1 - John Searle: From Speech Acts to Social Reality

Summary

It was in the Oxford of Austin, Ryle, and Strawson that John Searle was shaped as a philosopher. It was in Oxford, not least through Austin's influence and example, that the seeds of the book Speech Acts, Searle's inaugural magnum opus, were planted. And it was in Oxford that Searle acquired many of the characteristic traits that have marked his thinking ever since. These are traits shared by many analytic philosophers of his generation: the idea of the centrality of language to philosophy; the adoption of a philosophical method centred on (in Searle's case, a mainly informal type of) logical analysis; the respect for common sense and for the results of modern science as constraints on philosophical theorizing; and the reverence for Frege, and for the sort of stylistic clarity that marked Frege's writings.

In subsequent decades, however, Searle has distinguished himself in a number of important ways from other, more typical analytic philosophers. While still conceiving language as central to philosophical concerns, he has come to see language itself against the background of those neurobiological and psychological capacities of human beings that underpin our competencies as language-using organisms. He has embraced a radically negative stand as concerns the role of epistemology in contemporary philosophy. And he has braved territory not otherwise explored by analytic philosophers in engaging in the attempt to build what can only be referred to as a Grand Philosophical Theory.