John Searle’s philosophy of language

John Searle’s philosophy of language: Force, meaning and mind. Ed. by Savas L. Tsohatzidis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. 312. ISBN 9780521685344. $31.99.

Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

John Searle is undeniably one of the most important contemporary American philosophers. A glowing tribute to Searle’s contribution to the analytic tradition of the philosophy of language, this edited volume comprises eleven original essays by leading philosophers. The essays are grouped into two parts, ‘From mind to meaning’ and ‘From meaning to force’, which represent the two principal themes that have occupied Searle throughout his career. Additionally, an opening chapter by Searle foregrounds what he sees as some of the central issues of philosophy today.

The first three essays in Part 1 address intentionality, the cornerstone of Searle’s philosophy of mind and language. Although he agrees with Searle on the importance of causal self-referentiality in underwriting conscious perceptual states, in ‘Content, mode, and self-reference’, François Recanati takes issue with the idea of assigning self-referentiality to the propositional content of the perceptual state rather than to its psychological mode. Kent Bach, ‘Searle against the world: How can experiences find their objects?’, and Robin Jeshion, ‘Seeing what is there’, both critique Searle’s efforts to deflate the so-called ‘particularity objection’ to his internalist analysis of mental content. In ‘Intentionalism, descriptivism, and proper names’, Wayne A. Davis broadly agrees with Searle’s intentionalist stance on the sense and reference of proper names but argues that intentionalism can only be salvaged from externalist objections if some of its key features are changed. In ‘On the alleged priority of thought over language’, Christopher Gauker calls into question the widely held assumption that conceptual thought has ontological priority over language. Finally, in ‘Rule skepticism: Searle’s criticism of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’, Martin Kusch concludes that Searle has failed to make his case against Saul Kripke’s interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views on rule following.

Kepa Korta and John Perry’s ‘How to say things with words’ opens Part 2. Korta and Perry explore how propositional content—distinct from illocutionary force—is standardly characterized in the literature and offer a multipropositional conception. Stephen J. Barker, ‘Semantics without the distinction between sense and force’, and Nicholas Asher, ‘Dynamic discourse semantics for embedded speech acts’ both contest the time-honored wisdom, embraced by Searle, that propositional content is altogether different from illocutionary force, although Barker and Asher develop their arguments on entirely different grounds. In ‘Yes-no questions and the myth of content invariance’, Savas L. Tsohatzidis disputes Searle’s claim that a yes/no question, and its grammatically corresponding assertion, both have propositional content. Finally, Mitchell Green asks ‘How do speech acts express psychological states?’. Green contests the universality of Searle’s claim that for an illocutionary act to be deemed sincere, it must express the speaker’s mental state.

This volume, which is a testament to the vitality of Searle’s philosophy, is certain to be of interest to philosophers and linguists who are interested in the role of intentionality in the explanation of speech acts.