educated at the university of Wisconsin-Madison and Oxford, and subsequently based at Berkeley. Over the course of a long, distinguished, and combative career Searle’s work has centred on issues concerned with linguistic meaning and the nature of communication, the philosophy of mind, and the existence of social facts and their normative implications. His early work started from ground broken by Oxford philosophers, especially J. L. Austin, and his book How to Do Things with Words. In his work on the philosophy of mind, Searle stresses the unique nature of intentionality, arguing that it cannot be reduced to simple functional terms, but must be thought of in terms of a different kind of truth, irreducible to, but caused by biological cerebral processes. The most famous centrepiece of this work is the highly controversial Chinese room argument. In later work he has been interested in the construction of social facts by means of linguistic actions, but argues that since their genesis presupposes language, that itself cannot be accounted for in the same way.

His polemical side was shown in a widely publicized dispute with Jacques Derrida, and an ongoing interest in university governance and public affairs has evolved in recent years into a progressive shift to an aggressively neoconservative political stance. His many books include Speech Acts (1969), Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), The Construction of Social Reality (1995), and Making the Social World: the Structure of Human Civilization (2010).