Editing John Searle (section)

===Intentionality and the background===
In ''Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind'' (1983), Searle applies the principles of his account(s) of [[illocutionary act]]s to the investigation of [[intentionality]], which is central to Searle's "Philosophy of Mind". (Searle is at pains to emphasize that 'intentionality', the capacity of mental states to be ''about'' worldly objects, is not to be confused with 'intensionality', the referential opacity of contexts that fail tests for 'extensionality'.<ref>Searle, "Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization" (2010) p. 48-62</ref>)

For Searle, [[intentionality]] is exclusively mental, being the power of minds to [[Correspondence theory of truth|represent]] or symbolize over, things, properties and states of affairs in the external world.<ref>Searle, ''Intentionality'' (1983)</ref> Causal covariance, about-ness and the like are not enough: maps, for instance, only have a 'derived' intentionality, a mere after-image of the real thing.

Searle also introduces a technical term ''the Background'',<ref>Searle, ''Intentionality'' (1983); ''The Rediscovery of the Mind'' (1992) ch. 8</ref> which, according to him, has been the source of much philosophical discussion ("though I have been arguing for this thesis for almost twenty years," Searle writes,<ref>"Literary Theory and Its Discontents", ''New Literary History'', 640</ref> "many people whose opinions I respect still disagree with me about it"). He calls ''Background'' the set of abilities, capacities, tendencies, and dispositions that humans have that are not themselves intentional states but that generate appropriate such states on demand.

Thus, when someone is asked to "cut the cake," they know to use a knife and when someone is asked to "cut the grass," they know to use a lawnmower (and not vice versa), even though the request did not mention this. Beginning with the possibility of reversing these two, an endless series of sceptical, anti-real or science-fiction interpretations could be imagined. "I wish to say that there is a ''radical'' underdetermination of what is said by the literal meaning..." emphasizes Searle.<ref>{{cite book |last=Searle |first=John |title=The Construction of Social Reality |location=London |publisher=Allen Lane The Penguin Press |date=1995 |isbn=978-0-14-023590-6 |page=131}}</ref> The Background fills the gap, being the capacity always to have a suitable interpretation to hand. "I just take a huge metaphysics for granted," he says.<ref>{{cite book |last=Searle |first=John |title=Mind, Language and Society |location=London |publisher=Orion Books Ltd |date=1999 |isbn=978-0-75380-921-1 |page=108}}</ref> Searle sometimes supplements his reference to the ''Background'' with the concept of ''the Network'', one's network of other beliefs, desires, and other intentional states necessary for any particular intentional state to make sense.

To give an example, two chess players might be engaged in a bitter struggle at the board, but they share all sorts of Background presuppositions: that they will take turns to move, that no one else will intervene, that they are both playing to the same rules, that the fire alarm will not go off, that the board will not suddenly disintegrate, that their opponent will not magically turn into a grapefruit, and so on indefinitely. As most of these possibilities will not have occurred to either player, Searle thinks the Background is itself unconscious as well as nonintentional.<ref>{{cite book |last=Searle |first=John |title=The Rediscovery of the Mind |url=https://archive.org/details/rediscoveryofmin0000sear |url-access=registration |location=Mass, US |publisher=MIT Press |date=1992 |isbn=978-0-262-19321-4 |page=[https://archive.org/details/rediscoveryofmin0000sear/page/185 185]}}</ref> To have a Background is to have a set of brain structures that generate appropriate intentional states (if the fire alarm does go off, say). "Those brain structures enable me to activate the system of intentionality and to make it function, but the capacities realized in the brain structures do not themselves consist in intentional states."<ref>{{cite book |last=Searle |first=John |title=Rationality in Action |location=Mass, US |publisher=MIT Press |date=2001 |isbn=978-0-262-19463-1 |page=58}}</ref>

It seems to Searle that Hume and Nietzsche were probably the first philosophers to appreciate, respectively, the centrality and radical contingency of the Background. "Nietzsche saw, with anxiety, that the Background does not have to be the way it is."<ref>Searle, ''The Construction of Social Reality'' (1995), p.132</ref> Searle also thinks that a Background appears in the ideas of other modern thinkers: as the river-bed/substratum of Wittgenstein's ''[[On Certainty]]''<ref>{{cite book |last=Wittgenstein |first=Ludwig |title=On Certainty |location=Oxford |publisher=Basil Blackwell |date=1969}}</ref> ("the work of the later Wittgenstein is in large part about the Background, especially ''On Certainty''"<ref>Searle, ''The Rediscovery of the Mind'' (1992), p.177 and endnote</ref>) and [[Pierre Bourdieu]]'s ''[[Habitus (sociology)|habitus]]''.

In [[Searle–Derrida debate|his debate with Jacques Derrida]], Searle argued against [[Jacques Derrida|Derrida]]'s purported view that a statement can be disjoined from the original intentionality of its author, for example when no longer connected to the original author, while still being able to produce meaning. Searle maintained that even if one was to see a written statement with no knowledge of authorship it would still be impossible to escape the question of intentionality, because "a meaningful sentence is just a standing possibility of the (intentional) speech act". For Searle, ascribing intentionality to a statement was a basic requirement for attributing it any meaning at all.<ref name="reply">John Searle, ''Reiterating the Différences: A Reply to Derrida'', Glyph 2 (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977 p. 202</ref><ref>Gerald Graff. 1988. Summary of Reiterating the differences. in Derrida, Jacques. ''Limited Inc.'' p. 26.</ref>

In 2023 Pierre Jacob [[Intentionality#Mental states without intentionality|described Searle's view as "anti-intentionalist"]].<!--THIS REFERENCE COPEID-PASTED--><ref>{{cite encyclopedia |last1=Jacob |first1=Pierre |title=Intentionality |url=https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/ |encyclopedia=The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy |publisher=Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University |date=2019}}</ref>