Bertrand Russell once said that until the
second decade of this century-- and remember that, by that time, he was in his forties
and had done virtually all the philosophical work for which he's really distinguished--
he regarded language as transparent. That's to say, as a medium, he could simply
use without paying particular attention to it. Much the same must be true, I think, not only
of other philosophers, but of writers of every kind-- novelists, poets, and so on. It's only in this century that the enormous
self-consciousness of language, which we now take for granted, has developed. In fact, it's become one of the most prominent
intellectual characteristics of our age. What's involved isn't just a superficial interest
in words, but beliefs about absolutely fundamental matters. For instance, it's come to be widely believed
that it's, more than anything else, the particular power of abstract thinking, made possible
to us by language, that enables us to conceptualize a cope with innumerable aspects of reality
which are not present to us, and thus relate ourselves to the world in the way we do. Many believe that it's this more than anything
else that differentiates us from the animals. And for all these reasons, many believe that
it's through the acquisition of a language that we become selves. If many of these things are true, then language
is fundamental to our humanity and our individuality in ways that were not dreamt of til comparatively
recently. And this, I think, is the underlying reason
why philosophers have newly come to take such a powerful and, indeed, passionate interest
in language. A philosopher of language who has made a reputation
on both sides of the Atlantic is the American John Searle. He first started philosophy at Oxford, where
he arrived as a Rhodes Scholar in the early 1950s. And he taught at Oxford for some years before
returning to the United States. His book called Speech Acts, published in
1969, is something of a recent classic. He's now a professor of philosophy at the
University of California in Berkeley. Professor Searle, there's one thing which
I think we must get straight right at the beginning. I've been talking about the philosophy of
language. But there is another phrase, "linguistic philosophy"
or "linguistic analysis," which means something quite different. And this could be very confusing to our viewers
unless we make the distinction clear at the outset. Yes, well, it can be made very simply. "Linguistic philosophy" and "linguistic analysis"
are names techniques or methods for solving philosophical problems. The philosophy of language is not the name
of a technique, but the name of a subject matter, branch of philosophy. I'll give you a couple of examples. The linguistic philosopher believes that you
can solve certain traditional problems, such as problems about skepticism, by examining
the ordinary use of words such as "know." You examine the use-- Know, know-- K-N-O-W. K-N-O-W-- verbs like "know," "believe," "suppose,"
"guess." Now, that would be a problem that the linguistic
philosopher would work on. The philosophy of language is the name of
a subject matter within philosophy. And there, the problems are such things as
how do words relate to reality? What is the nature of meaning? What is truth, reference, logical necessity? Those are problems in the subject matter of
the philosophy of language. Now, obviously, philosophers of language like
yourself regard language as being absolutely fundamental to human life and human thought
and so on. I tried to explain just now in my introduction
to this discussion some of the reasons why, but I think it would be especially interesting
to hear from you, as a professional in the field, your reasons for regarding language
as being as central as you clearly do regard it as being. Well, I think to begin with, it's almost bound
to be central to philosophy. Philosophy is, in an important sense, a conceptual
inquiry. But quite apart from philosophy, I think language
is crucial, for some of the reasons you were suggesting, crucial to an understanding of
human beings and human life. We tend, in a pre-theoretical way, to have
the idea that words are, as you said, transparent-- quoting Russell-- and that we can just apply
them. We just name our experiences and our social
relations. But in fact, when we began to investigate,
what I think we find is that those forms of experience and those forms of social relations
that we regard as characteristically human would be impossible without language, that
language really is what distinguishes us more than anything else from other forms of animal
life. I'll give you a couple of examples. Wittgenstein gave a very simple example to
illustrate this about experience. It might seem obvious that our experience
has just come to us independently of any language. But what Wittgenstein pointed out was a great
many of our experiences would be impossible without language and gives this example. He draws a triangle. And he says, now see this as apex and that
as base. And then he says, now see that as apex and
that as base. And you'll find you have a different experience. I've named two different experiences that
you can have. But the interesting thing is, they're not
experiences my dog can have, not because he hasn't got the optical apparatus, but because
he hasn't got the conceptual apparatus. The words, we want to say, are part of the
experience. Now, that's a trivial example. And one can give lots of more grand examples. I mean, just take the following. La Rochefoucauld said-- I forget where-- that
very few people would fall in love if they never read about it. And I think there is a real underlying truth
in that and that is that categories like love and hate themselves influence the experiences,
that our concepts determine or at least shape our experiences, that it would be impossible
to have the experiences that we have without the linguistic categories we have. In other words, our experience of the world
doesn't consist of the world as a lot of independent objects to which we as human beings then attach
the labels of name, i.e. Words. What you're saying is the objects don't exist
separately from words, that the words enter into the very structure of our experience. Yes, now let me see if I can say what I think
you're driving at. It would be this-- not that language makes
the world. That's the kind of subjectivism that I wouldn't
want to accept, but rather something like this. What counts as an object, what counts as reality
is a function of the system of representation that we bring to bear on reality, namely language. So the world doesn't come to us all sliced
up into objects and experiences. What counts as this object or the same object
or as a book or a table or a glass, that is a matter of the categories that we impose
on the world. And those are linguistic. Would you say this is true of, say, an everyday
object? Now, 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." Precisely. And I've got to be able to locate this experience
as coming under that concept. And, therefore, I couldn't have the experience
of seeing a glass of water without some linguistic equipment. That's the point I'm making, precisely that. And, therefore, the language that we have
helps to create the very categories in which we experience the world-- the very categories
in which we see objects has language built into them, is what you're saying. It's precisely that. Therefore, by investigations in the philosophy
of language, we are investigating the very structure of experience and the structure
of whole ways of life and ways of viewing the world and so on. And, indeed, that was one of Wittgenstein's
great themes, was the idea that a language is a form of life and that we should think
of language as inner-penetrating with our life, not as something that stands outside
and pictures it, as he once thought. Now, another thing I said in my introduction
to this was that this enormous self-consciousness about the use of language is something that
characterizes this century. It's very striking that something that is
similar is true of the arts as well. For example, in this century, an enormous
amount of poetry is being written about the writing of poetry or about how difficult it
is to be a poet. We have filmmakers making films about the
making of a film. And it's true of plays. And painting has, so to speak, exhibited it's
own techniques. Even musical composition exhibits its own
techniques. Art has become its own subject matter. The medium has itself become the object of
attention. Now, there's a obvious parallel there with
what has happened with language and philosophy. Do you think that these developments are all
interconnected? Or do you think it's sheer coincidence? It surely is not sheer coincidence. I mean, I think there are certain features
of the 20th century mode of sensibility that makes language seem immensely problematic
to us. But let me disagree with one thing you've
said. It isn't that philosophers have suddenly discovered
language in the 20th century. There's a lot about language in-- Locke devoted
a whole book of the Essay to it. There's a theory of language in Hume. And indeed, back to Plato and the Theaetetus
there are theories of language. So it isn't something we've recently discovered. But the point I think you're making-- and
I entirely agree with it-- is that language has come to seem problematic. It has come to seem-- to use your quotation
from Russell-- not a matter of transparency. It isn't something that we can see right through
to the world. It is itself a problem. And I think that has a great deal to do with
something like the tremendous loss of confidence, the decline of rationality that occurred at
the end of the 19th century. One doesn't know quite how to date the rise
of modernism. But it is part of modernism in the arts. And surely, I can't, as you say-- it can't
be just coincidental that the same awareness of the complexity and the problematic character
of language exists in philosophy. Contrast Mill with the later Wittgenstein. And I think you see the break that I'm talking
about now. You're stressing then that self-consciousness
about language, in fact, goes back quite a long way in philosophy, probably further than
it does in the arts with poetry and so on. Now, what were the specifically philosophical
developments that brought it to a head in this century in the way that it did. Right, right. Well, now, that is a marvelously complicated
subject. And let me pick out a couple of strands in
that. First of all, there's a historical development. Descartes, over three centuries ago, asked
this basic question in philosophy-- what is knowledge? How is knowledge possible? And I think if you take that question very
seriously-- and we have in philosophy. That has been the central question for the
centuries after Descartes. Eventually, that leads you to what will, I
think, almost inevitably seem a more fundamental question-- namely, how does our mind represent
the world at all? The question of what is meaning has come to
seem prior to the question, what is knowledge. And there's certain other historical, certain
specific historical features that led to that. Particularly, I would say the work of Frege
in the 19th century, the German philosopher and mathematician, and the work of Russell
in the early 20th century. And both of them were engaged in an investigation
of the foundations of mathematics and the nature of mathematical knowledge. And they were led to develop certain theories
about the nature of linguistic representation. In order to answer questions about the nature
of mathematics and what goes on in mathematical statements, they were led to fundamental questions
about the nature of statement making. Well, how? I mean, what is the connection between mathematical
knowledge-- which would seem to be purely abstract and carried out in Greek symbols
and such-- what is the connection between that and ordinary statements of the kind that
philosophers now analyze. Well, there are numerous connections. But one basic connection was, what is the
nature of mathematical truth? And both Frege and Russell argued that mathematics
was really an extension of logic, that the statements of mathematics were true, in a
sense, by definition. And in order to develop that, they needed
a theory of truth and a theory of logic. And already now, we're in the philosophy of
language when they began to develop that. So in other words, it's investigation into
truth which develops into a investigation into meaning and, hence, an analysis of statements,
sentences, and so on. Historically, I think it went that way. How did we get from Russell at the turn of
the century to now? I think we can identify several lines of development. And oddly enough, Wittgenstein tends to play
a crucial role in more than one of them. There's one line of development that goes
from early Wittgenstein through the logical positivists like Carnap-- and I think one
would include Russell's work in this line as well-- up to the present day and the works
of philosophers like Quine and Davidson. Now, that line is mostly concerned with the
relationship between meaning and truth. And the crucial question tends to be, what
are the true conditions of an utterance? They are mostly concerned with conditions
for establishing or determining the truth of sentences. And, obviously, this line will be more closely
connected with the philosophy of science. Now, another line, which is the later Wittgenstein,
and also the work of philosophers like Austin and Grice-- and I think I would include myself
in this-- is more concerned with questions of linguistic use, with language seen as a
part of human behavior. And the crucial question there is not what
is the relation between meaning and truth, but what is the relation between meaning and
use or meaning and the intentions with which a speaker makes an utterance? Now, those are two lines that I see developing. And I don't want to give you the impression
that they're completely independent. No, they overlap and intertwine and interact
in all sorts of ways. But then there's the third line that has come
to seem very prominent in recent years. And that is the science of linguistics of
which-- and Chomsky's name is the most prominent among contemporary linguists-- has come to
interact with philosophy in ways that were not the case until really quite recently,
until after 1957. You've made so many important points at once,
Professor Searle, that I think it will be helpful if I sort of, so to speak, recapitulate
before we start moving ahead. We're considering language, this amazing phenomenon
of words and utterances and noises that is so fundamental to our humanity and to the
way we cope with life and see the world and everything. Now, you might say there are two main ends
to this process. There is the relationship of language to the
world, the relationship of language to its objects, to all the things in the world that
we talk about. And there is also the relationship of language
to the language user. So this gives, as it were, two lines of development
in the history of the subject we are considering. One lot of people have concentrated on discussing
the relationship of words to their objects. And what that leads them to do is to analyze
sentences and statements. It leads them to consider, above all else,
the, question of under what conditions can statements be said to be true or false. And that leads them to develop formal criteria
of truth and so on. That's one line of development that you mentioned. And you named Russell, the early Wittgenstein,
Carnap, and Davidson as being the main-- And Quine. --and Quine, of course, yes. Now, the other line of development is interestingly
different from that. That considers the subjects of language, not
the objects of language-- in other words, the human beings using language. And the questions there are about their intentions. What are they using language for? What are their purposes? Well, now, you didn't say who the main people
in that line of development were. But I-- No, I did-- a later Wittgenstein, Austin,
and I would include [? Grice, ?] and Strawson, and other people as well. Yes, yes. And so those are the two main lines of development
of the philosophy of language. And then as a sort of third, you threw in
Chomsky in linguistics. I didn't throw it in. It comes charging in. It comes charging in. Well, now, right. Now, we've got that sketch map of the field. Is Now, for clarity's sake, let's take these
one at a time. Now, let's start by discussing the school
of thought that is interested in the relationship between language and its objects-- in other
words, to use the most famous phrase, words and things. Can you unpack that a little? Well, let me-- should I do it by way of telling
you something about the central figures? I think perhaps that's one way to go about
it. Yes, yeah. Well, an epoch-making book in this field is
Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. And he there articulates a very powerful theory
of language, that sentences consistent, for him, as-- it consists of being, in effect,
pictures. They are conventionalized pictures of facts,
not that they actually look like the fact but that the relation between the way a sentence
represents and the way a picture represents is structurally quite close. And then this picture theory of meaning, as
it was called, formed the basis of his theory of language. Now, he came to reject that later. But that had a powerful influence-- his book
the Tractatus had a powerful influence on a school of philosophers who were known as
the logical positivists. And their center was in Vienna between the
wars. And they, I think at least partly misunderstanding
Wittgenstein, took the question of verification, how do we verify a proposition as the central
question in meaning. And their slogan was called the verification
principle. And the question that they asked, the crucial
question was in order to know what a sentence means, what must we do to find out whether
or not it's true. This was one way of putting the claim that
the meaning of a statement is its method of verification. And they accepted the idea that all statements
are either analytic or synthetic. Leading figure in this group, and perhaps
the leading figure, is Carnap. And Carnap, though his views changed a great
deal over the years, I think is primarily famous for this conception of language-- that
is, that language primarily consists in statements that are true or false and that their meaning
is intimately connected with their method of verification in such a way that we can
define meaning in terms of verification. Now then, when we get to more recent times,
when we get to Quine, Quine is most famous, his single most famous work was an attack
on the analytic-synthetic distinction. That is, he attacks the idea that we can make
clear distinction between that truth which is in virtue of meaning and that which is
in virtue of matters of fact. And this then lead in his more recent work
to what I can only describe as a general rejection of the notion of meaning. Quine adopts a behavioristic conception of
language. He sees us as beings who are bombarded by
stimuli, verbal and otherwise. And then we make verbal responses. And all that really amounts to meaning is
our dispositions to respond verbally. There isn't, in addition to these dispositions
to verbal responses, anything called meanings going through our mind. So Quine's behaviorism is closely connected
with his empiricism. But ironically, it led him to reject what
had seemed one of the foundation stones of a earlier generation of empiricists, namely
the distinction between analytic and synthetic proposition. His famous article is called "Two Dogmas of
Empiricism." " Am I going too fast through these or you
want to-- No, no. Shall I go on to Davidson, then? Yes, Davidson is the one person you mentioned
that you haven't talked about. Now, Davidson incidentally is remarkably influential
in England and, indeed, I would say more influential in England than he is in his home country,
but for what perhaps is a very good reason. He's certainly a very powerful philosopher. Davidson argues that there is a more intimate
connection between meaning and truth than previous philosophers have been aware of or
least have made explicit. And that is this. If we wanted a theory of meaning for a language,
the way to get that theory of meaning would be to get a set of principles which would
enable us to deduce for any sentence of the language under what conditions it was true,
so that, for Davidson, a theory of truth really is a theory of meaning. There isn't any gulf between meaning and truth
there in that once we've got a theory that makes clear what are the truth conditions
of sentences, that is already a theory of meaning of the sentences of the language. Well, I don't think we'll go any further into
the work of each of these individuals, Professor Searle. I think we ought to move on now to the second
of the main lines of development that you mentioned. And that is the line of development that's
concerned with the intentions of speech users. Now, the central notion here is the notion
of the speech act, isn't it, which is indeed the title of your famous book. The idea is that sentences don't just kind
of exist in limbo. They don't exist all by themselves, autonomously
in the universe. They are generated by human beings. And they're always generated in actual situations. And they're always generated for a purpose,
in order to do something. And the idea is, isn't it, that you can only
understand meaning if you understand the intentions of the language user. What is he doing when he utters something? Would you take-- Yes, well, let me go on with that. In the tradition that we're now talking about,
it isn't that there is a rejection of the question, what is the relation between language
and the world. Rather, that question is put in a larger context. The question now becomes, well, what sort
of behavior is linguistic behavior? And then the way that that is answered is
in such a fashion as to try to explain how the speaker's intentions, how his rule-governed
intentional behavior relates language to the world. So the question, how does language relate
to reality, which I think is one of the fundamental questions-- perhaps the fundamental question
in the philosophy of language-- is assimilated to what I think is the larger question. And that is, what is it about human beings
that enabled them to, as you said earlier, make these noises that have such remarkable
consequences-- among them is the consequence-- that they do relate to reality? Look, for me in this tradition, 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? After all, from a physical point of view,
the noises that come out of my mouth are fairly trivial stuff. I mean, my jaw flaps open and I make this
racket. And out it comes. And in linguistics textbooks, there's all
this ridiculous stuff in my throat and mouth that enables me to do that. But 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 or an order, explanation, that what he said was true or
false or interesting or boring or uninteresting. We attribute all these remarkable properties
to it. And one set of those properties are those
that related to the world. Now, the basic idea behind this second approach
is that the way that language relates to the world is a matter of how people do that relating. And the basic term of that, at least in the
tradition as I see it, is, as you said, the notion of a speech act. When people do communicate with each other,
whether in words or in writing, they perform a series of acts that we have names for such
as making statements, asking questions, giving orders, commands, apologies. Austin, incidentally, claimed that he could
get a list of about 1,000 such verbs and verb phrases in English. Now, that is the alternative tradition. And I should say Wittgenstein's enormously
important role in developing that-- the later Wittgenstein-- but it would be misleading
if I said that he would agree with everything that I have said. And I think there's a basic point of disagreement. Wittgenstein, though he was really the person
who gave this direction to the philosophy of language, the idea of looking at language
as a form of human behavior and language as a form of life, nonetheless, he resisted making
general theories of language. He thought any kind of general theorizing
was almost about bound to lead to distortion and falsehood when we were doing philosophy. So though I regard myself as, at least in
part, inspired by the work of Wittgenstein, I think he would reject the theoretical bent
that I personally try to pursue and that Austin, I think, was pursuing. I was going to say, the other really big figure
in this tradition, apart from Wittgenstein, the later Wittgenstein, is JL Austin-- now
alas dead, he died rather young-- an Oxford philosopher. And, indeed, you were a pupil of-- Yes, I was, indeed. --of Austin, weren't you? Can you say just a lit-- he invented the term
"speech act." He didn't quite invent the term. It did exist in certain structural linguists
such as Bloomfield in the 1930s. But in its modern meaning, it is Austin's
invention. And he arrived at it by quite an interesting
route. Before Austin, the primary concern of philosophers
of language had been with those utterances that are true or false. And indeed, as I was saying earlier, verification
loomed large. And there were such questions as whether or
not propositions that weren't verifiable could even be said to be meaningful, the logical
positivists arguing that they couldn't. Now, Austin made an interesting observation. He observed that there are lots of utterances
that don't set out to be true or false, that-- I mean, he gave the following example. He said, in a wedding ceremony and when the
preacher says, do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, and the chap who
says I do, according to Austin, is not describing a marriage ceremony. He's indulging in one. That is, his utterance isn't meant to be a
description true or false of anything. He's performing an action. And Austin then observed a whole class of
these utterances. When I say, I promise or I bet or I apologize
or thanks or I congratulate you, these he called performatives. And he then made a distinction between these
cases where saying something is doing something, where uttering these phrases, these ritual
phrases is doing something. And he contrasted these so-called performatives
with what he called constatives, those utterances that did set out to be true or false. But then the theory underwent an interesting
sea change. He discovered that he couldn't make the distinction
between performative really quite precise. The constative class was supposed to be sayings,
and the performative class was supposed to be doings. But what he discovered is that, of course,
that saying is a kind of doing as well. And that then led to what he called the general
theory of speech acts, where all of our utterances are seen as speech acts. And in my own work, I have come to the conclusion
that the basic unit of meaning, if I may so speak, is the speech act, that what we are
looking for when we ask such things as what did he mean by that is precisely into those
intentions with which his utterance was performed. That is to say, what kind of speech act was
he performing-- statement, question, command, and so on? And then within the speech act, we'll need
to distinguish between the kind of speech act is, whether or not it's a statement or
a question or an order on the one hand and what its content is. I can both predict that you will leave the
room and order you to leave the room or ask whether you will leave the room. Now, in some sense, I want to say all of those
have the same content, though they have, what Austin called, different force. And he had a label for this. He called those illocutionary acts-- that
is, the basic speech acts where we are saying something and saying it as a statement or
question or a command-- as contrasted with those of our utterances that we can describe
in terms of the effect they produce on people. Whether or not I convince you or amuse you
or bore you or annoy you, those he called perlocutionary acts. Now, I think that bit of his taxonomy enables
us to see that our quarry here, the target of our investigation is the illocutionary
act, that large class that includes making statements, asking questions, giving commands,
apologies, thanks, congratulations, and so on. And there it seems to me, if we investigate
those-- and here, Austin unfortunately didn't live long enough really to do this investigation. But I have been working on it. And other people have tried to work on it. And there the crucial question is what is
the structure of the illocutionary act. And that's the form-- and I think this is
a derivative from Austin-- that is the form in which the question I was asking earlier
has really come to take shape. And that is, if we ask what I said was the
question, how do we get from the physics to the semantics, that then is translated into
the question, how do we get from the utterance to the illocutionary act? So I think you can see a line of development
there from Austin. But again, I want to emphasize that Wittgenstein
wasn't like that. He did inspire much of this. But he would have thought that to do it in
this theoretical way was almost invariably, almost bound to distort the immense complexity
and subtlety of language. Now, you yourself have, as it were, taken
up this work of Austin's. And you're developing it further. It's already several years since your book
Speech Acts was produced. What are you working on now? Well, really I'm trying to carry this investigation
into the next stage. If we really take seriously the idea that
speaking a language is engaging in a form of behavior, then we're led to ask, well,
in what sense of behavior exactly? And what is it about action that seems so
crucial here? And this ties in with what, to me, are the
two central questions in contemporary philosophy. And I think, in a way, they come together. The two questions are, how does language relate
to reality, which all philosophers of language are concerned with the one way or another. And the second is, what is the nature of human
action? What is it to perform an action? What is it to explain an action? Why is that the methods of science have not
given us the kind of results in the study of human behavior that they've been able to
give us elsewhere. Or to put that part more pointedly, why have
so much of the social sciences seemed to be a bore and unproductive? Now, the way those two questions come together,
or two families of questions come together, I want to say is in the notion of what philosophers
call intentionality. Now, intentionality was a term introduced
by Brentano. And it is, itself, a medieval term. And, at least the way I use it, the feature
that certain mental states have of being directed at objects and states of affairs in the world
is what I call their-- and what the following this tradition I call-- their intentionality. If we think of our beliefs and fears and hopes
and desires, they're all, in this sense, intentional. If you believe, you must believe that such
and such is the case. Or if you fear, you must fear something. Whereas for pains and tickles and itches,
they aren't in that way directed. They are, so to speak, independent. They're not directed at objects and states
of affairs in the world. Now, the way that this notion of intentionality
ties in with the philosophy of language is this. The question that we've been posing-- and
in philosophy, the way you pose the question is half the battle. If you can get your question raised exactly
right, you're well on the way to a solution. The way I want to now repose that question
is this. Given that our mental states are, so to speak,
intrinsically intentional, they can't help but be directed at objects and states of affairs
in the world, the question is, how does the mind impose intentionality on objects that
are not intrinsically intentional, because the noises that come out of my mouth, as I
was saying earlier, they're just noises. The marks that I make on paper, the pictures
that hang on the wall of a museum are after all, again, just physical objects, bits of
canvas with paint slashed on them or painted on them. And now we want to ask, how is it that these
fairly trivial, middle-sized, physical phenomena acquire this remarkable capacity to represent
the world and represent it in these different illocutionary modes, to be statements or questions
or commands or pictures of Bryan Magee or of the Battle of Hastings? And that, I think, is the point at which the
theory of language and the theory of action come together in this problem of intentionality. So you get a kind of double prong with the
theory of speech acts. On the one hand, by seeing language as action,
by seeing speaking as a form of human behavior, I think you get a deeper insight into language. You see how-- and to use a Wittgensteinian
metaphor-- it meshes with the rest of our behavior. But now, by taking this representative feature,
this intentionality of language back into your theory of action, you also see how actions
themselves have a kind of intentionality, in the sense in which language is meaningful,
it isn't such a move to say that actions can also be meaningful, that our intentions are
a kind of representation of what we're going to do. Now, let me say having said that, that I'm
not going back to argue for the ghost in the machine or saying that there are all these
mysterious mental events occurring in this queer mental medium. I'm not going back to Descartes. I think it's a big mistake to suppose that
the logical features of intentionality-- that is, how it is that the mind can represent
the world, either in our mental states, beliefs, hopes, fears, and so on, or perceptions or
in our representations of a public kind, in language-- it's a big mistake to suppose that
those questions have to be the same as Descartes' questions, namely, well, what's going on in
my mind? Is there some queer mental event occurring
in my soul when I speak? So I want to separate the Cartesian questions,
the questions about the nature of consciousness, from what, to me, is the basic question about
intentionality, namely how do mental states represent? And how do they have this remarkable capacity
to make objects represent? I mean, look at it this way. How can mere things represent? How can a mere object or noise stand for something
in the world? So my current research, which is really going
a step back from speech acts and into more basic primitive questions, speech acts asked
the question, how does language represent the world? Now I'm concerned with the question, how does
anything represent anything? And that, I think, is the question about intentionality. We've left one loose end in this discussion,
Professor Searle, which I want to take up and tie up before we bring the program to
an end. When you were earlier on sketching out the
whole state of the subject, you mentioned linguistics and, in particularly, the work
of Chomsky as being an important feature in the landscape. I think I must ask you before we do finally
conclude to say just a little bit briefly about him. Yes. Well, of course, Chomsky, I think it's no
exaggeration to say, produced a revolution in linguistics. What he did was take syntax as central to
language. Now, that wasn't just the revolution. That had been done before him. But he took it in a particular way. He asked the question, how can we get a finite
set of rules that will generate all and only the sentences of a language? And then he showed that these rules had to
have certain very special logical features. But the impact that this has had on philosophy
is quite interesting. And it's in different realms that it's had. One obvious thing is that it's given us new
syntactical tools to do studies of language. I mean, in my own case for example, I use
some of Chomsky's apparatus to try to show how different speech acts are realized in
different syntactical forms in English. And I think one could do similar studies for
other languages. But more importantly I think in Chomsky, he
was led to the following conclusion. The syntax that he came up with was extremely
abstract and complicated. And that raised the question, how can little
kids learn that? I mean, that you can't teach a small child
axiomatic set theory. Chomsky showed that English is much more complicated
than axiomatic set theory. How is it that little kids can learn that? And his answer was quite interesting. What he said was, in a sense they already
know it. It's a mistake to suppose that the mind is
a blank tablet. What happens is that the form of all natural
human languages is programmed into the child's mind at birth. I mean, in his strongest moments, Chomsky
says that the child has a perfect knowledge of universal grammar at birth. And then his exposure to language just triggers
this antecedent knowledge. And it's realized in the different natural
human languages. Now, there used to be a traditional objection
to this idea of a universal grammar. People would say, but languages are so different. English is so different from Chinese. Chomsky's answer to that was that though they're
different on the surface, they have a common, underlying or deep structure. And it's that which is programmed into the
child's mind. Now, that seems to me Chomsky's positive contribution. And I think it really is remarkable. But there are, I think, certain limitations. And those limitations have to do with the
present disarray in linguistics. Chomsky sees man as, essentially, a syntactical
animal. He never asked such questions as, well, what
are these syntactical forms used for? And his notion of syntax is that this theory
of the syntax of language must be stated in purely syntactical terms. That is, we're not allowed to say what these
forms mean or how people are supposed to use them. And Chomsky's actually denied what seems to
me to be true, namely that the purpose of language is communication. He doesn't think that that's the case. I mean, he thinks that-- He thinks it's expression. Well, that's right. And that language, the essence of language
is syntax and that we have the syntax programmed into us, that we are, as I said, syntactical
animals. Now, I think that leads to a certain limitation
in his research. I think that the most interesting questions
about syntax have to do with how form and function interact. And 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. Now, it's an effectual question. I mean, the research in the end and the long
haul, it might show that he was right and I am wrong. But my gut feel is that we will not get an
understanding of syntax of language and how language evolved without a conception of what
human beings use language to do. And that's back to speech acts. Well, Professor Searle, you've given us an
excellent survey, I think, of what the present situation is in the philosophy of language
and also how it developed out of the past. Would you-- and I put this to you as my very
last question-- would you conclude this discussion by hazarding some informed guesses about-- Well, I'll try. --how it's going to develop in the immediate
future. Yes, I'll try. Left my crystal ball in Berkeley. But I'll see what I can do without it. First of all, I think linguistics is now such
a booming subject, that that's bound to continue, partly because it's so well-funded. And I think linguists and philosophers are
going to find each other useful. I mean, we're interacting more than we did
in the past. I find myself at linguistics conferences and
inviting linguists to come and speak in philosophy conferences. So I think, though the Chomskyan paradigm
has broken down, there isn't the kind of unified development of linguistics as a science that
there once seemed in the heyday of Chomsky's paradigm. Though the field is in kind of a mess, it
seems to me that is going to continue, that the field will continue to develop. Linguistics will be a source of enormous usefulness
for the philosopher of language, even though, of course, the direction of the interest that
the linguist and the philosopher has are different. The linguist's interest is factual, empirical. He wants to know what are the facts about
language. The philosopher really is more conceptual. He wants to know how is meaning and communication
possible at all. His question, to use an old-fashioned jargon,
is transcendental. It's not just empirical. So that's one thing that I think will continue. Now, another thing I think is really having
a kind of a boom in England and in certain parts of the United States now is the work
of Quine and Davidson and especially Davidson's idea that you can get a theory of meaning
by way of a theory of truth. The thing that is so appealing about that
is you get well-defined questions. I mean, you get questions that you can state
using the apparatus of modern mathematical logic. And you get the sort of questions that Austin
liked incidentally, questions where cooperative group effort could produce results. So I think that vein is, by no means, worked
out. We're going to see a lot of interesting work
done in the Davidsonian tradition. And finally, I want to say that the kind of
stuff I'm interested in I think is going to continue to interest people. And I'm quite interested to see that on the
European continent, where for so long there seemed really a kind of iron curtain between
the way they did philosophy and the way we did philosophy-- I mean, French and German
philosophy seem so different from Anglo-American philosophy. They're now getting more and more interested
in precisely this aspect of language that we've been talking about. So I see at least these three strands of work
going. Post-Chomsky-- and, of course, I'm including
Chomsky himself in what I call post-Chomsky-- linguistics will continue to develop. I see more and more work going on in formal
semantics of the Davidsonian kind. And I think a lot of useful work is going
to be done there. And then I see these problems about language
usage and intentionality. That seems to me a very rich field. More and more in the Searlean kind, as well. Thank you very much, Professor Searle. Thank you.
