Searle’s Contradictory Theory of Social Reality (original) (raw)
Related papers
Deconstructing Searle’s Making the Social World
Hindriks (2013) argued that Searle’s (2010) theory of institutions suffers from a number of problems pertaining to the notions of constitutive rule, status function, Status Function Declaration, deontic power, and human right (Hindriks 2013a). Lobo (this issue) argues that these criticisms are not sufficiently charitable. In response, it is argued here that the problems that were identified earlier are sufficiently severe to call for substantial revisions of the theory.
This is a survey and critique of Searle's thinking about social norms and collective intentionality up to 1999 or so, and provides an account of why his views evolved as they did. The essay also argues against the account of normativity that Searle espouses at this point and later revises.
Restructuring Searle’s Making the Social World
Institutions are normative social structures that are collectively accepted. In his book Making the Social World, John R. Searle maintains that these social structures are created and maintained by Status Function Declarations. The article’s author criticizes this claim and argues, first, that Searle overestimates the role that language plays in relation to institutions and, second, that Searle’s notion of a Status Function Declaration confuses more than it enlightens. The distinction is exposed between regulative and constitutive rules as being primarily a linguistic one: whereas deontic powers figure explicitly in regulative rules, they feature only implicitly in constitutive rules. Furthermore, he contends that Searle’s collective acceptance account of human rights cannot adequately account for the fact that people have these rights even when they are not recognized. Finally, It is argued that a conception of collective intentionality that involves collective commitment is needed in order to do justice to the normative dimension of institutions.
Searle’S Theory of Institutional Facts: A Program of Critical Revision
In the first part of my paper I recapitulate some main points of Searle’s theory of institutional facts, as stated in Chapters 1-6 of his book The Construction of Social Reality.1 First, I describe the puzzle that motivates the inquiry and the three main goals of his theory. Then, I describe the two structures that (in my opinion) constitute the core of his theory: “X counts as Y” and power. Finally, I introduce a number of (in my opinion) auxiliary and accessory components of his theory. Apart from the organization of the material, the presentation here aims at a faithful, clear and succint reproduction of Searle’s original position, with just two or three rather small (and notified) innovations.
Language and Institutions in Searle's The Construction of Social Reality
The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social …, 2008
In Chapter 3 of his The Construction of Social Reality (CSR in the following text), John Searle endeavors to explain and justify his claim that language is essentially constitutive of institutional reality. Unlike several other components of his theory of institutions (collective intentionality, deontic power, constitutive rules), this claim of Searle's has not been made a topic of critical discussion yet. However, there are several difficulties connected with this part of Searle's theory, and most of my paper is an attempt to show what they are and how to remove them.
Searle's construction of social reality
In his book 'The Construction of Social Reality' (Searle 1995:1) and later works, John Searle [1] discusses the problem that 'there are portions of the real world, objective facts in the world, that are only facts by human agreement'. He describes these objective facts as observer relative features of reality, or components of 'social reality', as opposed to the intrinsic features of physical reality or 'brute facts', such as rocks, water and trees. He then asks the question 'how is a socially constructed reality possible?' and then devotes much of this book to providing some answers. In this essay, I propose to go further and suggest that because these observer relative features are more relevant and important to our daily lives than intrinsic features, for many people social reality seems more 'real' than physical reality. In other words, rather than being hard to account for, observer relative features 'have a grip on us'.
I argue that the scope of Searle’s theory is wider than previously acknowledged. Critics object that the scope of the theory is too narrow since it cannot account for opaque kinds of social facts due to the self-referentiality of social concepts. Using the distinction between a macrolevel and a micro-level, I show that it can in fact account for opaque social phenomena like power structures and inflation: opaque kinds of social facts (macro phenomena) can be reduced to self-referential and transparent institutional facts (micro phenomena). Hence, opaque social phenomena can be taken into account, while still keeping the self-referentiality
Hegel and Searle on the Necessity of Social Reality [Preprint version]
Rivista di Estetica, 2014
In his 2010 book Making the Social World, John Searle offers a refined account of his theory of how social reality is instituted by acts of collective intentionality 1 . In the following, I am not so much concerned with this theory directly, but rather with a closely connected question that Searle addresses towards the end of his book: Why do human beings live in a social world of institutions that has the property of providing them with objective reasons for actions? Searle's answer to this question draws on the intimate connection between institutional reality, the practical normativity essential to it, and the fact that the creatures that institute this reality are endowed with a free will. It is this conceptual relation between free will, practical normativity and the structure of social reality that I want to explore from the standpoint of Hegel's mature philosophical thought. More specifically, my thesis is that Hegel's Philosophy of Right offers an explanation of the necessity of an essentially normative social reality by arguing that subjects are only truly free when they live within a social world of institutions that secure and further their freedom. Whereas Searle believes that the free beings could also exist independently of forming an institutional reality, Hegel's point is that if there are to be free beings at all, they must live within a world of essentially normative social institutions.