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Oxford Readings in Philosophy
The Philosophy Of Language
The Philosophy of Language
156 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 1971
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125 people want to read
About the author
John Rogers Searle
97 books376 followersJohn Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and was the Slusser Professor of Philosophy and Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 3, 2025
This book appeared in 1971. And I think it was the first philosophy book in English that I ever read. So it is dear to my heart.
I am not a huge fan of Searle but the introduction seems to me very good. If only for this brilliant observation:
“I may utter ‘It’s raining’, mean it’s raining by that utterance, and still not care a hang whether my hearer believes that I believe it’s raining. The intended effect on the hearer of meaning it’s raining when I say ‘It’s raining’ and mean it [...] is that the hearer should know that he has been told [...] that it is raining.“ (p. 10)
There is an essay by Austin where he tells us that we do things with words. That, at the time seemed to me quite true, but I failed to see the philosophical consequences.
Strawson tells us that a locutionary act is an act of saying something; an illocutionary act is an act we perform in saying something. Very well. Again I did not see the philosophical relevance.
And the same is true for the essay by Searle. Is it even interesting whether an American Soldier (as an Italian prisoner) can mean that he is a German officer by saying: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?”
Grice did some important work but the essay here is very technical and I do not quite see where he is supposed to lead us.
Actually I am quite sympathetic to the view offered by Katz that Logical Positivism and Ordinary Language Philosophy are “inherently incapable of providing adequate, well-motivated solutions to the major philosophical problems they tackled“ (p. 102) The first, he says, produced irrelevant theories, the latter failed to give any theory. What is the alternative? Chomsky! Who “introduced the conception of a grammar as a generative, transformational system to supersede the conception of a grammar of a set of segmentation and classification procedures.” (p. 109) Wonderful, but what does the theory actually accomplish?
With Russell and his bald current king of France I can at least see what he wants to do, namely show how a proposition can have meaning although (the referent of) one of its components does not exist. (This is fine but, I agree with Katz, quite irrelevant. Because how people actually understand the proposition has nothing to do with Russell’s analysis. Maybe a hearer does not know that there is no king of France. Maybe she refuses to give meaning, maybe she thinks the proposition might be metaphorical. Maybe the french king of comedy is meant, etc. The proposition lacks context. But I digress...)
Funny, that what Katz thinks the theory is doing is giving credit to the idea that our ability to understand deep structure must be innate.
But what does the master himself has to say?
Chomsky is represented with two essays. I do not intend to give an overview of his (then 1966) theory. I am not qualified to do so. Just some remarks.
In Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar we find this little nugget: “This view is incomprehensible to me, and it is, in any event entirely false.“ A sure sign of a genius, it seems to me.
Prior to his own studies, he tells us, modern study of language “is seriously defective in its failure to deal with traditional questions.” How does Chomsky deal with it?
“A distinction must be made between what the speaker of a language knows implicitly (what we may call his competence) and what he does (his performance).” (p. 73)
Really? Why? It seems to me that the performance is the competence. I can fake incompetence by just uttering nonsense but I cannot fake competence.
He goes on saying it is clear that the deep structure is quite different from the surface structure. (p. 78) – He loves saying that something is clear when it is not clear at all – again a sign of genius.
He postulates that there are these enormously complicated transformational rules that have to be mastered in order to understand language. And then he says that because they are so complicated they can not be learned and thus must be innate.
The poor child has only a couple of years to learn the language. And to Chomsky it is remarkable that he understands a sentence that he has not learned before. (He also says that the child learns without (or little) reinforcements which to me sounds bizarre.)
In the second essays he elaborates on his idea that language competence must be innate. “The idea that sentences or sentence-forms are learned by association or conditioning or ‘training’ [...] is entirely at variance with obvious fact.” How is that for an argument? He seriously says that the rules must “operate over an infinite range” (p. 123)
“The problem is, precisely, to determine how the child determines that the structure of his language has the specific characteristics that empirical investigation leads us to postulate, given the meagre evidence available to him.“ (p. 125)
Right, we postulate something outrageous and then wonder how the child comes to the same conclusions.
But I do not need to go on, because luckily Searle included an essay by Putnam to this topic. And he does it better than I could.
He calls Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis ‘daring’. But with a caveat... “it may me meaningless, in which case it is not daring.” (p. 130) He also calls it essentially and irreparably vague. (p. 131)
There is only one real argument needed against the argument of Chomsky that language is too complicated: “... nine or ten years is enough to become pretty darn good at anything.”
(He does have some other arguments.)
And I love this: “Let a complete seventeenth century Oxford education be innate if you like; still the solution to ‘jump’ [peg-solitaire] was not innate.
Innateness only postpones the problem of learning.
–
The essay by Putnam is the only really good one, in my opinion. But I attach four stars anyway.
I am not a huge fan of Searle but the introduction seems to me very good. If only for this brilliant observation:
“I may utter ‘It’s raining’, mean it’s raining by that utterance, and still not care a hang whether my hearer believes that I believe it’s raining. The intended effect on the hearer of meaning it’s raining when I say ‘It’s raining’ and mean it [...] is that the hearer should know that he has been told [...] that it is raining.“ (p. 10)
There is an essay by Austin where he tells us that we do things with words. That, at the time seemed to me quite true, but I failed to see the philosophical consequences.
Strawson tells us that a locutionary act is an act of saying something; an illocutionary act is an act we perform in saying something. Very well. Again I did not see the philosophical relevance.
And the same is true for the essay by Searle. Is it even interesting whether an American Soldier (as an Italian prisoner) can mean that he is a German officer by saying: “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühen?”
Grice did some important work but the essay here is very technical and I do not quite see where he is supposed to lead us.
Actually I am quite sympathetic to the view offered by Katz that Logical Positivism and Ordinary Language Philosophy are “inherently incapable of providing adequate, well-motivated solutions to the major philosophical problems they tackled“ (p. 102) The first, he says, produced irrelevant theories, the latter failed to give any theory. What is the alternative? Chomsky! Who “introduced the conception of a grammar as a generative, transformational system to supersede the conception of a grammar of a set of segmentation and classification procedures.” (p. 109) Wonderful, but what does the theory actually accomplish?
With Russell and his bald current king of France I can at least see what he wants to do, namely show how a proposition can have meaning although (the referent of) one of its components does not exist. (This is fine but, I agree with Katz, quite irrelevant. Because how people actually understand the proposition has nothing to do with Russell’s analysis. Maybe a hearer does not know that there is no king of France. Maybe she refuses to give meaning, maybe she thinks the proposition might be metaphorical. Maybe the french king of comedy is meant, etc. The proposition lacks context. But I digress...)
Funny, that what Katz thinks the theory is doing is giving credit to the idea that our ability to understand deep structure must be innate.
But what does the master himself has to say?
Chomsky is represented with two essays. I do not intend to give an overview of his (then 1966) theory. I am not qualified to do so. Just some remarks.
In Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar we find this little nugget: “This view is incomprehensible to me, and it is, in any event entirely false.“ A sure sign of a genius, it seems to me.
Prior to his own studies, he tells us, modern study of language “is seriously defective in its failure to deal with traditional questions.” How does Chomsky deal with it?
“A distinction must be made between what the speaker of a language knows implicitly (what we may call his competence) and what he does (his performance).” (p. 73)
Really? Why? It seems to me that the performance is the competence. I can fake incompetence by just uttering nonsense but I cannot fake competence.
He goes on saying it is clear that the deep structure is quite different from the surface structure. (p. 78) – He loves saying that something is clear when it is not clear at all – again a sign of genius.
He postulates that there are these enormously complicated transformational rules that have to be mastered in order to understand language. And then he says that because they are so complicated they can not be learned and thus must be innate.
The poor child has only a couple of years to learn the language. And to Chomsky it is remarkable that he understands a sentence that he has not learned before. (He also says that the child learns without (or little) reinforcements which to me sounds bizarre.)
In the second essays he elaborates on his idea that language competence must be innate. “The idea that sentences or sentence-forms are learned by association or conditioning or ‘training’ [...] is entirely at variance with obvious fact.” How is that for an argument? He seriously says that the rules must “operate over an infinite range” (p. 123)
“The problem is, precisely, to determine how the child determines that the structure of his language has the specific characteristics that empirical investigation leads us to postulate, given the meagre evidence available to him.“ (p. 125)
Right, we postulate something outrageous and then wonder how the child comes to the same conclusions.
But I do not need to go on, because luckily Searle included an essay by Putnam to this topic. And he does it better than I could.
He calls Chomsky’s innateness hypothesis ‘daring’. But with a caveat... “it may me meaningless, in which case it is not daring.” (p. 130) He also calls it essentially and irreparably vague. (p. 131)
There is only one real argument needed against the argument of Chomsky that language is too complicated: “... nine or ten years is enough to become pretty darn good at anything.”
(He does have some other arguments.)
And I love this: “Let a complete seventeenth century Oxford education be innate if you like; still the solution to ‘jump’ [peg-solitaire] was not innate.
Innateness only postpones the problem of learning.
–
The essay by Putnam is the only really good one, in my opinion. But I attach four stars anyway.
June 24, 2024
This is an exceptionally hard book to read. The font is small and the topic is incomprehensible for someone who has not done a philosophy degree. For those who have done a philosophy degree, the book looks over various papers written in the 1960s on the philosophy of language. Is it a good book on the subject? Yes, there are good papers in the book. I especially liked the paper The Philosophical Relevance of Linguistic Theory, which looks over how linguistics is useful in philosophy. A difficult book but one that gives useful information on the philosophy of language.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews