John Searle

Searle was born in Denver on July 31, 1932. His father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T Corporation; his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician.

Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In his junior year, he became a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, from which he received all his university degrees (BA, MA, and DPhil), and where he held his first faculty positions.

Searle began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959 and remained a faculty member there for the rest of his career. He married Dagmar Carboch, a fellow philosopher, in 1958, and had two sons. She worked as a lawyer and edited much of her husband's writing. Carboch died in 2017.

Searle received five honorary doctoral degrees from four countries and was an honorary visiting professor at Tsinghua University and East China Normal University. In 2000, he received the Jean Nicod Prize; in 2004, the National Humanities Medal; and in 2006, the Mind & Brain Prize. In 2010 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

At the time of his retirement in 2014, Searle was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. He continued teaching until 2016. In June 2019, his emeritus status was revoked after he was found to have engaged in sexual harassment and retaliation against a former student and employee, in violation of the university's policies.

Searle enjoyed skiing, sailing, and wine tasting, and owned a vineyard in Napa Valley, California. He died at a hospital in Safety Harbor, Florida, on September 17, 2025, at the age of 93.

While an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle became the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". McCarthy was the junior senator from Wisconsin at the time. At UC Berkeley, Searle was the first tenured professor to join the 1964–65 Free Speech Movement.

In 1969, while serving as chairman of the Academic Freedom Committee of the Academic Senate of the University of California, he supported the university in its dispute with students over the People's Park. In The Campus War: A Sympathetic Look at the University in Agony (1971), Searle investigated the causes behind the campus protests of the era. …

Searle's early work, which did much to establish his reputation, was on speech acts. He attempted to synthesize ideas from many colleagues—including J. L. Austin (the "illocutionary act", from How To Do Things with Words), Ludwig Wittgenstein, and G. C. J. Midgley (the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules)—with his own thesis that such acts are constituted by the rules of language. He also drew on the work of Paul Grice (the analysis of meaning as an attempt at being understood), R. M. Hare, and Stenius (the distinction, concerning meaning, between illocutionary force and propositional content), P. F. Strawson, John Rawls, and William 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 that (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 these elements to give his account of illocutionary acts. He gives 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. Among concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the "illocutionary force" and the "propositional content" of an utterance. Searle does not define the former but introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences

all have the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in illocutionary force (respectively, a statement, a question, a command, and an expression of desire).

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 characterized by having "conditions of satisfaction", an idea adopted from Strawson's 1971 paper "Meaning and Truth", and a "direction of fit", an idea adopted from Austin and Elizabeth Anscombe. For example, the statement "John bought two candy bars" is satisfied if and only if it is true, i.e., if John bought two candy bars. …