Daily Inspiration Quote by John Searle

Searle’s line is doing a quiet but aggressive piece of boundary-drawing: it separates what minds do “by nature” from what language does “by courtesy.” A belief is about something intrinsically; its directedness toward the world is built into the mental state itself. An utterance, by contrast, borrows its aboutness. Words don’t point on their own - they get their aim from speakers, practices, and institutions that collectively prop them up.

The specific intent is to resist the temptation (common in both pop cognitive science and some formal linguistics) to treat meaning as a self-contained property of symbols, as if sentences carried Intentionality the way magnets carry charge. Searle insists that speech acts are not free-floating semantic objects; they are performances. The “derived” status of an utterance’s Intentionality is his way of saying: don’t credit the marks on the page with what belongs to the agent using them.

The subtext is a warning against a seductive metaphor: that language “contains” meaning the way a box contains a thing. Searle’s view makes meaning look less like a substance and more like a social achievement, tethered to intentions, conventions, and the background know-how that makes an assertion an assertion rather than mere noise.

Contextually, this sits in Searle’s larger campaign against reducing the mind to computation. If utterances only have derived Intentionality, then computers manipulating symbols don’t automatically get genuine aboutness - they get, at best, a simulation whose meaning is parasitic on human interpreters.