John Searle Quotes

Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

In the performance of an illocutionary act in the literal utterance of a sentence, the speaker intends to produce a certain effect by means of getting the hearer to recognize his intention to produce that effect; and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expression with the production of that effect.

There is a narrow class of uses of language where you intend to communicate. Communication refers to an effort to get people to understand what one means. And that, certainly, is one use of language and a social use of it. But I don't think it is the only social use of language. Nor are social uses the only uses of language.

How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

I only mean forty per cent of what I say.

We have only the language for fun and miserable, and maybe we need language for deep and shallow, meaningful and meaningless.

There are words and words and none mean anything. And then one sentence means everything.

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

Words have meaning. And their meaning doesn't change.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

The real being of language is that into which we are taken up when we hear it - what is said.

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

There are about 30 words around you all the time, like 'thread' or 'exit.'

Language is froth on the surface of thought.

My interest is in how meaning is communicated via language, and I believe the shape, positioning, even the color of the language has an effect on meaning.

As soon as there is language, generality has entered the scene.

If we are to look only at the words, then we inquire, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker.

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.

My mother introduced to me as a child the world of language: the way in which translation can be a system by which you can understand others.

I'm very much afraid I didn't mean anything but nonsense. Still, you know, words mean more than we mean to express when we use them; so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer means. So, whatever good meanings are in the book, I'm glad to accept as the meaning of the book.