Searle's Concept Research Articles

The Comparison between Emily’s and Gabriel’s Expressive Speech Acts in the “Emily in Paris” Movie Series

This study aims to compare Emily as a native English speaker and Gabriel as a non-native English speaker to illustrate the types of expressive speech acts, expressive speech effects in the Emily In Paris movie series to see their similarities and differences expressive speech act. This research used descriptive qualitative method. The data was a transcript of data from Emily in Paris movie, the data were taken from the script, then classified according to the Searle's concept and Hymes's concept of type expressive act. Data were analyzed using ten types of expressive act instruments according Searle (1976), namely: thanking, apologizing, congratulating, greeting, wishing, attitude, condoling, blaming, praising, forgiving and supported by (IFID). The data were analyzed by identifying the types of expressive acts, classifying, comparing, interpreting, and concluding. The results of the study show that there are 138 expressive utterances found in the film Emily in Paris, Emily (100) and Gabriel (35). This study found four similarities; Both of them were dominant presented two types expressive acts such as praising and wishing. Both dominant presented expressive acts explicitly because they always said directly and clearly what they mean. For praing and wishing, they did not present implicitly. Three differences were; Emily presented more expressive acts (100), while Gabriel only (35). In the praising type, the charcaters Emily and Gabriel were always showing compliment statements to their friends. The most similarity lies in praising and apologizing which were the types most often used by them. Emily uses the act of praising (19) while Gabriel uses the act of praising (11), both tend to implicitly present expressive acts. Keywords: Expressive Act, Pragmatics, Speech act, Movie series.

AN ANALYSIS OF SPEECH ACT ON BU TEJO’S UTTERANCES AS THE MAIN CHARACTERS IN TILIK MOVIE

A movie is one of the famous media that is interesting in conveying messages to the people. Tilik movie is a short movie produced by Ravacana Films collaborating with the Culture Department of Special Region of Yogyakarta (DIY). This is viral in 2020 because it shows the culture and relates to the condition and real life of people in our society. Speech act is action carried out through language. Through speech act, people can make command, request, etc.  The aim of this research to analyze the speech act used by Bu Tejo as one of the main characters in the Tilik movie. The primary sources of data were Bu Tejo’s utterances in Tilik movie. This research also used its movie script as a secondary source. In speech act, there are three types of speech acts; a) locutionary acts, b) illocutionary acts, and c) perlocutionary acts. In this research, the researcher concerns to the illocutionary acts used by Bu Tejo as the main character in the Tilik. The researchers employed the descriptive qualitative method to analyze and describe the script. The script of the Tilik movie as the data of speech acts were taken and classified according to the John R. Searle's Concept of types of illocutionary acts and supported by Austin's concept. There are two research questions, 1) what kind of illocutionary acts and 2) how many frequency distributions are used by Bu Tejo as the main character in Tilik Movie. This research results in 70 illocutionary acts found in Bu Tejo’s utterances, consisting of 41 representatives, 18 directives, and 11 expressives.

El estatus de arte del CG-art desde un modo de existencia de tipo-natural

La introducción de las redes generativas antagónicas en el mundo del arte ha revitalizado la clásica pregunta: ¿puede una máquina crear arte? Estos algoritmos requieren una mínima intervención humana para funcionar, por lo que sus creaciones se consideran CG-art. En esta clase particular de arte los computadores no son una herramienta al servicio humano, sino un agente creativo autónomo. Por otro lado, estudios cognitivos recientes han demostrado que las personas son escépticas ante la idea de que una máquina pueda crear arte. Este artículo tiene como objetivo mostrar que el CG-art no puede excluirse arbitrariamente del dominio artístico. Para ello se utiliza la distinción hecha por Dickie entre teorías del arte de tipo natural y cultural. Luego, utilizando el concepto función de estatus de Searle, se propone considerar al arte como un fenómeno independiente del lenguaje. Complementando ambos enfoques sostengo que, la teoría idónea para explicar el fenómeno del CG-art es del tipo natural. Esto implica que la sociedad no puede negar el carácter de arte a estas creaciones algorítmicas. Así, la idea de que las máquinas pueden crear arte es fortalecida.
 Palabras clave: CG-art, teoría de arte, filosofía social, Searle, función de estatus

Interactive intentionality and norm formation

AbstractThe paper aims at complementing Searle's social ontology with an epistemology capable of illustrating institution formation. To this purpose, I discuss Searle's conception of constitutive rules and show that it requires the specifications of normative powers and purposes identifying status functions to be taken as given. However, such specifications arise from underlying normative commitments that may be various and possibly conflicting. Hence, in order to account for the formation of institutions, it is necessary to understand how status function declarations may emerge from alternative normative commitments. I make the hypothesis of “interactive intentionality,” as an interactive and deliberative mode of practical reasoning, to describe the processes of convergence on definite constitutive rules. These processes show how interactive intentionality may frame both commitment and enforcement, thus providing some insights to make rule-based and equilibrium-based accounts of institutions epistemologically commensurable.

The personal learning environment and the institution of education: reflections on technological personalisation in iTEC schools

This paper explores the distinction between 'education' and 'learning' with regard to the personal learning environment (PLE), drawing on evidence from the large-scale European iTEC project. The paper argues that Searle's concept of 'status functions' - declarations by powerful agencies about the nature, legitimacy and function of institutions, tools, practices and positions - can help bring clarity to the distinction between the PLE and institutional learning. In analysing the iTEC project, low adoption rates of tools are reported. It is argued that these result from conflicts between status functions for individual stakeholders who are already committed to a wide variety of practices and tools which PLE tools could potentially disrupt. The difference between the status functions of tools and social status within the educational institution is explored drawing on Veblen's analysis of education. In conclusion, it is argued that the PLE was mistaken in focusing on learning, and would be better focused on mechanisms of social status. The work highlights the challenge for the PLE to study and explore new ways in which learners can empower themselves.

THE COMMUNICATIVE RELEVANCE IN FICTIONAL DISCOURSE

Searle (1975) evidenced two programmatic questions about the logic of fictional discourse: why evolution would have selected fiction as a cross-cultural behavior and what enables an author to use words literally without committing to their literal meanings in fictional communication. Ferreira (in press) argues that part of the problem lies on a Searle's conception that by violating the logical rules of assertive sentences, the fictional communication constitutes itself as parasitic ordinary language. Alternatively, this paper discusses the fictional model of communication by relevance theory (Sperber, Wilson 1995), showing that ordinary communication and fictional discourse are second-order representations or metarepresentations.

Conceptual Blending and Intentionality

My original thesis was that conceptual blending was solely based on acts of individual intentionality without addressing collective or multiple intentionality (or aboutness). However, after reconsidering the problem, using Arthur Koestler's examples from Act of Creation and Fauconnier's and Turner's examples that were deeply ingrained in shared social contexts, I started to change my initial thesis. What made me switch over to the idea that conceptual blending was, after all, dominantly tacit and unconscious social act that required shared intentionality was John Searle's concept of The Background and Langacker's grounding, which, although different, both pointed at the socially shared elements of internalized knowledge. Thus, on second thought it appeared to me that conceptual blending hinged lot on social factors and/or rituals and definitely needed wider social context. Actually it turned out that I had to try to answer Searle's question: Can an individual harbor both her own ideas and collective ones at the same time? As Searle claims that this dual capacity is biological given that is shared by variety of species and presupposes a background sense of the other as candidate for cooperative agency, I could not help noticing the sheer intellectual effort it takes to break away from the Background. This meant that the only thing that blocked esoteric and weird interpretations was not the semantic content but the shared tacit assumptions. There seems to be more or less relevant counterpart in linguistics proper, too. and that is Langacker's concept of modeling local contextual aspects of meaning (the notion of ground). In the end, I was able to conclude that conceptual blending must have recourse to collectivity as shared background in situations that require it.

Institutions, distributed cognition and agency: rule-following as performative action

Aoki recently proposed the concept of substantive institutions, a concept that relates the outcomes of strategic interaction with public representations of the equilibrium states of games. I argue that the Aoki model can be grounded in theories of distributed cognition and performativity, which I put into the context of Searle's philosophical account of institutions. Substantive institutions build on regularized causal interactions between internal neuronal mechanisms and external facts, shared in a population of agents. Following Searle's proposal of conceiving rule-following as a neuronally anchored behavioral disposition, I show that his corresponding notion of collective intentionality can be grounded in recent neuroscience theories of imitation as the primordial process in human learning. I relate this to Searle's concept of status function and the neuronal theory of metaphors. This results in a precise definition of rule-following as performative action. I present two empirical examples of this: (1) the institution of money, and (2) status hierarchies in markets.

É incoerente a concepção de Searle sobre a consciência?

O artigo investiga a frequente alegação na literatura filosófica de que a concepção de Searle sobre a redução da consciência é incoerente. Após um exame das teses básicas de sua teoria da mente (seção 2), é discutida sua posição a respeito da identidade entre a consciência e a atividade cerebral (seção 3). Da adesão de Searle a uma tese da identidade de ocorrências deve-se concluir que não há contradição entre esta tese e a irredutibilidade ontológica que ele defende. Porém, é possível deduzir de sua teoria asserções que contradizem esta mesma teoria (seção 4), uma vez que essa irredutibilidade resulta em um dualismo de propriedades (seção 5).

Searle's conception of institutional reality

This paper aims to present Searle's conception of institutional reality as an important contribution to contemporary political philosophy and social theory. Its importance notwithstanding, the two objections will be raised concerning the central notion of collective intentionality. Searle thinks of this notion as crucial for explaining human cooperation and social reality. The first objection is that Searle missed to take into account the rationality assumption in his explanation of cooperation and human interaction. The second objection is related to the previous one. Additionally, Serle missed to investigate the role of autonomous moral agent in the procedure of constructing social reality. Given this shortcoming there is no possibility for addressing the question of justice within Serle's theory of institutional reality.

Rationality‐in‐Relations

ABSTRACT . If in a game with multiple proper coordination equilibria there is a single one that is best for all participants, it is rational for each participant to choose the strategy that has the best equilibrium as one of its possible outcomes. This seems so obvious that any plausible theory of rationality should be expected to be applicable to such situations. However, this is not true for the “orthodox” theory of rational choice, as Robert Sugden has convincingly shown. In this paper, I shall argue that this failure is due to an implicit individualistic understanding of intentionality. John R. Searle's concept of collective intentionality (as put forth in his Construction of Social Reality) and his more recent theory of Rationality in Action provides important conceptual tools pertaining to a more comprehensive theory of rationality. The account I shall develop differs from Searle's own, as for reasons to be found in his overall project, Searle's departure from the orthodox view of rationality gets stuck half‐way.

Diversity, Background and the Quest for Home in Postgraduate Education

A central task of tertiary teaching is to enable students to work within the constitutive rules of scholarly practice. John Searle's concept of Background implies that it is neither possible nor desirable to make these rules explicit. This is because as we get better at something, we do not employ rules more skillfully but become more fluent and develop dispositions and capacities responsive to situational demands of practice. While the concept of Background may seem to make the task of tertiary teaching impossible, it is argued that it opens the way for a rich account of the acquisition of scholarly know-how. Prompted by the difficulties faced by many postgraduate students in South Africa, the analysis has a purchase wherever universities admit students whose previous education impedes their epistemological access to scholarly practices.

Deconstructing a classical classification: a typological look at Searle's concept of illocution type

Analyse typologique de la classification des types illocutoires chez Searle. Comparant le systeme de Searle a une classification grammaticale des categories modales, l'A. entreprend une typologie diachronique et synchronique de l'espace semantique et du changement de signification.

An analysis of promise

Abstract The author attempts to offer an analytic statement of the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of a truthful application of the functor ‘ a promised b that …’. According to this analysis, promising is saying c with an eye to the addressee's realizing or thinking (i) of the speaker's intention to act towards the state of affairs d about which the speaker knows or thinks that it is not the case that the hearer suspects the speaker's ignorance about his dissatisfaction should d fail to materialize, (ii) of the speaker's belief that the hearer could approach him as obliged to act towards d , (iii) of the speaker's placing himself under an obligation to act towards d (a simplified account). Particular points of the definition are discussed and justified. Special attention is paid to the notion of obligation. A critical comparison of the definition with Searle's concept of promise is made. The author concludes with remarks on the relationship between promise and morality and on the relationship between descriptive and evaluative statements.