The Construction of Social Reality in Philosophy

Sep 26, 2009 Tyler rated it really liked it

Shelves: philosophy

How can ideas that depend upon the human mind be said to be true? Does there even exist such a thing as social facts? Many thinkers have doubted it, but only now has a philosopher taken the question up.

John Searle shows here how ontologically subjective concepts can be objective facts. Intentionality is key, but only collective intentionality makes social facts possible. Yet this collective intentionality is exactly what libertarians deny – consider Margaret Thatcher, who tells us there are no How can ideas that depend upon the human mind be said to be true? Does there even exist such a thing as social facts? Many thinkers have doubted it, but only now has a philosopher taken the question up.

John Searle shows here how ontologically subjective concepts can be objective facts. Intentionality is key, but only collective intentionality makes social facts possible. Yet this collective intentionality is exactly what libertarians deny – consider Margaret Thatcher, who tells us there are no societies, only individuals. What can Searle say to this without raising the specter of a Hegelian Absolute? His precise line of reasoning I leave for the book’s readers to assess.

In any case, Searle links physical entities to social facts by describing those facts as labels of intentionality. Physical entities can “count as” (the intending consciousness) mental facts, such as paper rectangle that counts as money. And social objects (a dollar), at bottom, are simply placeholders for some activity (commerce).

The joint buildout of social and ontological facts is the basis of institutions, and here again, fact implies function. A government is an institutional fact; more importantly, it is a function or activity. The upshot is that power grows out of organizations, not individuals.

Social and institutional facts, the author further explains, are true when a “sufficient number” of people in a community treat them as facts. Again, an institution, say a bank, is an ontologically subjective concept. But its acceptance by the people who use it makes it epistemically objective.

As to the individual, we learn nothing. Searle doesn’t tell us what a “sufficient” number is, or what the status of an institution's opponents or dropouts is. Searle finds it amusing that the individual can be thought of as possessing inherent rights. Does that invalidate the power of whatever institutions recognize or enable that concept? Here the discussion stops, perhaps awaiting another book. Meantime, The Unconscious Civilization is a short read I recommend to fill the gap.

Searle does address a related problem, the aforementioned Hegelian idealism, public enemy number one of the individual according to so many. And here Searle has a lot to say. The book, in fact, contains two parts. The exploration of the institution ends the first part. The second part is a defense of both realism and the correspondence theory of truth. Although seemingly superfluous – after all, Searle has already taken care to tie epistemology to a physical ontology – this part is a solid work in its own right. Readers will enjoy the careful perusal of the philosophy in the second part.

The book is not easy. Despite the touchy-feely book cover, this is neither anthropology nor sociology. It is philosophy. But the discussion is structured with an elegance that fans of the subject will appreciate after having their ears boxed by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I’m glad to give it a good rating. For those who haven’t thought much about how philosophy relates to social matters, this book is a good way to expand one’s horizons.
...more

4 likes · Like · see review

Jan 09, 2010 Leo Horovitz rated it really liked it

Shelves: philosophy-of-science, non-fiction, philosophy

My first contact with Searle, or at least the first time I actually read a text by Searle, was roughly a year and a half ago, when I was attending a philosophy class where we were supposed to write an essay on a subject of our own choosing in the area of the philosophy of mind. I had gotten interested in Searle's argument against the possibility of strong AI because I had been in contact with his Chinese room thought experiment while studying AI during my computer science studies several years a My first contact with Searle, or at least the first time I actually read a text by Searle, was roughly a year and a half ago, when I was attending a philosophy class where we were supposed to write an essay on a subject of our own choosing in the area of the philosophy of mind. I had gotten interested in Searle's argument against the possibility of strong AI because I had been in contact with his Chinese room thought experiment while studying AI during my computer science studies several years ago (a project, I can mention as an aside, with which I am still not done...) The particular text I was reading then was Searle's classic "Mind, Brains and Programs" in which he presents the above mentioned thought experiment and argues against strong AI. I found something deeply wrong with his presentation of the arguments coming from the other side and thought he completely misunderstood the issues involved. My essay was based around using Daniel Dennett's intentional stance (or strategy) and it's implications for the conclusions we can draw as to what entities are truly intentional, and turned that against Searle's statements of what needs to be fulfilled in order for us to say of some entity that it was intentional. The experience did not give me a good impression of Searle, I found his arguments to be completely erroneous and concluded that he had no basis for claiming that intentionality can only be supposed to exist "for real" in an entity if it is discovered to display "the right causal relations" (whatever that's supposed to mean). Dennett's account was much more reasonable in that it concluded that wherever we are able to use the intentional strategy to predict the behavior of some entity in such a way that we could not do without the intentional strategy, we have reason to conclude that the entity actually has intentionality (Dennett is often misunderstood as having an instrumentalist view of intentionality, which is simply not true, he says clearly that it is a real, objective phenomenon).

In any case, this first impression was, as I said, not good. At the same time I realized, of course, that one single paper was hardly grounds for dismissing Searle as a philosopher on the whole. Hence, I felt that I should probably read some more of Searle's writings sometime in the future. Roughly a year later the opportunity came when I attended a class (actually, two different classes taken after each other, filling up the fall semester) on the philosophy of science. In the second of these two classes, we read a book called "Understanding Philosophy of Science" by James Ladyman, which was a more or less traditional introduction to the subject, dealing with the scientific method, changes in scientific theories (Kuhn's "paradigms" and "scientific revolutions") as well as a part about realism (a book I have yet to finish, I'm behind in more than one place in my studies). The other book was the present one and it supplied a very different take on some of the issues concerning science and reality. Without going into the scientific method or the justification of science (something which Searle, quite rightly, takes for granted) Searle treats fact in the most general sense, giving a very convincing and easy to follow account of how he can combine his view of the world as one unified entity with the existence of social fact, which seem to differ greatly from "brute" facts of nature as he calls them. The account goes through how any social or institutional fact can be said to have the structure "X counts as Y in C" meaning that a specific object or other phenomenon X can be counted as an instance of a social phenomenon Y in a certain context C. This all need to bottom out, ultimately, in an X which is a brute natural fact, but complex structures of social and institutional facts can be established by building higher and higher levels upon the lower level, meaning that a certain social fact can consist in counting another social fact X as a new social fact Y (in a context C). This avoids an infinite regress by demanding that there is a brute fact at the bottom, this is what makes it possible to maintain the actual existence of social facts while also claiming that there is one and only one world.

After dealing with these issues in quite a great deal of detail, along the way dealing with and refuting social constructionism and other theories found absurd, he closes with three chapters arguing for some basic ideas about reality and truth that are not exactly part of the project undertaken in the book's main part (which is why they are placed in the end), but are nonetheless presupposed by his account of social facts. Here, Searle defends realism, shows how the common arguments against realism does not hold up to scrutiny, and shows why realism, while not directly provable, is a necessary presupposition for talking at all about the world. An interesting aspect of all this is that he does not, as hinted at just now, aim at proving a thesis directly, but instead aims to show how some positions he takes are necessary by a transcendental form of argument. The final chapter deals with truth and defends, to my satisfaction, the correspondence theory of truth so that it has been shown, once again, that it follows by necessity from some basic ideas we have about truth such that it would not be possible to talk about truth in a reasonable sense of the word without it having a meaning such that a true statement is true in virtue of a sort of correspondence to the external world.

It's a wonderful account of a set of related ideas, seemingly centered around defending the view that an external world exists, that at the bottom we find brute facts, that we can build layers of social and institutional facts on top of these, and that all these facts have in common that they describe some conditions on the world on which true statements are based. It's clear, straight forward, calm, very well written, interesting and extremely insightful. I maintain my previous assessment of Searle regarding his discussion of AI and intentionality (to a certain extent, I actually think he's probably right about the nature of intentionality in a sense, but that he is wrong in dismissing Dennett's account of how we come to know that some entity does exhibit intentionality), but my overall view of Searle as a philosopher has (to say the least) been greatly changed for the better. ...more

4 likes · Like · see review