did not read any further in his work."^[80] Steven Lukes responded to Searle's response to Gross and argued point by point against the allegations Searle makes against Durkheim, essentially upholding Gross's argument that Searle's work bears a great resemblance to Durkheim's and attributing Searle's miscomprehension of Durkheim's work to the fact that Searle had never read Durkheim.^[80]

The central role of the concept of construction in Searle's ontology of social phenomena suggests that his position could generally be described as constructivist; however, this is not the case, as Searle would like to see constructivist theses limited strictly to the realm of social reality. The key here is Searle's distinction between observer-dependent and observer-independent phenomena. The social world consists of observer-dependent phenomena, which is why one can speak of the construction of social realities, whereas the natural sciences describe observer-independent phenomena, which consequently are not constructed.

This critical attitude toward generally constructivist positions points to a general philosophical stance for which Searle has advocated in recent years, attempting to defend traditional and strong readings of the concepts of truth, reality, and rationality against relativizing philosophical currents. While explicitly defending other forms, such as conceptual relativism, he considers some forms of real or alleged relativism from authors such as Richard Rorty or Jacques Derrida to be not only philosophically implausible, but also politically dangerous. In particular, Searle argues philosophically that without our traditional concepts of truth, reality, and rationality, our linguistic practices would be incomprehensible. Rorty objected to this transcendental reasoning, stating: 'Wherever Searle sees conditions of intelligibility or preconditions, I see rhetorical flourishes, which are intended to give users of the practices in question the feeling that they are loyal to something powerful and powerful, that is, the internal nature of reality.'

In recent years, Searle's main interlocutor on issues of social ontology has been Tony Lawson. Although their accounts of social reality are similar, there are important differences. Lawson emphasizes the notion of social totality whereas Searle prefers to refer to institutional facts. Furthermore, Searle believes that emergence implies causal reduction whereas Lawson argues that social totalities cannot be completely explained by the causal powers of their components. Searle also places language at the foundation of the construction of social reality, while Lawson believes that community formation necessarily precedes the development of language and, therefore, there must be the possibility for non-linguistic social structure formation.^[99,100,101]

In Rationality in Action (2001), Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed. According to what he calls the Classical Model, rationality is seen as something like a train track: a person moves onto it at one point with their beliefs and desires, and then the rules of rationality compel them all the way to a conclusion, though Searle doubts that this picture holds generally. Searle also briefly critiques the rules of mathematical decision theory, pointing out that its axioms require that anyone valuing a quarter and their life would, at some odds, bet their life for a quarter; he insists he would never take such a bet and believes this stance is perfectly rational.

Directing most of his attack against the common conception of rationality, Searle first argues that reason does not cause an individual to do anything, because having sufficient reason wills, but does not force, them to do that thing. Therefore, in any decision situation, people experience a gap between reasons and actions. For example, when deciding to vote, a person may care most about economic policy and prefer candidate Jones's economic policy, but must still make an effort to actually cast a vote. Similarly, every time a smoker who feels guilty lights a cigarette, they are aware that they are succumbing to craving rather than merely acting automatically as when exhaling. This gap leads people to believe they possess freedom of the will. Searle considers whether one truly has free will an open question, but regards its absence as highly unappealing because it would make the feeling of freedom an epiphenomenon—unlikely from an evolutionary perspective given its biological cost—and asserts that "All rational activity presupposes free will".^[103]

Second, Searle believes people can rationally act without their actions resulting from their own desires. While Hume's Law widely posits that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is" (facts about how the world is cannot dictate what one should do), Searle contrasts these "brute facts" with institutional facts relating to institutions like marriage, promises, and commitments, which are systems of constitutive rules where what one should do follows from what one has done. For instance, promising something means one must do it because making the promise participates in the constitutive rules of promise-making itself, embedding a "shouldness" in the factual action of promising. He contends that this provides a desire-independent reason for action, such as an obligation to pay for a drink ordered at a bar regardless of whether one desires to pay. Although this argument—first presented in his 1964 paper "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'"—remains highly controversial, Searle maintained that "the traditional metaphysical distinction between fact and value cannot be captured by the linguistic distinction between 'evaluative' and 'descriptive' because all such speech act notions are already normative".^[80,104]

Third, Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting often inconsistent patterns of desires to decide between outcomes, rather than the reverse. While the Classical Model would assume a desire to visit Paris outweighs saving money and focus on calculating the cheapest route, Searle argues that individuals balance the desire for Paris against the desire to save money to evaluate which they value more. Consequently, he views rationality not as a system of rules, but as an adverb: certain behaviors are deemed rational regardless of their source, and a system of rules is merely derived from observing patterns in what is considered rational.

After Jacques Derrida responded to J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act in his 1972 paper "Signature Event Context," Searle argued in his 1977 essay "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida" that Derrida's apparent rejection of Austin was unwarranted. Searle later refused to let his 1977 reply be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection Limited Inc, in which a new text by Derrida critiqued Searle's positions on the topic. In the 1990s, Searle elaborated on why he did not consider Derrida's approach to be legitimate philosophy.

Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-09626-3) was also published in Spanish as Speech Acts by Ediciones Cátedra in 1986 (ISBN 978-84-376-0218-9). In 1971, Searle published The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony, a work of political commentary. In 1977, his published titles included Chomsky's Revolution in Linguistics (Editorial Anagrama, ISBN 978-84-339-0354-9) and What is a Speech Act? (University of Valencia Publications Service, ISBN 978-84-370-0028-2). His other contributions to speech act theory include the 1979 essay collection Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts and Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, co-authored with Daniel Vanderveken in 1985.

In the philosophy of mind, Searle wrote Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), which was later released in Spanish editions as Intentionality by Editorial Tecnos in 1992 (ISBN 978-84-309-2252-9) and Intentionality in the Philosophy of Mind by Ediciones Altaya in 1999 (ISBN 978-84-487-1294-5). Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures was published as a lecture collection in 1984, followed by a Spanish edition from Ediciones Cátedra in 1985 (ISBN 978-84-376-0569-2). The Rediscovery of the Mind appeared in 1992, with an edition released in 1996 by Editorial Crítica (ISBN 978-84-7423-742-9). His review collection The Mystery of Consciousness was published in 1997, followed by a Spanish release from Ediciones Paidós Ibérica in 2000 (ISBN 978-84-493-0895-6). Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World, summarizing his earlier work, was published in 1998, with a Spanish edition issued by Alianza Editorial in 2004 (ISBN 978-84-206-8605-9). Searle subsequently published Rationality in Action in 2001, the essay collection Consciousness and Language in 2002, Mind: A Brief Introduction (a summary of work in philosophy of mind) in 2004, and Seeing Things As They Are: A Theory of Perception in 2015.

Addressing social ontology, Searle published The Construction of Social Reality in 1995, which appeared in a Spanish edition from Ediciones Paidós Ibérica in 1997 (ISBN 978-84-493-0421-7). In 2004, he published the lecture collection Freedom and Neurobiology (issued in Spanish as Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power by Ediciones Paidós Ibérica, ISBN 978-84-493-1666-1) and Language and Social Sciences: Dialogue Between John Searle and Crea (El Roure Editorial, ISBN 978-84-7976-030-4). Searle's bibliography is also associated with the Jovellanos International Essay Prize. His later publications include Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (2008) and Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010), which was released in Spanish as Creating the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization by Grupo Planeta Spain in 2014 (ISBN 9786079377212). In 2014, he also authored 'What Your Computer Can't Know', a review of Luciano Floridi's The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford University Press, 2014), published in The New York Review of Books, vol. LXI, no. 15 (October 9, 2014), pp. 52–55.

Key publications by John R. Searle include "Minds, Brains and Programs" (1980, published in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences), the 1990 American Philosophical Association Presidential Address "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?", and "Collective Intentions and Actions" in the 1990 volume Intentions in Communication edited by Philip R. Cohen, Jerry L. Morgan, and Martha E. Pollack. His writings addressing the mind and brain further encompass "The Problem of Consciousness" (Social Research, 1993), the review article "Consciousness" (Annual Review of Neuroscience, 2000), "Dualism revisited" (Journal of Physiology-Paris, 2007), and the co-authored volume Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language (2007) with M. Bennett, D. Dennett, and P. Hacker. Additional works and engagements include The Storm Over the University, an interview with Léo Peruzzo Júnior, and "Searle and Smith: A Dialogue", published in the 2003 collection John Searle's Ideas About Social Reality: Extensions, Criticisms, and Reconstructions edited by D. Koepsell and L. Moss.

Searle's philosophy has been examined in various scholarly critiques, including Barry Smith's Papers on the History of Speech Act Theory and Friedrich Christoph Doerge's 2006 dissertation Illocutionary Acts—Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It. Further studies include E. Cescon and D. P. Nunes's 2015 paper on free will in Searle contrasting biological naturalism with physicalism and functionalism, Tomas Koblizek's 2012 analysis "How to Make the Concepts Clear: Searle's Discussion with Derrida" alongside Searle's reply, and Ilham Dilman's 2011 book Philosophy as criticism: essays on Dennett, Searle, Foot, Davidson, Nozick.

In his March 2017 Scientific American article "Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguish artificial intelligence from the natural kind", Gary Marcus argues that multiple tests of artificial intelligence efficacy are required because there cannot be one ultimate test of intelligence, just as there is no single test of athletic prowess. Marcus highlights alternative evaluations such as a "Construction Challenge" testing perception and physical action—elements absent from the original Turing test—as well as administering the same standardized science and discipline tests taken by schoolchildren. He identifies an incapacity for reliable disambiguation as a major stumbling block for artificial intelligence, given that virtually every human sentence is ambiguous in multiple ways, exemplified by the "pronoun disambiguation problem" in which machines cannot determine the referent of pronouns like "he", "she", or "it".

Further reading on John Searle's philosophy includes studies on speech act theory and language, such as Barry Smith's "Papers on the History of Speech Act Theory", Friedrich Christoph Doerge's 2006 work Illocutionary Acts—Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It (Tuebingen University), and Tomas Koblizek's "How to Make the Concepts Clear: Searle's Discussion with Derrida" (2012, Organon F, Suppl. Issue 2, pp. 157–165, alongside Searle's reply on pp. 217–220). Additional discussions and publications include "The Storm Over the University", an interview with Léo Peruzzo Júnior, and "Searle and Smith: A Dialogue" edited by D. Koepsell and L. Moss in John Searle's Ideas About Social Reality: Extensions, Criticisms, and Reconstructions (2003, Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-1258-1). Key works and discussions regarding the mind, consciousness, and action include Searle's "Minds, Brains and Programs" (The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980), his 1990 American Philosophical Association Presidential Address "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?", "Collective Intentions and Actions" in Intentions in Communication (MIT Press, 1990), "The Problem of Consciousness" (Social Research, 1993), "Consciousness" (Annu. Rev. Neurosci., 2000), "Dualism revisited" (J Physiol Paris, 2007/2008), and the volume Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language by M. Bennett, D. Dennett, P. Hacker, and J. Searle (2007, Columbia University Press, ISBN 978-0-231-14044-7). Searle's biological naturalism has also been analyzed in relation to free will, physicalism, and functionalism by E. Cescon and D. P. Nunes in "The issue of free will in John R. Searle: a contrast of biological naturalism to physicalism and to functionalism" (Cognitio-Estudos: revista eletrônica de filosofia, 2015).

In the context of evaluating artificial intelligence, Gary Marcus argued in "Am I Human?: Researchers need new ways to distinguish artificial intelligence from the natural kind" (Scientific American, March 2017) that multiple tests of AI efficacy are necessary because, just as there is no single test of athletic prowess, there cannot be one ultimate test of intelligence. Marcus noted that one proposed evaluation, the "Construction Challenge", would test perception and physical action—elements absent from the original Turing test—while another proposal involves administering standard school science and disciplinary tests to machines. Marcus also highlighted that an insuperable obstacle to artificial intelligence remains its inability to reliably disambiguate language, noting that virtually every sentence generated by humans is ambiguous in multiple ways, as exemplified by the "pronoun disambiguation problem" in which machines cannot determine to whom or what pronouns such as "he", "she", or "it" refer.

Available audiovisual recordings include a 1984 audio recording, a 1987 discussion with Bryan Magee on Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy on The Great Philosophers, and a 1982 video on the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. Other recorded presentations include material on mind, matter, consciousness, and his theory of perception, a May 2013 TED talk titled "Our shared condition—consciousness", and a webcast of lectures on the Philosophy of Society.

Recorded and published dialogues include Conversations with Searle, an interview in the Conversations with History series available as a webcast and podcast, and a video or transcript of an interview discussing language, writing, mind, and consciousness. Additionally, there is a June 13, 2011 video interview conducted by The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies and a Figure/Ground interview from November 19, 2012.