The Background (Searle)

The sentences "cut the cake" and "cut the grass" contain the same verb. A syntactic analysis would find no difference. But a human being understands them differently — not because she applies a rule specifying different cutting operations, but because she knows what cakes are and what grass is, what it feels like to press a knife through frosting, what it sounds like when a mower starts. This knowledge is not stored as a proposition. It is something deeper, more pervasive, less articulable — a way of being in the world that enables the interpretation of sentences without itself taking the form of a sentence. Searle called it the Background. It includes bodily know-how, social competence, familiarity with the physical world, implicit understanding of how objects behave. It is not a theory or a database. It is, in Searle's framework, the condition for the possibility of meaning.