Our tools are extensions of our purposes, and so we find it natural to make metaphorical attributions of intentionality to them; but I take it no philosophical ice is cut by such examples.
Interpretation
Our tools reflect our intentions, but attributing intent to them does not carry philosophical weight.
In this quote, John Searle highlights the relationship between humans and their tools, suggesting that tools are manifestations of our goals and purposes. While we may instinctively ascribe intention to our tools as extensions of ourselves, this attribution does not progress philosophical discourse, implying that the true essence of understanding lies beyond these metaphorical attributions.
In practice
Discussing the philosophy of technology in a seminar.
We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.
You can't *discover* that the brain is a digital computer. You can only *interpret* the brain as a digital computer.
Where conscious subjectivity is concerned, there is no distinction between the observation and the thing observed.
Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The illusion could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purpose at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation required the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality
We love the old saints, missionaries, martyrs, and reformers. Our Luthers, Bunyans, Wesleys and Asburys, etc... We will write their biographies, reverence their memories, frame their epitaphs, and build their monuments. We will do anything except imitate them. We cherish the last drop of their blood, but watch carefully over the first drop of our own.
You have no idea how fragile an actor's self-worth is.
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.
If you live long enough, sooner or later everybody you know has cancer.
To have security against atomic bombs and against the other biological weapons, we have to prevent war, for if we cannot prevent war every nation will use every means that is at their disposal; and in spite of all promises they make, they will do it. At the same time, so long as war is not prevented, all the governments of the nations have to prepare for war, and if you have to prepare for war, then you are in a state where you cannot abolish war.
The function of the child is to live his own life - not the life that his anxious parents think he should live.
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