Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege

Born	8 November 1848 Wismar, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany
Died	26 July 1925(1925-07-26) (aged 76) Bad Kleinen, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany
Era	19th century philosophy 20th century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Philosophy of mathematics, Mathematical logic, Philosophy of language
Notable ideas	Principle of compositionality, Quantification theory, Predicate calculus, Logicism, Sense and reference
Influenced by Adolf Trendelenburg, Hermann Lotze[1]
Influenced Giuseppe Peano, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michael Dummett, Edmund Husserl, Gershom Scholem, Ian Rumfitt, and most of the analytic tradition

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925, pronounced [ˈɡɔtloːp ˈfreːɡə ]) was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on the philosophy of language and mathematics. While he was mainly ignored by the intellectual world when he published his writings, Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) introduced his work to later generations of logicians and philosophers.

Life[link]

Childhood (1848–1869)[link]

Frege was born in 1848 in Wismar, in the state of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (the modern German federal state Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). His father Carl (Karl) Alexander Frege (3 August 1809 – 30 November 1866) was the co-founder and headmaster of a girls' high school until his death. After Carl's death, the school was led by Frege's mother Auguste Wilhelmine Sophie Frege (née Bialloblotzky, 12 January 1815 – 14 October 1898).

In childhood, Frege encountered philosophies that would guide his future scientific career. For example, his father wrote a textbook on the German language for children aged 9–13, entitled Hülfsbuch zum Unterrichte in der deutschen Sprache für Kinder von 9 bis 13 Jahren (2nd ed., Wismar, 1850; 3rd ed., Wismar and Ludwigslust: Hinstorff, 1862), the first section of which dealt with the structure and logic of language.

Frege studied at a gymnasium in Wismar and graduated in 1869. His teacher Gustav Adolf Leo Sachse (5 November 1843 – 1 September 1909), who was also a poet, played the most important role in determining Frege’s future scientific career, encouraging him to continue his studies at the University of Jena.

Studies at University: Jena and Göttingen (1869 – 1874)[link]

Frege matriculated at the University of Jena in the spring of 1869 as a citizen of the North German Federation. In the four semesters of his studies he attended approximately twenty courses of lectures, most of them on mathematics and physics. His most important teacher was Ernst Karl Abbe (1840–1905) (physicist, mathematician, and inventor). Abbe gave lectures on theory of gravity galvanism and electrodynamics, complex analysis theory of functions of a complex variable, applications of physics, selected divisions of mechanics, and mechanics of solids. Abbe was more than a teacher to Frege: he was a trusted friend, and, as director of the optical manufacturer Carl Zeiss AG, he was in a position to advance Frege's career. After Frege's graduation, they came into closer correspondence.

His other notable university teachers were Christian Philipp Karl Snell (1806–1886) (subjects: use of infinitesimal analysis in geometry analytical geometry of planes, analytical mechanics, optics, physical foundations of mechanics); Hermann Karl Julius Traugott Schaeffer (1824–1900) (analytical geometry, applied physics, algebraic analysis, on the telegraph and other electronic machines; and the famous philosopher Kuno Fischer (1824–1907) (Kantian and critical philosophy).

Starting in 1871, Frege continued his studies in Göttingen, the leading university in mathematics in German-speaking territories, where he attended the lectures of Alfred Clebsch (1833–1872) (analytical geometry), Ernst Christian Julius Schering (1824–1897) function theory, Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804–1891) (physical studies, applied physics, Eduard Riecke (1845–1915) (theory of electricity, and Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) (philosophy of religion). (Many of the philosophical doctrines of the mature Frege have parallels in Lotze; it has been the subject of scholarly debate whether or not there was a direct influence on Frege's views arising from his attending Lotze's lectures.)

In 1873, Frege attained his doctorate under Ernst Schering, with a dissertation under the title of "Über eine geometrische Darstellung der imaginären Gebilde in der Ebene" ("On a Geometrical Representation of Imaginary Forms in a Plane"), in which he aimed to solve such fundamental problems in geometry as the mathematical interpretation of projective geometry's infinitely distant (imaginary) points.

Frege married Margarete Katharina Sophia Anna Lieseberg (15 February 1856 - 25 June 1904) on March 14, 1887.

Work as a logician[link]

Though his education and early work were mathematical, especially geometrical, Frege's thought soon turned to logic. His Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens (Halle a/S: Verlag von Louis Nebert, 1879) (Concept-Script: A Formal Language for Pure Thought Modeled on that of Arithmetic) marked a turning point in the history of logic. The Begriffsschrift broke new ground, including a rigorous treatment of the ideas of functions and variables. Frege wanted to show that mathematics grows out of logic, but in so doing, he devised techniques that took him far beyond the Aristotelian syllogistic and Stoic propositional logic that had come down to him in the logical tradition.

Title page to Begriffsschrift (1879)

In effect, Frege invented axiomatic predicate logic, in large part thanks to his invention of quantified variables, which eventually became ubiquitous in mathematics and logic, and which solved the problem of multiple generality. Previous logic had dealt with the logical constants and, or, if ... then ..., not, and some and all, but iterations of these operations, especially "some" and "all", were little understood: even the distinction between a pair of sentences like "every boy loves some girl" and "some girl is loved by every boy" was able to be represented only very artificially, whereas Frege's formalism had no difficulty expressing the different readings of "every boy loves some girl who loves some boy who loves some girl" and similar sentences, in complete parallel with his treatment of, say, "every boy is foolish".

It is frequently noted that Aristotle's logic is unable to represent even the most elementary inferences in Euclid's geometry, but Frege's "conceptual notation" can represent inferences involving indefinitely complex mathematical statements. The analysis of logical concepts and the machinery of formalization that is essential to Principia Mathematica (3 vols., 1910–1913) (by Bertrand Russell, 1872–1970, and Alfred North Whitehead, 1861–1947), to Russell's theory of descriptions, to Kurt Gödel's (1906–1978) incompleteness theorems, and to Alfred Tarski's (1901–1983) theory of truth, is ultimately due to Frege.

One of Frege's stated purposes was to isolate genuinely logical principles of inference, so that in the proper representation of mathematical proof, one would at no point appeal to "intuition". If there was an intuitive element, it was to be isolated and represented separately as an axiom: from there on, the proof was to be purely logical and without gaps. Having exhibited this possibility, Frege's larger purpose was to defend the view that arithmetic is a branch of logic, a view known as logicism: unlike geometry, arithmetic was to be shown to have no basis in "intuition", and no need for non-logical axioms. Already in the 1879 Begriffsschrift important preliminary theorems, for example a generalized form of law of trichotomy, were derived within what Frege understood to be pure logic.

This idea was formulated in non-symbolic terms in his Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) (The Foundations of Arithmetic). Later, in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic) (vol. 1, 1893; vol. 2, 1903) (vol. 2 of which was published at his own expense), Frege attempted to derive, by use of his symbolism, all of the laws of arithmetic from axioms he asserted as logical. Most of these axioms were carried over from his Begriffsschrift, though not without some significant changes. The one truly new principle was one he called the Basic Law V: the "value-range" of the function f(x) is the same as the "value-range" of the function g(x) if and only if ∀x[f(x) = g(x)].

The crucial case of the law may be formulated in modern notation as follows. Let {x|Fx} denote the extension of the predicate Fx, i.e., the set of all Fs, and similarly for Gx. Then Basic Law V says that the predicates Fx and Gx have the same extension iff ∀x[Fx ↔ Gx]. The set of Fs is the same as the set of Gs just in case every F is a G and every G is an F. (The case is special because what is here being called the extension of a predicate, or a set, is only one type of "value-range" of a function.)

In a famous episode, Bertrand Russell wrote to Frege, just as Vol. 2 of the Grundgesetze was about to go to press in 1903, showing that Russell's paradox could be derived from Frege's Basic Law V. It is easy to define the relation of membership of a set or extension in Frege's system; Russell then drew attention to "the set of things x that are such that x is not a member of x". The system of the Grundgesetze entails that the set thus characterised both is and is not a member of itself, and is thus inconsistent. Frege wrote a hasty, last-minute Appendix to Vol. 2, deriving the contradiction and proposing to eliminate it by modifying Basic Law V. Frege opened the Appendix with the exceptionally honest comment: "Hardly anything more unfortunate can befall a scientific writer than to have one of the foundations of his edifice shaken after the work is finished. This was the position I was placed in by a letter of Mr. Bertrand Russell, just when the printing of this volume was nearing its completion." (This letter and Frege's reply are translated in Jean van Heijenoort 1967.)

Frege's proposed remedy was subsequently shown to imply that there is but one object in the universe of discourse, and hence is worthless (indeed, this would make for a contradiction in Frege's system if he had axiomatized the idea, fundamental to his discussion, that the True and the False are distinct objects; see, for example, Dummett 1973), but recent work has shown that much of the program of the Grundgesetze might be salvaged in other ways:

• Basic Law V can be weakened in other ways. The best-known way is due to philosopher and mathematical logician George Boolos (1940–1996), who was an expert on the work of Frege. A "concept" F is "small" if the objects falling under F cannot be put into one-to-one correspondence with the universe of discourse, that is, if: ∃R[R is 1-to-1 & ∀x∃y(xRy & Fy)]. Now weaken V to V*: a "concept" F and a "concept" G have the same "extension" if and only if neither F nor G is small or ∀x(Fx ↔ Gx). V* is consistent if second-order arithmetic is, and suffices to prove the axioms of second-order arithmetic.
• Basic Law V can simply be replaced with Hume's Principle, which says that the number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs if and only if the Fs can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the Gs. This principle, too, is consistent if second-order arithmetic is, and suffices to prove the axioms of second-order arithmetic. This result is termed Frege's Theorem because it was noticed that in developing arithmetic, Frege's use of Basic Law V is restricted to a proof of Hume's Principle; it is from this, in turn, that arithmetical principles are derived. On Hume's Principle and Frege's Theorem, see "Frege's Logic, Theorem, and Foundations for Arithmetic".^[2]
• Frege's logic, now known as second-order logic, can be weakened to so-called predicative second-order logic. Predicative second-order logic plus Basic Law V is provably consistent by finitistic or constructive methods, but it can interpret only very weak fragments of arithmetic.^[3]

Frege's work in logic had little international attention until 1903 when Russell wrote an appendix to The Principles of Mathematics stating his differences with Frege. The diagrammatic notation that Frege used had no antecedents (and has had no imitators since). Moreover, until Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica (3 vols.) appeared in 1910–13, the dominant approach to mathematical logic was still that of George Boole (1815–1864) and his intellectual descendants, especially Ernst Schröder (1841–1902). Frege's logical ideas nevertheless spread through the writings of his student Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) and other admirers, particularly Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951).

Philosopher[link]

Frege is one of the founders of analytic philosophy, mainly because of his contributions to the philosophy of language, including the

• Function-argument analysis of the proposition;
• Distinction between concept and object (Begriff und Gegenstand);
• Principle of compositionality;
• Context principle;
• Distinction between the sense and reference (Sinn und Bedeutung) of names and other expressions, sometimes said to involve a mediated reference theory.

As a philosopher of mathematics, Frege attacked the psychologistic appeal to mental explanations of the content of judgment of the meaning of sentences. His original purpose was very far from answering general questions about meaning; instead, he devised his logic to explore the foundations of arithmetic, undertaking to answer questions such as "What is a number?" or "What objects do number-words ("one", "two", etc.) refer to?" But in pursuing these matters, he eventually found himself analysing and explaining what meaning is, and thus came to several conclusions that proved highly consequential for the subsequent course of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of language.

It should be kept in mind that Frege was employed as a mathematician, not a philosopher, and he published his philosophical papers in scholarly journals that often were hard to access outside of the German-speaking world. He never published a philosophical monograph other than The Foundations of Arithmetic, much of which was mathematical in content, and the first collections of his writings appeared only after World War II. A volume of English translations of Frege's philosophical essays first appeared in 1952, edited by students of Wittgenstein, Peter Geach (born 1916) and Max Black (1909–1988), with the bibliographic assistance of Wittgenstein (see Geach, ed. 1975, Introduction). Despite the generous praise of Russell and Wittgenstein, Frege was little known as a philosopher during his lifetime. His ideas spread chiefly through those he influenced, such as Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap, and through work on logic and semantics by Polish logicians.

Sense and reference[link]

The distinction between Sinn ("sense") and Bedeutung (usually translated "reference", but also as "meaning" or "denotation") was an innovation of Frege in his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ("On Sense and Reference"). According to Frege, sense and reference are two different aspects of the significance of an expression. Frege applied Bedeutung in the first instance to proper names, where it means the bearer of the name, the object in question, but then also to other expressions, including complete sentences, which bedeuten the two "truth values", the true and the false; by contrast, the sense or Sinn associated with a complete sentence is the thought it expresses. The sense of an expression is said to be the "mode of presentation" of the item referred to.

The distinction can be illustrated thus: In their ordinary uses, the name "Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor", which for logical purposes is an unanalyzable whole, and the functional expression "the Prince of Wales", which contains the significant parts "the prince of ξ" and "Wales", have the same reference, namely, the person best known as Prince Charles. But the sense of the word "Wales" is a part of the sense of the latter expression, but no part of the sense of the "full name" of Prince Charles.

These distinctions were disputed by Bertrand Russell, especially in his paper "On Denoting"; the controversy has continued into the present, fueled especially by Saul Kripke's famous lectures "Naming and Necessity".

Imagine the road signs outside a city. They all point to (bedeuten) the same object (the city), although the "mode of presentation" or sense (Sinn) of each sign (its direction or distance) is different. Similarly "the Prince of Wales" and "Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor" both denote (bedeuten) the same object, though each uses a different "mode of presentation" (sense or Sinn).

1924 diary[link]

Frege's published philosophical writings were of a very technical nature and divorced from practical issues, so much so that Frege scholar Dummett expresses his "shock to discover, while reading Frege's diary, that his hero was an outspoken anti-Semite (1973)."^[4] He was always a conservative, but after World War I he became more of a radical. His late political "diary shows Frege to have been a man of extreme right-wing political opinions, bitterly opposed to the parliamentary system, democrats, liberals, Catholics, the French and, above all, Jews, who he thought ought to be deprived of political rights and, preferably, expelled from Germany".^[5] Frege confided "that he had once thought of himself as a liberal and was an admirer of Bismarck, but his heroes now were General Ludendorff and Adolf Hitler. This was after the two had tried to topple the elected democratic government in a coup in November 1923. In his diary Frege also used all his analytic skills to devise plans for expelling the Jews from Germany and for suppressing the Social Democrats."^[6] Frege disliked universal suffrage and was against any form of socialism, which he simply called Marxism. His antisemitism still allowed for exceptions, and he had friendly relations with Jews in real life: among his students was Gershom Scholem who much valued his teacher;^[7][8] and he encouraged Ludwig Wittgenstein to leave for England. The 1924 diary has been published.^[9]

Personality[link]

Frege was described by his students as a highly introverted person, seldom entering into dialogue, mostly facing the blackboard while lecturing though being witty and sometimes bitterly sarcastic.^[10]

Important dates[link]

• Born 8 November 1848 in Wismar, Mecklenburg-Schwerin.
• 1869 — attends the University of Jena.
• 1871 — attends the University of Göttingen.
• 1873 — PhD, doctor in mathematics (geometry), attained at Göttingen.
• 1874 — Habilitation at Jena; private teacher.
• 1879 — Professor Extraordinarius at Jena.
• 1896 — Ordentlicher Honorarprofessor at Jena.
• 1917 or 1918 — retires.
• Died 26 July 1925 in Bad Kleinen (now part of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern).

Important works[link]

Logic, foundation of arithmetic[link]

Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens (1879). Halle a. S.

• English: Concept Notation, the Formal Language of the Pure Thought like that of Arithmetics.

Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: eine logisch-mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl (1884). Breslau.

• English: The Foundations of Arithmetic: the logical-mathematical Investigation of the Concept of Number.

Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Band I (1893); Band II (1903). Jena: Verlag Hermann Pohle.

• English: Basic Laws of Arithmetic, translated and edited with an introduction by Montgomery Furth (1964). This work is a translation of only part of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. ISBN 978-0-520-04761-7

Philosophical studies[link]

Function and Concept (1891)

• Original: Funktion und Begriff : Vortrag, gehalten in der Sitzung; vom 9. Januar 1891 der Jenaischen Gesellschaft für Medizin und Naturwissenschaft, Jena, 1891;
• In English: Function and Concept.

"On Sense and Reference" (1892)

• Original: "Über Sinn und Bedeutung", in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik C (1892): 25–50;
• In English: "On Sense and Reference", alternatively translated (in later edition) as "On Sense and Meaning".

"Concept and Object" (1892)

• Original: "Über Begriff und Gegenstand", in Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie XVI (1892): 192–205;
• In English: "Concept and Object".

"What is a Function?" (1904)

• Original: "Was ist eine Funktion?", in Festschrift Ludwig Boltzmann gewidmet zum sechzigsten Geburtstage, 20. February 1904, S. Meyer (ed.), Leipzig, 1904, pp. 656–666 (Internet Archive: [2], [3], [4]);

• In English: "What is a Function?"

Logical Investigations (1918–1923). Frege intended that the following three papers be published together in a book titled Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations). Though the German book never appeared, English translations did appear together in Logical Investigations, ed. Peter Geach, Blackwell's, 1975.

• 1918–19. "Der Gedanke: Eine logische Untersuchung" ("Thought: A Logical Investigation"), in Beiträge zur Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus I: 58–77.
• 1918–19. "Die Verneinung" ("Negation") in Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus I: 143–157.
• 1923. "Gedankengefüge" ("Compound Thought"), in Beiträge zur Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus III: 36–51.

Articles on geometry[link]

• 1903: "Über die Grundlagen der Geometrie". II. Jahresbericht der deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung XII (1903), 368–375;
  • In English: "On the Foundations of Geometry".
• 1967: Kleine Schriften. (I. Angelelli, ed.) Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Darmstadt, 1967 és G. Olms, Hildescheim, 1967. "Small Writings," a collection of most of his writings (e.g., the previous), posthumously published.

References[link]

Primary[link]

• Online bibliography of Frege's works and their English translations.
• 1879. Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachgebildete Formelsprache des reinen Denkens. Halle a. S.: Louis Nebert. Translation: Concept Script, a formal language of pure thought modelled upon that of arithmetic, by S. Bauer-Mengelberg in Jean Van Heijenoort, ed., 1967. From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Harvard University Press.
• 1884. Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: eine logisch-mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl. Breslau: W. Koebner. Translation: J. L. Austin, 1974. The Foundations of Arithmetic: A logico-mathematical enquiry into the concept of number, 2nd ed. Blackwell.
• 1891. "Funktion und Begriff." Translation: "Function and Concept" in Geach and Black (1980).
• 1892a. "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100: 25-50. Translation: "On Sense and Reference" in Geach and Black (1980).
• 1892b. "Über Begriff und Gegenstand" in Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 16: 192-205. Translation: "Concept and Object" in Geach and Black (1980).
• 1893. Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Band I. Jena: Verlag Hermann Pohle. Band II, 1903. Partial translation: Furth, M, 1964. The Basic Laws of Arithmetic. Univ. of California Press.
• 1904. "Was ist eine Funktion?" in Meyer, S., ed., 1904. Festschrift Ludwig Boltzmann gewidmet zum sechzigsten Geburtstage, 20. Februar 1904. Leipzig: Barth: 656-666. Translation: "What is a Function?" in Geach and Black (1980).
• 1918-1923. Peter Geach (editor): Logical Investigations, Blackwell's, 1975.
• 1924. Gottfried Gabriel, Wolfgang Kienzler (editors): Gottlob Freges politisches Tagebuch. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, vol. 42, 1994, pp. 1057-98. Introduction by the editors on pp. 1057-66. This article has been translated into english, in: Inquiry, vol. 39, 1996, pp. 303–342.
• Peter Geach and Max Black, eds., and trans., 1980. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 3rd ed. Blackwell (1st ed. 1952).

Secondary[link]

Philosophy:

• Badiou, Alain. "On a Contemporary Usage of Frege", trans. Justin Clemens and Sam Gillespie. UMBR(a), no. 1, 2000, pp. 99–115.
• Baker, Gordon, and P.M.S. Hacker, 1984. Frege: Logical Excavations. Oxford University Press. — Vigorous, if controversial, criticism of both Frege's philosophy and influential contemporary interpretations such as Dummett's.
• Currie, Gregory, 1982. Frege: An Introduction to His Philosophy. Harvester Press.
• Diamond, Cora, 1991. The Realistic Spirit. MIT Press. — Primarily about Wittgenstein, but contains several articles on Frege.
• Dummett, Michael, 1973. Frege: Philosophy of Language. Harvard University Press.
• ------, 1981. The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy. Harvard University Press.
• Hill, Claire Ortiz, 1991. Word and Object in Husserl, Frege and Russell: The Roots of Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Athens OH: Ohio University Press.
• ------, and Rosado Haddock, G. E., 2000. Husserl or Frege: Meaning, Objectivity, and Mathematics. Open Court. — On the Frege-Husserl-Cantor triangle.
• Kenny, Anthony, 1995. Frege — An introduction to the founder of modern analytic philosophy. Penguin Books. — Excellent non-technical introduction and overview of Frege's philosophy.
• Klemke, E.D., ed., 1968. Essays on Frege. University of Illinois Press. — 31 essays by philosophers, grouped under three headings: 1. Ontology; 2. Semantics; and 3. Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics.
• Rosado Haddock, Guillermo E., 2006. A Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Gottlob Frege. Ashgate Publishing.
• Sisti, Nicola, 2005. Il Programma Logicista di Frege e il Tema delle Definizioni. Franco Angeli. — On Frege's theory of definitions.
• Sluga, Hans, 1980. Gottlob Frege. Routledge.
• Weiner, Joan, 1990. Frege in Perspective. Cornell University Press.

Logic and mathematics:

• Anderson, D. J., and Edward Zalta, 2004, "Frege, Boolos, and Logical Objects," Journal of Philosophical Logic 33: 1-26.
• Burgess, John, 2005. Fixing Frege. Princeton Univ. Press. — A critical survey of the ongoing rehabilitation of Frege's logicism.
• Boolos, George, 1998. Logic, Logic, and Logic. MIT Press. — 12 papers on Frege's theorem and the logicist approach to the foundation of arithmetic.
• Dummett, Michael, 1991. Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics. Harvard University Press.
• Demopoulos, William, ed., 1995. Frege's Philosophy of Mathematics. Harvard Univ. Press. — Papers exploring Frege's theorem and Frege's mathematical and intellectual background.
• Ferreira, F. and Wehmeier, K., 2002, "On the consistency of the Delta-1-1-CA fragment of Frege's Grundgesetze," Journal of Philosophic Logic 31: 301-11.
• Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940. Princeton University Press. — Fair to the mathematician, less so to the philosopher.
• Gillies, Donald A., 1982. Frege, Dedekind, and Peano on the foundations of arithmetic. Methodology and Science Foundation, 2. Van Gorcum & Co., Assen, 1982.
• Gillies, Donald: The Fregean revolution in logic. Revolutions in mathematics, 265–305, Oxford Sci. Publ., Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 1992.
• Charles Parsons, 1965, "Frege's Theory of Number." Reprinted with Postscript in Demopoulos (1965): 182-210. The starting point of the ongoing sympathetic reexamination of Frege's logicism.
• Gillies, Donald: The Fregean revolution in logic. Revolutions in mathematics, 265–305, Oxford Sci. Publ., Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 1992.
• Macbeth, Danielle, 2005, Frege's Logic. Harvard University Press.
• Wright, Crispin, 1983. Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects. Aberdeen University Press. — A systematic exposition and a scope-restricted defense of Frege's Grundlagen conception of numbers.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gottlob Frege

• Frege at Genealogy Project

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Gottlob Frege

	Philosophy portal
	Logic portal

• A comprehensive guide to Fregean material available on the web by Brian Carver.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  • "Gottlob Frege" — by Edward Zalta.
  • "Frege's Logic, Theorem, and Foundations for Arithmetic" — by Edward Zalta
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
  • Gottlob Frege — by Kevin C. Klement.
  • Frege and Language — by Dorothea Lotter.
• Metaphysics Research Lab: Gottlob Frege.
• Frege on Being, Existence and Truth.
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Gottlob Frege", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Frege.html .
• Begriff, a LaTeX package for typesetting Frege's logic notation.

Piergiorgio Odifreddi (2007)

Piergiorgio Odifreddi taking part in a seminar at Sarzana's "Festival of the Mind". (2006)

Piergiorgio Odifreddi (born July 13, 1950 in Cuneo), is an Italian mathematician, logician and aficionado of the history of science, who is also extremely active as a popular science writer and essayist, especially in a perspective of philosophical atheism as a member of the Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics.

Born in Cuneo (Piedmont), he received his Laurea in mathematics in Turin in 1973. From 1983 to 2002, he taught in both Italy (Turin, Alessandria, Siena, Milan) and in the United States (Cornell University). Since 2001, he has been a professor of mathematical logic in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Turin.

He has written editorials and books reviews for La rivista dei libri (the Italian edition of the New York Review of Books), is a regular contributor to Le Scienze (the Italian edition of Scientific American), and has also written for several newspapers such as La Repubblica, La Stampa and the weekly L'Espresso. The television stations Radio Tre, RAI Due and RAI Tre have hosted many of his discussions on various scientific topics.

Piergiorgio Odifreddi participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.

Honors[link]

• 1998 - Galileo Prize of the Italian Mathematical Union.
• 2002 - Peano Prize of Mathesis
• 2005 - Commander OMRI

Works[link]

Academic writings[link]

• Classical recursion Theory, North Holland - Elsevier, 1988
• Classical recursion Theory. Volume II, North Holland - Elsevier, 1999

Popular writings[link]

• Il Vangelo secondo la Scienza, Einaudi, 1999, ISBN 88-06-14930-X (The Gospel According to Science)
• La matematica del '900, prefazione di Gian-Carlo Rota, Einaudi, 2000, ISBN 88-06-15153-3 (The Mathematics of the 20th Century)
• Il computer di Dio, Cortina, 2000, ISBN 88-7078-663-3 (God's Computer)
• C'era una volta un paradosso, Einaudi, 2001, ISBN 88-06-15090-1 (Once upon a time there was a paradox)
• La repubblica dei numeri, Cortina, 2002, ISBN 88-7078-776-1 (The Republic of Numbers)
• Zichicche, Dedalo, 2003, ISBN 88-220-6260-4
• Il diavolo in cattedra. La logica matematica da Aristotele a Kurt Gödel, Einaudi, 2003, ISBN 88-06-16721-9 (The Devil in the Professor's Chair: Mathematical Logic from Aristotle to Kurt Goedel)
• Divertimento geometrico - Da Euclide ad David Hilbert, Bollati Boringhieri, 2003, ISBN 88-339-5714-4 (Geometric Diversions - From Euclid to Hilbert)
• Le menzogne di Ulisse. L'avventura della logica da Parmenide ad Amartya Sen, Longanesi, 2004, ISBN 88-304-2044-1 (Ulysses' Lies. The Adventure of Logic from Parmenides to Amartya Sen)
• Il matematico impertinente, Longanesi, 2005, ISBN 88-304-2222-3 (The Impertinent Mathematician)
• Penna, pennello, bacchetta: le tre invidie del matematico, Laterza, 2005, ISBN 88-420-7643-0 (Pen, brush, baton: the three envies of the mathematician)
• Idee per diventare matematico, Zanichelli, 2005, ISBN 88-08-07063-8 (Ideas for becoming a mathematician)
• Incontri con menti straordinarie, Longanesi, 2006, ISBN 88-304-2346-7 (Meetings with extraordinary minds)
• Che cos'è la logica?, Luca Sossella editore, 2006, ISBN 88-89829-19-2 (What is logic?)
• La scienza espresso: Note brevi, semibrevi e minime per una biblioteca scientifica universale, Einaudi, 2006, ISBN 978-88-06-18258-8 (Science express)
• Perché non possiamo essere cristiani (e meno che mai cattolici), Longanesi, 2007, ISBN 978-88-304-2427-2 (Why we cannot be Christians (much less Catholics))

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Piergiorgio Odifreddi

• Antonino Zichichi
• UAAR

External links[link]

• Piergiorgio Odifreddi's Official Site (IT)
• Article by Odifreddi on Recursive Functions in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Friedrich Ludwig may refer to:

• Friedrich Ludwig (painter) (1895–1970), German expressionist painter
• Friedrich Ludwig (musicologist) (1872–1930), German historian, musicologist, and college instructor

This disambiguation page lists articles about people with the same name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

John Rogers Searle

Born	(1932-07-31) July 31, 1932 (age 79) Denver, Colorado, U.S.
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Analytic
Main interests	Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Intentionality · Social reality
Notable ideas	Indirect speech acts · Chinese room
Influenced by David Hume · J.L. Austin · Bertrand Russell · Ludwig Wittgenstein Gottlob Frege · P.F. Strawson Hubert Dreyfus
Signature

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932, in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959, where, among his many distinctions, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. Among his notable concepts are the "Chinese Room" argument against artificial intelligence.

Biography[link]

Searle's father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T, while his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician. John Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a doctorate in philosophy and ethics.

Politics[link]

In the 1950s, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy" (McCarthy was then the junior Senator from Wisconsin).^[1]

While a professor at Berkeley in 1964, he joined the Free Speech Movement^[2] opposing policies of the university administration. Later, in 1969, he sided with the administration against the students over People's Park. Also in 1969, he served as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California.^[3] He authored The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971).^[4] The book attempted to investigate the causes behind the campus uprisings of the era. In it, Searle notes: "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and ... several radical polemicists.... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred -- one might almost say terror -- of close analysis and dissection of argument." He asserts: "[M]y wife was threatened that I (and other members of the administration) would be assassinated or violently attacked."^[1] In an op-ed piece written shortly after 9/11, Searle maintained that:

We need to give up on the fantasy that we are going to find Bin Laden hiding in a cave, and when we do so, our troubles will be over... There will be plenty of others, perhaps reinspired by his martyrdom, to take up where he left off.^[5]

Further, he argued the attacks were part of a longer-term struggle whose only solution was to root out governments that supported terrorism.^[6]

Philosophy[link]

Speech acts[link]

Searle's early work, which did a great deal to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues including J.L. Austin (the term "illocutionary act"), Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.C.J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules), and his own thesis, in 'Speech Acts,' that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of P.F. Strawson, John Rawls, and H. Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), Hare and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), and William P. Alston, who maintained that sentence meaning consists in sets of regulative rules requiring the speaker to perform the illocutionary act indicated by the sentence, and that such acts involve the utterance of a sentence which (a) indicates that one performs the act, (b) means what one says, and (c) addresses an audience in the vicinity. In his 1969 book Speech Acts, Searle sets out to combine all of these elements to give his account of 'illocutionary acts', which Austin had introduced in How To Do Things with Words.

Despite his announced intention^[7] to present a "full dress analysis of the illocutionary act", Searle in fact does not give one.^{[citation needed]} Instead, he provides an analysis of what he considers the prototypical illocutionary act of promising, and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further illocutionary act types (1969, 57-71).

Among the concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the 'illocutionary force' and the 'propositional content' of an utterance. Searle does not precisely define the former as such, but rather introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences:

1. Sam smokes habitually.
2. Does Sam smoke habitually?
3. Sam, smoke habitually!
4. Would that Sam smoked habitually!

each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (a statement, a question, a command, and an expression of desire, respectively) (1969, 22).

According to a later account, which Searle presents in Intentionality (1983) and which differs in important ways from the one suggested in Speech Acts, illocutionary acts are characterised by their having conditions of satisfaction (an idea adopted from Strawson's (1971) paper "Meaning and Truth" [9]) and a direction of fit (an idea adopted from Elizabeth Anscombe). For example, the statement "John bought two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if it is true, i.e. John did buy two candy bars. By contrast, the command "John, buy two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if John carries out the action of purchasing two candy bars. Searle refers to the first as having the word-to-world direction of fit, since the words are supposed to change to accurately represent the world, and the second as having the world-to-word direction of fit, since the world is supposed to change to match the words. (There is also the double direction of fit, in which the relationship goes both ways, and the null or zero direction of fit, in which it goes neither way because the propositional content is presupposed, as in "I'm sorry I ate John's candy bars.")

In Foundations of Illocutionary Logic^[8] (1985, with Daniel Vanderveken), Searle prominently uses the notion of "illocutionary point". (Although Searle does not mention earlier uses of the concept, it originates from Alexander Sesonske's article "Performatives".)

Searle's speech-act theory has been challenged by several thinkers, and in a variety of ways. A wide-ranging critique is offered by F.C. Doerge [10].^[9] Collections of articles referring to Searle's account are found in: Burkhardt 1990^[10] and Lepore / van Gulick 1991.^[11]

Searle-Derrida debate[link]

In the early 1970s Searle had a brief debate with Jacques Derrida regarding Speech Act theory. The debate was characterized by a degree of mutual hostility between the philosophers each of whom accused the other of having misunderstood the basic points of the other.^[12] Searle was particularly hostile to the deconstructionist framework of Derrida and refused to let his response to Derrida be printed along with Derrida's papers in the 1988 collection of the papers in the debate, Limited Inc. Searle did not consider Derrida's approach legitimate philosophy or even intelligible writing. Searle argued that he did not want to dedicate any attention to the deconstructionist point of view such as to not legitimize it. Some critics have consequently considered the debate a non-debate, but rather simply a series of elaborate misunderstandings^[13], while others have seen either Derrida or Searle as having gained the upper hand.^[14] The level of hostility in the debate can be seen from the fact that Searle in his reply stated that "It would be a mistake to regard Derrida's discussion of Austin as a confrontation between two prominent philosophical traditions", to which Derrida replied that that sentence was "the only sentence of the "reply" to which I can subscribe".^[15] The debate has nonetheless frequently been interpreted as a prominent example of a confrontation between analytical and continental philosophy.

The debate began in 1972, when Jacques Derrida analyzed J. L. Austin's theory of the illocutionary act in his paper "Signature Event Context". While sympathetic to Austin's departure from a purely denotational account of language to one that includes "force", Derrida was sceptical of the framework of normativity employed by Austin. He argued that Austin had missed the fact that any speech event is framed by a "structure of absence" - the words that are left unsaid, because of contextual constraints, and by "iterability", the strictures on what can be said, given by what has been said in the past. Derrida argued that the focus on intentionality in speech act theory was misguided, because intentionality is restricted to be intentional about that which is already established as a possible intention. He also took issue with the way Austin had excluded the study of fiction, non-serious or "parasitic" speech, and wondered whether this exclusion reflected that Austin had considered these speech genres to be governed by different structures of meaning, or simply by a lack of interest. In his brief reply to Derrida "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida", Searle argued that Derrida's critique was unwarranted because it assumed that Austin's theory was attempting to give a full account of language and meaning, when in fact its aim was much narrower, Searle considered leaving out parasitic discourse forms justified by the narrow scope of Austin's inquiry.^[16][17] Searle agreed with Derrida's proposal that intentionality presupposes iterability, but Searle did not apply the same concept of intentionality used by Derrida, being unable or unwilling to engage with the continental conceptual apparatus.^[14] This in turn caused Derrida to criticize Searle for not being sufficiently familiar with phenomenological perspectives on intentionality.^[18] Searle also argued that Derrida's disagreement with Austin turned on his having misunderstood Austin's type–token distinction, and his failure to understand Austin's concept of failure in relation to performativity. Some critics have suggested that Searle was at fault for the unsuccesful nature of the exchange, by being so grounded in the Anglo-Saxon analytical tradition that he was unable to engage with the continental phenomenlogical tradition represented by Derrida.^[18]

Derrida in his response to Searle, "Limited inc, abc..." ridiculed Searle's positions, suggesting that Searle had formed a Société à responsabilité limitée (Society for Limited Responsibility) with Austin, because of the ways in which the ambiguities of authorship within Searle's reply circumvented the very speech act of the reply, since a clear sender of the message could not be established. Searle did not reply. Later in 1988, Derrida tried to review his position and his critiques of Austin and Searle, reiterating that he found the constant appeal to "normality" in the analytical tradition to be problematic.^{[19][20][21][22][23][14][24][25]}

In 1995 Searle gave a brief reply to Derrida in The Construction of Social Reality, in which he called Derrida's conclusion "preposterous" and stated that "Derrida, as far as I can tell, does not have an argument. He simply declares that there is nothing outside of texts. ..."^[26]

Intentionality and the Background[link]

Searle defines "Intentionality" as the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs in the world.^[27] The nature of intentionality is an important part of discussions of the Searle's "Philosophy of Mind". Searle emphasizes that the word ‘intentionality, (the part of the mind directed to/from/about objects and relations in the world independent of mind) should not be confused with the word ‘intensionality’ (the logical property of some sentences that do not pass the test of 'extensinalidade').^[28] In Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Searle applies certain elements of his account(s) of "illocutionary acts" to the investigation of intentionality. Searle also introduces a technical term the Background,^[29] which, according to him, has been the source of much philosophical discussion ("though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years," Searle writes,^[30] "many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it.") Background he calls the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have and that are not themselves intentional states. Thus, when someone asks us to "cut the cake" we know to use a knife and when someone asks us to "cut the grass" we know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the actual request did not include this detail. Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the Background with the concept of the Network, one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense. Searle argues that the concept of a Background is similar to the concepts provided by several other thinkers, including Wittgenstein's private language argument ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background"^[31]) and Bourdieu's habitus.

To give an example, two chess players might be engaged in a bitter struggle at the board, but they share all sorts of Background presuppositions: that they will take turns to move, that no one else will intervene, that they are both playing to the same rules, that the fire alarm won't go off, that the board won't suddenly disintegrate, that their opponent won't magically turn into a grapefruit, and so on indefinitely. As most of these possibilities won't have occurred to either player,^[32] Searle thinks the Background must be unconscious, though elements of it can be called to consciousness (if the fire alarm does go off, say).

In his debate with Derrida, Searle argued against Derrida's notion that a statement can be disjoined from the original intentionality of its author, for example when no longer connected to the original author, while still being able to produce meaning. Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because "a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the (intentional) speech act". For Searle ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for attributing it any meaning at all.^[33][34]

Consciousness[link]

Building upon his views about Intentionality, Searle presents a view concerning consciousness in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992). He argues that, starting with behaviorism (an early but influential scientific view, succeeded by many later accounts that Searle also dismisses), much of modern philosophy has tried to deny the existence of consciousness, with little success. In Intentionality, he parodies several alternative theories of consciousness by replacing their accounts of intentionality with comparable accounts of the hand:

No one would think of saying, for example, "Having a hand is just being disposed to certain sorts of behavior such as grasping" (manual behaviorism), or "Hands can be defined entirely in terms of their causes and effects" (manual functionalism), or "For a system to have a hand is just for it to be in a certain computer state with the right sorts of inputs and outputs" (manual Turing machine functionalism), or "Saying that a system has hands is just adopting a certain stance toward it" (the manual stance). (p. 263)

Searle argues that philosophy has been trapped by a false dichotomy: that, on the one hand, the world consists of nothing but objective particles in fields of force, but that yet, on the other hand, consciousness is clearly a subjective first-person experience.

Searle says simply that both are true: consciousness is a real subjective experience, caused by the physical processes of the brain. (A view which he suggests might be called biological naturalism.)

Ontological subjectivity[link]

Searle has argued^[35] that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is epistemically subjective, whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is epistemically objective. In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) which are ontologically subjective, i.e. are experienced subjectively. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science".^[36] But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the appearance is the reality".^[37] His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

Artificial intelligence[link]

A consequence of biological naturalism is that if we want to create a conscious being, we will have to duplicate whatever physical processes the brain goes through to cause consciousness. Searle thereby means to contradict to what he calls "Strong AI", defined by the assumption that as soon as a certain kind of software is running on a computer, a conscious being is thereby created.^[38]

In 1980, Searle presented the "Chinese room" argument, which purports to prove the falsity of strong AI.^[39] (Familiarity with the Turing test is useful for understanding the issue.) Assume you do not speak Chinese and imagine yourself in a room with two slits, a book, and some scratch paper. Someone slides you some Chinese characters through the first slit, you follow the instructions in the book, write what it says on the scratch paper, and slide the resulting sheet out the second slit. To people on the outside world, it appears the room speaks Chinese—they slide Chinese statements in one slit and get valid responses in return—yet you do not understand a word of Chinese. This suggests, according to Searle, that no computer can ever understand Chinese or English, because, as the thought experiment suggests, being able to 'translate' Chinese into English does not entail 'understanding' either Chinese or English: all which the person in the thought experiment, and hence a computer, is able to do is to execute certain syntactic manipulations.^[40]

Stevan Harnad argues that Searle's "Strong AI" is really just another name for functionalism and computationalism, and that these positions are the real targets of his critique.^[41] Functionalists claim that consciousness can be defined as a set of informational processes inside the brain. It follows that anything that carries out the same informational processes as a human is also conscious. Thus, if we wrote a computer program that was conscious, we could run that computer program on, say, a system of ping-pong balls and beer cups and the system would be equally conscious, because it was running the same information processes.

Searle argues that this is impossible, since consciousness is a physical property, like digestion or fire. No matter how good a simulation of digestion you build on the computer, it will not digest anything; no matter how well you simulate fire, nothing will get burnt. By contrast, informational processes are observer-relative: observers pick out certain patterns in the world and consider them information processes, but information processes are not things-in-the-world themselves. Since they do not exist at a physical level, Searle argues, they cannot have causal efficacy and thus cannot cause consciousness. There is no physical law, Searle insists, that can see the equivalence between a personal computer, a series of ping-pong balls and beer cans, and a pipe-and-water system all implementing the same program.^[42]

Social reality[link]

Searle extended his inquiries into observer-relative phenomena by trying to understand social reality. Searle begins by arguing collective intentionality (e.g. "we're going for a walk") is a distinct form of intentionality, not simply reducible to individual intentionality (e.g. "I'm going for a walk with him and I think he thinks he's going for a walk with me and thinks I think I'm going for a walk with him and ...").

Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (1995) addresses the mystery of how social constructs like "baseball" or "money" can exist in a world consisting only of physical particles in fields of force. Adapting an idea by Elizabeth Anscombe in "On Brute Facts," Searle distinguishes between brute facts, like the height of a mountain, and institutional facts, like the score of a baseball game. Aiming at an explanation of social phenomena in terms of Anscombe's notion, he argues that society can be explained in terms of institutional facts, and institutional facts arise out of collective intentionality through logical rules of the form "X counts as Y in C". Thus, for instance, filling out a ballot counts as a vote in a polling place, getting so many votes counts as a victory in an election, getting a victory counts as being elected president in the presidential race, etc.

Rationality[link]

In Rationality in Action (2001), Searle argues that standard notions of rationality are badly flawed. According to what he calls the Classical Model, rationality is seen as something like a train track: you get on at one point with your beliefs and desires and the rules of rationality compel you all the way to a conclusion. Searle doubts this picture of rationality holds generally.

Searle briefly critiques one particular set of these rules: those of mathematical decision theory. He points out that its axioms require that anyone who valued a quarter and their life would, at some odds, bet their life for a quarter. Searle insists he would never do this and believes that this is perfectly rational.

Yet most of his attack is directed against the common conception of rationality, which he believes is badly flawed. First, he argues that reasons don't cause you to do anything, because having sufficient reason wills (but doesn't force) you to do that thing. So in any decision situation we experience a gap between our reasons and our actions. For example, when we decide to vote, we do not simply determine that we care most about economic policy and that we prefer candidate Jones's economic policy. We also have to make an effort to cast our vote. Similarly, every time a guilty smoker lights a cigarette they are aware of succumbing to their craving, not merely of acting automatically as they do when they exhale. It is this gap that makes us think we have freedom of the will. Searle thinks whether we really have free will or not is an open question, but considers its absence highly unappealing because it makes the feeling of freedom of will an epiphenomenon, which is highly unlikely from the evolutionary point of view given its biological cost. He also says: " All rational activity presupposes free will ".^[43]

Second, he believes rationality is not a system of rules, but more of an adverb. We see certain behavior as rational, no matter what its source, and our system of rules derives from finding patterns in what we see as rational.

Third, Searle believes we can rationally do things that don't result from our own desires. It is widely believed that one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is", i.e. that facts about how the world is can never tell you what you should do ('Hume's Law'). By contrast, in so far as a fact is understood as relating to an institution (marriage, promises, commitments, etc.), which is to be understood as a system of constitutive rules, then what one should do can be understood as following from the institutional fact of what one has done; institutional fact, then, can be understood as opposed to the "brute facts" related to Hume's Law. For example, Searle believes the fact that you promised to do something means you should do it, because by making the promise you are participating in the constitutive rules that arrange the system of promise making itself, and therefore understand a "shouldness" as implicit in the mere factual action of promising. Furthermore, he believes that this provides a desire-independent reason for an action—if you order a drink at a bar, you should pay for it even if you have no desire to. This argument, which he first made in his paper, "How to Derive 'Ought' from 'Is'" (1964),^[44] remains highly controversial, but even three decades later Searle continued to defend his view that "..the traditional metaphysical distinction between fact and value cannot be captured by the linguistic distinction between 'evaluative' and 'descriptive' because all such speech act notions are already normative."^[45]

Fourth, Searle argues that much of rational deliberation involves adjusting our (often inconsistent) patterns of desires to decide between outcomes, not the other way around. While in the Classical Model, one would start from a desire to go to Paris greater than that of saving money and calculate the cheapest way to get there, in reality people balance the niceness of Paris against the costs of travel to decide which desire (visiting Paris or saving money) they value more.

See also[link]

References[link]

Bibliography[link]

• Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969)
• The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (political commentary; 1971)
• Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (essay collection; 1979)
• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983)
• Minds, Brains and Science: The 1984 Reith Lectures (lecture collection; 1984)
• Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (John Searle & Daniel Vanderveken 1985)
• John Searle and His Critics (Ernest Lepore and Robert Van Gulick, eds.; 1991)
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992)
• The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
• The Mystery of Consciousness (review collection; 1997)
• Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (summary of earlier work; 1998)
• Rationality in Action (2001)
• Consciousness and Language (essay collection; 2002)
• Freedom and Neurobiology (lecture collection; 2004)
• Mind: A Brief Introduction (summary of work in philosophy of mind; 2004)
• Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts (essay collection; 2007)
• Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (2008)
• Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization (2010)

Further reading[link]

• "Minds, Brains and Programs", The Behavioral and Brain Sciences.3, pp. 417–424. (1980)
• Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-27302-1
• Minds, Brains and Science (1984), Harvard University Press, hardcover: ISBN 0-674-57631-4, paperback: ISBN 0-674-57633-0
• "Is the Brain a Digital Computer?" (1990) Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association
• "Collective Intentions and Actions" (1990) in Intentions in Communication J. M. P. R. Cohen, & M. and E. Pollack. Cambridge, Mass.: . MIT Press: 401-416.
• The Rediscovery of the Mind (1992) ISBN 0-262-69154-X
• The Problem of Consciousness, Social Research, Vol. 60, No.1, Spring 1993.
• The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
• The Mystery of Consciousness, Granta Books, (1997) hardcover: ISBN 1-86207-122-5, New York Review Books paperback: ISBN 0-940322-06-4
• Consciousness Ann. Rev. Neurosci. (2000) 23:557-78. Review.
• Rationality in Action, MIT Press, (2001) – contains (among other things) Searle's account of akrasia
• Consciousness and Language (2002), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-59744-7
• D. Koepsell (ed.) and L. Moss (ed.) "Searle and Smith: A Dialogue" in John Searle's Ideas About Social Reality: Extensions, Criticisms, and Reconstructions (2003), Blackwell, ISBN 978-1-4051-1258-1
• Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004), Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-515733-8
• Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language and Political Power (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-13752-4
• Dualism revisited J Physiol Paris. 2007 Jul-Nov;101(4-6):169-78. Epub 2008 Jan 19.
• M. Bennett, D. Dennett, P. Hacker, J. Searle, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language (2007), Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-14044-4
• The Storm Over the University

• Doerge (2006), Friedrich Christoph: Illocutionary Acts - Austin's Account and What Searle Made Out of It. Tuebingen: Tuebingen University. http://tobias-lib.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/volltexte/2006/2273/pdf/Dissertation_Doerge.pdf

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: John Searle

• John Searle's Machines Like Us interview
• Searle's homepage at UC Berkeley
• Conversations with Searle.
• Interview in Conversations with History series. Available in webcast and podcast.
• Conversations with History:John R. Searle on YouTube
• Video or transcript of an interview with John Searle on language, writing, mind, and consciousness
• John Searle at the Internet Movie Database
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk
• Webcast of Philosophy of Society lectures
• Philosophy of Language: an interview with John Searle ReVEL, vol. 5, n. 8, 2007.
• The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies video interview with John Searle 2011-06-13
• BBC Reith Audio Lectures - John Searle: Minds, Brain & Science (1984)