John Searle

Searle built his early reputation extending his Oxford teacher J.L. Austin's ordinary-language observation that saying something is often a way of doing something — promising, warning, christening a ship — into Speech Acts, a systematic theory of exactly what conditions have to hold for an utterance to count as a genuine act of promising, asserting, or requesting rather than an empty string of words. His most famous contribution came a decade later and took direct aim at what he called strong artificial intelligence: the claim that a computer running the right program does not merely simulate a mind but actually has one. His Chinese Room thought experiment imagines a person who speaks no Chinese locked in a room with a comprehensive rulebook in English, who receives Chinese symbols through a slot, follows the rulebook to produce other Chinese symbols in response, and passes them back out — convincingly enough that a Chinese speaker outside believes they are conversing with someone who understands the language, while the person inside understands nothing at all beyond mechanical symbol-shuffling. His conclusion was that manipulating symbols according to syntactic rules, no matter how sophisticated the program, can never by itself produce semantics: real understanding, real meaning, requires something more than correct input-output behavior, which he argued must be a genuine biological property of brains rather than something any sufficiently complex symbol-processor automatically acquires. He spent sixty years at Berkeley developing this and related arguments about consciousness and social reality, becoming one of the most cited living philosophers of mind — until, in 2019, the university stripped him of his emeritus title following a Title IX investigation that found he had sexually harassed a former research assistant, a conclusion he denied, that permanently complicated how his long career would be remembered.