A summary of John Searle's main contributions (1932-2025)


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Draft version: version 4 (31st May 2026, Rawls objection added)
Inclusion criteria: My intuition.


John Searle died last month. The terrorist attack in Manchester may have prevented me from noticing the news until today. His argument against computers ever having minds is his most famous contribution, but he has several others. Summaries below. (Some mind material  of his missing though.) Note: Searle was involved in a sexual harassment scandal.


Against the is-ought gap. The is-ought gap, from David Hume, is that you cannot validly infer what you ought to do from what is. For example, from only the premise that exercise is healthy, you cannot validly infer that you ought to exercise; some other premise is needed, such as "You ought to exercise if it is healthy." Searle denies that there always is this gap. He asks us to consider the following argument: (1) Jones uttered the words "I hereby promise to pay you, Smith, five dollars." (2) Jones promised to pay Smith five dollars. (3) Jones placed himself under (undertook) an obligation to pay Smith five dollars. (5) Jones ought to pay five dollars. From the fact of what Jones said we seem to get a conclusion about what he ought to do. But this attempt to deny there always is the gap was criticized by J.E.J. Altham. More recently, Charles Pigden believes one needs to distinguish between two readings of the is-ought gap and Searle's argument only works against one of these (2025).


The Chinese room thought experiment. Searle imagines himself in a room with some instructions. Chinese characters are slipped under the door. He follows the instructions and sends some Chinese characters back. He does not understand Chinese but by following the instructions he appears to be having a conversation with someone. Searle denies that a computer which appears to converse should therefore be thought of as having a mind, saying that in the room he is like a computer: he follows instructions and appears to converse but does not actually understand Chinese. And all computer attempts at intelligence are like this, he thinks. A well-known objection to Searle is that the person in the room who applies the instructions does not understand, but the whole system does. 


Derrida's positivist assumptions. Beyond the Chinese room argument, Searle is famous for his debate with Jacques Derrida, usually represented as a debate between a representative of the analytic tradition (dominant in philosophy departments in the English-speaking world) and continental philosophy (coming from continental Europe and influential in some arts departments). The debate went on for years, from the 1970s to the 1990s at least. In 1983, Searle attributed two positivist assumptions to Derrida. First, for any legitimate category, something either falls under that category or it does not, e.g. something is a work of fiction or it is not. Second, for any legitimate category, there needs to be a set of instructions we can follow to determine whether something falls under that category or not. Searle thinks that the radical program of literary interpretation recommended by Derrida, which avoids attributing intentions and more, can be avoided by rejecting the assumptions. For example, some things are not clearly fictions or not fictions and we do not have to say that they must be one or the other. Derrida agrees that he makes the first assumption, but regards it as indispensable. 


The hamburger example. In 1994, Searle considers the loosely Derridean view that every interpretation is a misinterpretation, that communication is always miscommunication. Searle disagrees. He memorably asks us to imagine someone's entering a restaurant and ordering a hamburger. The waiter, or crew member, brings an ancient petrified hamburger. The someone says, "I don't want an ancient petrified hamburger. I want a fresh one." The waiter brings a fresh hamburger but encased in concrete. The someone says, "I don't want a hamburger encased in concrete. I want a fresh hamburger not encased." How long will this delivery and further specification go on for? Searle thinks that it is impossible for the someone to fully specify what they want. But he does not think that we should infer that successful communication is impossible, for example where A specifies what they want and B understands. He thinks success here requires a background of shared cultural understanding, but this background cannot be fully articulated. (Text lifted from PhilPapers.) 
 
Analytic philosophy in the US and objection to Rawls. Searle's chapter "Contemporary Philosophy in the United States," is an impressive history of philosophy in the analytic tradition in the US, and beyond: an accessible and probably enduring textbook-like piece. It presents how logical positivism, with its distinctions between analytic and synthetic truths and descriptive and evaluative sentences, was subject to severe criticism, most influentially by W.V. Quine, who attacked the former distinction. But it tells us that John Rawls's philosophy became dominant in place of the previous focus on meta-ethics - analysis of moral language - because it appealed to more  people's tastes, rather than because he argued against the reason for that focus grounded in the latter distinction. This theme is also taken up by Bernard Williams in the same book.


Social reality, performative language, the ontologically subjective and epistemically objective. Searle has written on the construction of social reality. He distinguishes between ontologically objective and subjective, and epistemically objective and subjective. Something is ontologically objective if (and only if) its existence does not depend on any agreement from us that it exists, or any belief by any one of us: these can be lacking and yet it exists. Something is ontologically subjective if (and only if) its existence does have this dependence: without some agreement that it is or belief that it is, it would cease to exist. Something is epistemically objective if it can be established to exist or to be true, something is epistemically subjective if it cannot be. Searle thinks that various social facts or features are ontologically subjective but epistemically objective. Vladimir Putin's being the president of Russia is ontologically subjective (dependent on agreement) but epistemically objective (one can establish that he is president). Searle emphasizes the role of performative language in creating social facts, a kind of language identified by J.L. Austin. Performative language does not describe an already existing reality; it brings into existence a feature of social reality. For example, a priest says, "You are hereby man and wife," bringing into existence a marriage. Searle says that performative language conveys something of the form: "X counts as Y in context C."


Performative theory of money. Mainstream economists think that money is whatever has certain functions. This goes back to Adam Smith. Smith thought that people initially bartered and recognized the value of specialization. One person specialized in one thing, e.g. hunting, and another person specialized in another thing, e.g. gathering fruit, and they traded. But what if people do not want your specialist good? It is sensible to have some of what everyone wants, in case they do not want your specialist good. Smith thinks precious metals were once what everyone wanted. Such metals became money. But whatever is in this role is money for Smith, and whether it is believed to be or not. Searle's view is that money is created by performative language by an authority. For example an authority says, "I hereby declare that paper notes of this kind are £5 notes." Searle's position seems extremely conservative to me: if people are using a certain kind of material object for trades in general (exchanging items for the objects and specifying the value of things with it), then it is their money, whether an authority declares it to be so or not.
 
References
Altham, J.E.J. 1985. Wicked promises. In I. Hacking (ed.), Exercises in analysis: essays by students of Casimir Lewy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Available at:
https://silverbronzo.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/austin-how-to-do-things-with-words-1962.pdf
And:
https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_2271128/component/file_2271430/content
And:
https://raggeduniversity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Austin-J.-L.-How-to-Do-Things-With-Words.pdf
Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Available at:
https://lab404.com/misc/ltdinc.pdf
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2022. Traditional literary interpretation versus subversive interpretation. Asian Journal of Advances in Research 16(3): 34-39. Available at:
https://philarchive.org/archive/EDWSIA-2
Pigden, Charles. 2011.  Survey Paper: Recent Work on No-Ought-From-Is. Available from:
https://www.academia.edu/5649505/Is_Ought_Survey_Recent_Work_on_Is_and_Ought_
Pigden, Charles. 2025. Comment on In Memoriam: John Searle (1932-2025). Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog. September 29th, 12.19am. Available at:
https://leiterreports.com/2025/09/28/in-memoriam-john-searle-1932-2025/
Searle, John R. 1964. How to Derive "Ought" from "Is." The Philosophical Review 73: 43-58.
Searle, John R. 1983. The Word Turned Upside Down. The New York Review of Books October 27 1983: 74-79.
Searle, John R. 1994. Literary Theory and Its Discontents. New Literary History 25: 637-667.
Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press. Available at:
https://epistemh.pbworks.com/f/6.+The+Construction+of+Social+Reality+(SCAN).pdf
Searle, John R. Contemporary philosophy in the United States. In Nicholas Bunin and E.P. Tsui-James (editors.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Available at:
https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/5633910/blackwell_companion_to_philosophy.2002.pdf?1737824815=&response-content-disposition=inline%3B+filename%3DSpinoza_and_Leibniz.pdf&Expires=1780269664&Signature=ZKZG1G2iiQkhV6X3m3m~xl5EnZGe4~rfV2YyKJErN5-5rSF-R3rxFaxiAMahsnhpbiISrtcs0iXAZy4Q2jw~Nwp-xTEZxEfdvEmx183uKX-s1kPXV9VwBy79ueZKchzKW6xr70em0X5MqDK6Xjnp1-Nn9GIMeU8BFUHwCZzSxJzm3nXDJufu8IAlhId0lBibtSOJ~FLCVms~XVr-4PAekTBFiLZYInzHlX5G8bAqFcby7ohTspsJ51cmF3Fy68zbov1jq916Iq3vKAHHWHIuhNCUggBmA8bHKTGW6RDOQvTaCqIG4JszrN-1s3VP4T~OquLC6VH86F4-KSda8vJzbQ__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA#page=18
Smith, Adam. 1904 (originally 1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: Methuen.
Williams, Bernard.  Contemporary philosophy: A Second Look. In Nicholas Bunin and E.P. Tsui-James (editors.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. (See the previous reference to this for the PDF location.)


Further reading (from me)
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. What it’s like to be a philosopher? A thinly-fictional response to reading about the death of John Searle, by means of an imitation of R.K. Narayan. Available at: https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWWIL.pdf
Edward, Terence Rajivan. 2025. Avoiding alien capture? On The Guardian's John Searle obituary (with appendices providing a newspaper style introduction for me and …). Available at: https://philpapers.org/archive/EDWAAC-2.pdf