It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have … - John Searle

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My friends all say I’m going to be Secretary of State, [but] I don’t see how that would be much different from the job I have now

John Searle

It seems to me obvious that infants and many animals that do not in any ordinary sense have a language or perform speech acts nonetheless have Intentional states. Only someone in the grip of a philosophical theory would deny that small babies can literally be said to want milk and that dogs want to be let out or believe that their master is at the door.

Animals, Babies, Baby, Dog, Philosophical, Theory

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It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule.

Believe, Clear, Effort, Number, Numbers, Philosophers

The reason that no computer program can ever be a mind is simply that a computer program is only syntactical, and minds are more than syntactical. Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.

Computer, Content, Mind, Reason

You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.

Brain, Computer, Digital, Discover, Interpret

We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.

Common, Common Sense, Exist, Knowledge, Mental, Two

Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. . . Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill. . . At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.

Childhood, Electromagnetic, Science, Technology, Thought