John Rogers Searle ( ; July 31, 1932 – September 17, 2025) was an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He was the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley.
Searle's early work on speech acts, influenced by J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein, helped establish his reputation. His most famous philosophical contribution is the "Chinese room" argument, which attempts to refute the possibility of "strong" artificial intelligence.
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 In June 2019, his emeritus status was revoked after he was found to have engaged in sexual harassment and retaliation against a former student and employee, in violation of the university's policies.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. "I have been attacked by both the House Un-American Activities Committee and ... by several radical polemicists.... Stylistically, the attacks are interestingly similar. Both rely heavily on insinuation and innuendo, and both display a hatred—one might almost say terror—of close analysis and dissection of argument."
In the late 1980s, Searle and other landlords petitioned Berkeley's rental board to raise the limits on how much they could charge tenants under the city's 1980 rent-stabilization ordinance. After the rental board refused to consider their petition, the group sued, charging a violation of due process. In 1990, the California Supreme Court upheld Searle's argument in part and Berkeley changed its rent-control policy, leading to large increases in rent between 1991 and 1994. Searle saw the issue as one of fundamental rights, writing, "The treatment of landlords in Berkeley is comparable to the treatment of blacks in the South... our rights have been massively violated and we are here to correct that injustice." The court called the debate a "morass of political invective, ad hominem attack, and policy argument".
Shortly after the September 11 attacks, Searle wrote an op-ed arguing that the attacks were a particular event in a long-term struggle against forces intractably opposed to the United States and signaling support for a more aggressive neoconservative interventionist foreign policy. He argued that the US was in a more-or-less permanent state of war with these forces and should deny terrorists the use of foreign territory from which to stage attacks. He blamed the attacks on the lack of American resolve to deal forcefully with its enemies over the previous decades.
In March 2017, Searle became the subject of sexual assault allegations. The Los Angeles Times reported: "A new lawsuit alleges that university officials failed to properly respond to complaints that John Searle ... sexually assaulted his ... research associate last July and cut her pay when she rejected his advances." The case brought to light several earlier complaints against Searle on which Berkeley had allegedly failed to act.
The lawsuit, filed in a California court on March 21, 2017, alleged sexual harassment, retaliation, wrongful dismissal, assault, and battery, and sought damages both from Searle and the Regents of the University of California. It also claimed that Jennifer Hudin, the director of the John Searle Center for Social Ontology, where the complainant had been employed as Searle's assistant, said Searle "has had sexual relationships with his students and others in the past in exchange for academic, monetary or other benefits". After the lawsuit became public, several previous allegations of sexual harassment and assault by Searle were revealed.
On June 19, 2019, following campus disciplinary proceedings by Berkeley's Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination, University of California President Janet Napolitano approved a recommendation that Searle have his emeritus status revoked, after a determination that he had violated university policies against sexual harassment and retaliation between July and September 2016.
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
Would that Sam smoked habitually!