The life of a person is a bundle of stories – good, bad, and ugly. Their deaths force us to grapple with the question of which of these stories deserve to be told and why.
John Searle, one of the most astute and original philosophers of our time died on September 17. His enviably productive career – one that influenced an entire generation of philosophers through his remarkably clear, lucid, and analytically rigorous writings – ended under the shadow of allegations of sexual misconduct.
At a time when people are captivated by large language models, it has become pressing to ask whether artificial intelligence can actually “think” or understand what it does. Do such entities replicate the cognitive architecture of human minds when executing our commands, as many scientists would have us believe?
Although commonsense analysis might suggest an easy negative answer, John Searle recognised the philosophical depth of this question way back in the 1970s and challenged it with a compelling thought experiment known as the Chinese Room Argument.
The idea is elegant: an individual who does not understand Chinese could follow rules for manipulating Chinese symbols and produce flawless responses without comprehending what those symbols mean – either to themselves or to their audience.
The basic insight is that computational processes, however sophisticated, cannot generate genuine understanding. Syntax must not be confused with semantics.
One of the defining features of analytic philosophy – the philosophical tradition in which Searle worked – is its emphasis on language as central to philosophical inquiry. However, unlike other philosophers of his generation who believed that philosophical problems could be resolved by the proper use of language, Searle’s adopted a more integrative approach.
He sought to place language against the background of the neurobiological and psychological features that support our capacities as language-using entities.
An important contribution of Searle in the area of language is his work on speech acts, a theory originally developed by his mentor JL Austin. The theory suggests that the primary function of language is not merely to describe the world but also to perform actions: when we speak, we do not just convey information – we also warn, promise, apologise, command and request.
Searle revolutionised the theory by reworking some of its crucial aspects in ways that enabled it to receive tremendous recognition in other disciplinary fields such as law, literature, and gender studies.
His theory of speech acts provided him the much needed foundation for his later works on the construction of social reality, or social ontology – an area that he single-handedly brought to philosophical prominence in the mid-’90s. Searle pursued a hackneyed question which contemporary social scientists abandoned long back – how do we construct an objectivity of social reality in a way that can come on a par with the objectivity of the physical world?
Searle suggests that when we agree to accept that something counts as something in a particular context, we create social or institutional facts such as money, marriage, government and globalisation. These facts are constructed through what he calls collective intentionality – a state that people constitute by sharing their beliefs and intentional about the world.
The world of academic philosophy is notoriously divided into two seemingly irreconcilable camps – analytic and continental. The gulf between these two camps runs so deep and intractable that whosoever tries to bridge the gap ends up dividing it further with no meaningful result. Observing the oddity of this schism, Bernard Williams – an important twentieth-century philosopher – once characterised it as a strange cross-classification that inappropriately contrasts a method (analytic) with a geographical area (continental), akin to classifying cars into four-wheel-drive and made-in-Japan.
Not everyone, however, seeks such reconciliation. In 1977, when Searle debated the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the quintessential standard-bearer of continental philosophy, over Austin’s speech act theory, their academic exchange turned bitterly acrimonious. Searle accused Derrida of celebrating obscurantism and deceptiveness.
Searle’s commitment to clarity in philosophical thinking and writing was legendary. His dedication to straightforward, accessible prose and rigorous argumentation was a trademark of his work. He once said, “If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it yourself.”
In an interview, Searle recalled a conversation with Foucault, whom he deeply admired, in which he asked him about his thoughts on clarity in French philosophical writing. Foucault reportedly said, “If I write as clearly as you do, people in Paris wouldn’t take me seriously. They would think it’s childlike, it’s naïve... En France, il faut avoir au moins dix pour cent incompréhensible.” In France you have to have at least 10% incomprehensible.
Searle said he later posed the same question to the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who answered: “It’s worse than 10% – more like 20%.”
Whether and how seriously one takes Searle’s allegation against French philosophical writing is contestable. But if there was one philosopher who had the credibility of making such an allegation, it had to be Searle. Searle became Searle in the Oxford of philosophical giants like Gilbert Ryle, PF Strawson and Gilbert Ryle. Oxford gave him everything he needed to be the philosopher he became.
Searle was a vocal supporter of the students’ Free Speech Movement at University of California at Berkeley in 1964-’65. He was the first tenured professor to join the student-led protests for on-campus political free speech. The movement was often seen as a part of the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement in the US.
Searle was born in Denver. His mother was a doctor and father a business executive. He met Dagmar Carboch in Oxford whom he later married in 1958.
In 2017, Searle was stripped of his emeritus status from Berkeley – a place he served the entire career– after the university found that he had violated the norms of sexual harassment policies. After this, his health deteriorated drastically and the last two years of his life were “hellish”, in his secretary’s words, after his daughter-in-law put him in a nursing home station and prevented all forms of communication with the outside world.
The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones – in Shakespeare’s play, Mark Antony spoke these words at Caesar’s funeral. As a member of the philosophy community, one sincerely hopes that, in addition to recalling his fall from grace, future generations will also read and remember him for his towering contributions to the philosophy of the mind, cognitive science, social ontology, philosophy of language and gender studies.
Bhaskarjit Neog teaches philosophy at Jawaharlal Nehru University.
