John Rogers Searle

(American philosopher, 1932–). Searle is a prominent and often controversial contributor to philosophy of language and philosophy of mind; he is also noted for the account of social reality he gives in The Construction of Social Reality (1997). Searle's books are written in a clear, conversational style, a factor that contributes to his wide readership among lay-people. His early work was in speech act theory, where he elaborated and contributed new elements to John Austin's work in the field. Searle's philosophy of mind comprises three major components: a critique of computationalism and strong AI (the "Chinese Room Argument"), a theory of intentionality, and a theory of consciousness. Searle believes consciousness to be defined by first-person subjective experience, and thus irreducible to third-person objective description (based on neural states, for example); to attempt such a description is to immediately jettison the subject under consideration (consciousness). Searle also supposes consciousness to be an emergent property of brain processes and a function of brain biology. Searle's books include Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992), The Mystery of Consciousness (1997), Rationality in Action (2001), and Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004).