Denver

A Rocky Mountain city where John Searle was born in 1932, decades before he would spend sixty years at Berkeley arguing that a computer manipulating symbols, however fluently, still isn't the same thing as a mind that understands them.

Denver in the 1930s was a mile-high railroad city at the edge of the plains, and Searle's father worked for the telephone company while his mother practised medicine. The family moved often. He went to Wisconsin, then to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and stayed on to teach before coming back to California. What he took from Oxford was the conviction that ordinary language does real work, and what he did with it was to describe speaking as a kind of acting rather than a kind of labelling.