John Searle

John Searle is an American philosopher who has made major contributions to philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His Chinese Room argument—an imagined scenario in which a person follows rules to manipulate Chinese symbols without understanding Chinese—became the most discussed thought experiment in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, arguing that computation alone cannot produce genuine understanding or intentionality.

Searle's speech act theory distinguished between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, providing the framework for most subsequent work in philosophy of language. His biological naturalism holds that consciousness is a biological phenomenon caused by the brain, neither reducible to computation nor requiring anything beyond physical processes—a position that resists both strong AI and Cartesian dualism. He taught at Berkeley for most of his career and became one of the most widely read analytic philosophers.