The Construction of Social Reality

by John Rogers Searle

This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a 'five-pound note' with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch.

"John Searle has a distinctive intellectual style. It combines razor-sharp analysis with a swaggering chip-on-the-shoulder impudence that many of his opponents might find intolerably abrasive were it not for the good humour that pervades all he writes. This is a man who likes a good philosophical brawl." --New Scientist

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology, Psychology, Science, Society, Metaphysics

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

About the author

John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and was the Slusser Professor of Philosophy and Mills Professor of Philosophy of Mind and Language at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004.

Reviews

[Amirsaman · Rating 1 out of 5]

ظاهرا انگیزه‌ی سرل برای نوشتن کتاب، تحلیل یک واقعه‌ی --به گفته‌ی او-- به لحاظ متافیزیکی بسیار پیچیده مثل سفارش دادن قهوه است، و توضیح ماهیت واقعیتی که نهادی مثل پول دارد (ماییم که به یک تکه کاغذ «کارکرد» می‌دهیم). اما در نیمه‌ی اول کتاب فقط تکرار داریم و تکرار بدیهیات، از یک سری استدلال ضعیف و ساده‌دلانه؛ حتا اهمیت سوال و مسئله‌ی نویسنده مشخص نیست.
کتاب را خریدم چون بحث «واقع‌گرایی علمی» برایم مسئله بوده. کتاب در یک فصل به این موضوع می‌پردازد. نویسنده موافق واقع‌گرایی است. فیلسوفانی که ضدواقع‌گرا هستند را مسخره می‌کند و می‌گوید استدلال‌های آن‌ها حتا «ارزش جواب دادن» هم ندارد و این «خیلی واضح» است که جهان ما واقعی است. نویسنده آرای معدود دیگرانی را هم که ذکر می‌کند، چنان ساده‌سازی می‌کند که عملا چیزی از فلسفه‌ی اولیه باقی نمی‌ماند و بعد شروع به حمله می‌کند.
در فصل آخر هم مباحثی در باب «صدق» مطرح می‌شود که بی‌حاصل می‌ماند؛ چون نویسنده نتوانسته بحث واقع‌گرایی را در فصل قبل پیش ببرد.

نشر نو (علی‌رغم این‌که کتاب‌های خوبی هم چاپ کرده)، دارد به سمت همین «سودو-فلسفه»ها می‌رود. ژانری که این روزها بسیار طرفدار پیدا کرده. نویسنده به جای آوردن دلیل و برهان، به جملاتی روانشناسانه (در بهترین حالت!) اتکا می‌کند. این همان علم کاذبی است که افرادی را جذب می‌کند که علم را درست درنیافته‌اند و خطر در همین‌جا نهفته است، نه کتاب‌های پیش از عشق و پس از تو و این‌ها.

[Marc Nash · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really disappointing although possibly my fault in a bad choice. I had assumed this was going to be an argument about how everything we take as reality is in fact a construction of mind and language. But it posited that there are a group of 'brute facts' that exist with or without there being anyone to observe it (if a tree falls in a forest but there's no one to hear it etc), such as there is snow on top of Mount Everest, and then there is a category of socially constructed reality such as money, marriage, baseball rules etc. The second is obviously true, in that other species don't have marriage, money or baseball, but the 'brute facts' rely entirely on our human perception and conception and of course language. 'Snow is white' is not a brute fact, because colour is entirely reliant on the human oracular apparatus as to how light reflects off bodies. Our senses of perception and how our mind arranges this data and how we frame it in language utterly construct reality, whether it persists beyond our own existence or not. We wouldn't be able to call that big lump of rock a mountain, or Everest, or even lump & rock if humans weren't around to conceptualise all that. There would be a solid mass existing in deep time, but even solid, mass & time are human conceptions.

The arguments are dominated by the weaknesses in counter arguments, so that somehow disproving counter arguments is offered to stand as proof for the last argument standing, which it doesn't. Seems to be these 'winning' arguments are just as vulnerable to disproof as the ones Searle chooses to take down with logic. And finally, for an example of how this book disappears up its own jacksie, he argues or tries to argue about the difference between "truth' and 'fact' and gets nowhere.

Let's face it., Wittgenstein's work on language has queered the field for all subsequent philosophy. Language is an intercessionary layer on everything that removes it one level from any material proof.

[Turbulent_Architect · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to say that John Searle is a perfect example of how one can be a brilliant philosopher but a terrible person. His work is a model of the clarity and rigor that is increasingly scarce in philosophy. One conspicuous locus of the kind of vague looseness that I have in mind is in all the chatter about social construction. To listen to some philosophers, you would think that there is no objective reality and that it's representation all the way down. They will probably tell you that Wittgenstein has demonstrated this, of course, but—Alas!—they will be unable to tell you how.

As the title suggests, Searle's The Construction of Social Reality (1995) seeks to explain the ontological status of social reality. his thesis is that social reality can be explained by three ingredients. The first of these is what he calls assignment of function, i.e., our propensity to impose functions on a brute reality that has none in and of itself. The second is collective intentionality, i.e., our ability to share intentional states like beliefs and desires. The third and last is constitutive rules, i.e., those kinds of rules that, besides regulating an activity, make it the activity that it is.

How exactly does this play out? Well, consider the example of money. Money is, in and of itself, purposeless bits of metal and paper. However, we can assign a purpose to those them by treating them in a certain way. We can do this, for instance, by jointly agreeing to treat them as having a certain exchange value. And this value is in turn to be cashed out in terms of the constitutive rules that make it up: Such and such a piece of nickel counts as being worth so much in this or that context. The same story can be told, mutatis mutandis, of any social fact you please, be it government, property, marriage, etc.

Searle has always repudiated the analytic-continental distinction on the grounds that he is closer to many so-called “continental” thinkers than to his “analytic” peers. The Construction of Social Reality perfectly exemplifies this; its core theses might as well be lifted from straight from Foucault. However, unlike some of the less sophisticated continental thinkers (or at least their American readers!), Searle avoids falling into the absurd position that there is nothing outside language or representation. For that reason alone, I’d recommend that anyone tempted to throw around the term “social construction” read this book—if, that is, I had any confidence that they might understand it.

[Theresa MacPhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be an intriguing counterpoint to the social constructionism of the 80s and early 90s. Read in juxtaposition to Latour and in conjunction with Hacking, I think that Searle makes an interesting argument. This might be a bit "dated" by now, but if you're going to read Latour and Woolgar, I see no reason not to indulge in work that was a reaction to the Social Construction of Facts.

Interesting side note: Political scientists were assigning this book at Cal last fall, which is why I picked it up in the first place. I'd be curious to know why Searle has gone out of favor recently.

[Blyden · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Social Construction of Reality, a sociology of knowledge by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann which explained the existence of social facts, social objects, and social institutions from a phenomenological and broadly symbolic interactionist perspective, with a focus on the importance of languge, was published in 1966. It was a seminal work in the constructivist movement within the social sciences and probably originated, or at least popularized the concept of “social construction”. It is a well-known, marginally famous book within sociology, the content of which is presented in reduced form in a great many introductory sociology textbooks and its popularity is not limited to sociology.

In the context of familiarity with and appreciation of Berger & Luckmann’s book and sharing a phenomenological perspective, a couple months ago I came across some supportive references to John R. Searle’s book on the same general topic with the very similar title, The Construction of Social Reality (1995), and decided to read it. I have now read through the end of Chapter 2, and have decided to abandon the book. I find it flawed and more than a little absurd. I do not recommend it.

The first problem I have with this book is that it seems very much to be written as a philosophical reply or answer to, yet has no mention of, Berger and Luckmann’s much earlier work. Not only does it cover the same general content as Berger & Luckmann and have a title that plays directly on theirs, but Searle explicitly frames his book as a rejection of phenomenological philosophy. One on p.2 and the other on p.5: “We cannot just describe how it seems to us from an internal phenomenological point of view…” (Of course the phenomenologists would say we have no choice but to describe it that way.) Moreover in the introduction he writes “…one might suppose that they would have been addressed and solved already in the various social sciences… [but] as far as I can tell the questions I am addressing in this book have not been satisfactorily answered in the social sciences.” What can I make of this? It may be that this is intended as a slam of Berger & Luckmann predicated on the word “satisfactorily”. It doesn’t seem possible that a competent scholar doing a literature review on this topic, or with this title in mind, could possibly fail to turn up references to Berger & Luckmann’s work. Nor does it seem possible that a scholar sharing these ideas with other scholars would not at some point have someone mention the obvious similarities to their work. That seems to leave us with two possibilities: that Searle either is incompetent as a scholar, or else is being disingenuous in failing to explicitly reference Berger & Luckmann.

A second major problem I find with this book is that he begins with the presumption of an objective reality. The core question of the work, framed either as “How are institutional facts possible?” or “How is a socially constructed reality possible?” – referencing a concept that probably originated with Berger & Luckmann’s work – only make sense if one has assumed an objective reality. To a phenomenologist these aren’t questions at all, and an objective reality can only be known or dealt with through necessarily subjective knowledge. An interesting illustration arises from Searle’s comments on p.6-7 in which he presents atomic theory and evolutionary theory not as theory or knowledge but as objective reality. Unfortunately we can never know with absolute certainty that atoms or evolution or any other knowledge of what we presume to be an objective world is the reality itself as opposed to merely being our current model of it. Past models of what was thought to be objective reality have at times been replaced by newer models, and these two may be superseded in the future.

Searle offers a discussion of function which seems to offer nothing new, not already well known to social science. He discusses the special category of symbolic functions, e.g. language, in a way that very much parallels the central importance of language in Berger & Luckmann’s theory.

Searle suggests that there is collective intentionality, which presumes collective conscience. He offers absolutely no evidence that such a thing exists, arguing for it instead on the grounds that it is a more parsimonious, elegant explanation for social action than the negotiated, symbolic social interaction model that underlies nearly all microsociology. I think, unfortunately for Searle, this is one instance in which Occam’s razor fails. All it would take for his argument is to show even one example of collective intentionality in which there was an absence of symbolic social interaction, but apparently he can think of none. Neither can I. I am inclined to think such examples do not exist. If that is true it would seem to be strong evidence that Searle’s model is simply wrong.

Searle defines the term “social fact” in terms of collective intentionality, and “institutional fact” as a subclass of “social fact”, the latter being facts that “require special human institutions for their very existence” (p.27). Institutional facts are contrasted with “brute” or “natural” facts that, in Searle’s view, exist independently of human, i.e. social, institutions.

Consideration of how institutional facts are created is the main theme of Chapter 2. He suggests that many institutional facts are self-referential, by which he means they can only exist as such because people accept that they exist. Money is a prime example of self-referential fact. Its value and use as money is predicated on people recognizing and accepting it as such. This is a large part of what Berger & Luckmann meant to say that something was socially constructed, but Searle thinks the self-referential quality is limited to institutional facts, whereas Berger & Luckmann suggest that all social knowledge, all “objective” facts, are social constructions. Who’s right? On p.33 Searle writes “Something can be a mountain even if no one believe it is a mountain”. Other than the hypothetical case that Searle has implied in the question, is this statement true? I don’t think so. No person can present any concrete example of a mountain that no one believes is a mountain. That’s precisely because even the concept of a mountain, which seems to be a very “natural” and “objective” object, is a social construction. Facts are not objective reality. They are knowledge of a (presumably) objective reality, and thus they themselves are subjective. The physical object presumably would remain no matter what we call it, but the concept of a mountain is self-referential, i.e. socially constructed, just like money is. It exists because people recognize it as such.

There are other, similar examples in this chapter. Searle wants to tell us that a printed dollar bill that falls between the cracks of the floor of the mint and is never circulated is nevertheless money, but that a perfect counterfeit bill that no one recognizes as counterfeit and which is circulated and accepted is not money. Both of those assertions are false, I think. Whatever is accepted as money is money, and what is not circulated can, at best, only have the potential to be money. “Money”, he writes, “has to exist in some physical form.” That seems unlikely. We have replaced precious resources with fiat paper money and to some extent have replaced paper money with electronic tick marks in the magnetization of credit cards or computer records of a bank account balance. Even those, I suppose, have at least the symbol as a physical form, but there seems to be nothing other than the inconvenience of keeping track mentally, to stop people from having a currency that consists entirely in peoples’ cognitions without any physical marker or form whatsoever. By the end of Chapter 2 I’d found enough that I found simply incongruent with the way that the world actually operates, as I understand it, that I quit this book.

Searle is no doubt correct when he writes that “much of our world view depends on our concept of objectivity and the contrast between the objective and subjective….” (p.7) Throw out the concept of objectivity and recognize that the objective can only be known subjectively and Searle’s whole line of thought tumbles into the garbage can.

[Amir Rajabi · Rating 3 out of 5]

برای من که تازه شروع کردم راجع به جامعه شناسی خوندن اصلا انتخاب خوبی نبود ( نویسنده فیلسوفه و با تکرارهای زیاد سعی در اثبات گزاره ها داره ، و منی که نیاز مند یه کتاب بودم که فعلا گزاره های مختلف رو بهم نشون بده تا بعد برم سراغ حلاجیشون) ولی خب به هر حال لذت بردم و کلی بهم افزود و مدخلی شد به موضوعی که برام خیلی مهمه

[Mohammad Reza Sepehri · Rating 4 out of 5]

این کتاب اثر جان سرل، فیلسوف معاصر آمریکاییه و بیشتر در حوزه ذهن و زبان کار میکنه و در مورد زبان و واقعیت اجتماعی، امور واقع نهادی، تبیین پدیده‌های اجتماعی، صدق و تطابق حرف میزنه...
مسئله اصلی کتاب از این قراره که: بخش‌هایی از جهان واقعی ما فقط بواسطه‌ی توافق انسان‌ها واقعیت به حساب میاد، یعنی بعضی چیزا فقط به این علت وجود دارن که ما معتقدیم وجود دارن! مثه پول و دارایی و دولت و ازدواج و ... چطور ممکنه در جهانی که تماما از ذرات فیزیکیِ قرار گرفته درون میدان‌های نیرو تشکیل شده و بنیادی‌ترین اصولش رو علوم طبیعی تعیین میکنه، جهان عینیِ پول و دارایی و ازدواج و دولت و انتخابات و فوتبال و مهمانی تولد و دادگاه وجود داشته باشه؟ این کتاب رو تا جایی که خوندم، از وضوح و قدرت استدلال بالایی برخورداره و ترجمه خوبش با وجود دشواری نسبی مسائل، فهم کتاب رو تا حدی آسون میکنه.

[Leo Horovitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great framework, dumb conclusions

This books approaches ideas that I really liked from Harari's Sapiens with much more depth. Searle's classification of ontological and epistemogical subjectivity and objectivity is really useful, and the way it is applied to analyze institutional facts was fascinating.
But the text derails into discussions about external realism and the correspondence theory of truth that, although adjacent to the main point, felt more like long winded appendices of things better discussed in other texts.
I really disliked Searle's conclusion of "biology always winning." I would agree with a certain form of materialism and the precedence of material reality over ideas, but the way it was posed here was really crude and undermines the previous discussion. If that was the point he was trying to make, he wasted a great framework on something dumb.

[Bahman Bahman · Rating 2 out of 5]

"مسئلۀ اصلی این کتاب از این قرار است: بخش‌هایی از جهانِ واقعی هست که فقط به‌واسطۀ توافق انسان‌ها واقعیت به‌شمار می‌آید. یعنی بعضی چیزها فقط به این علت وجود دارند که ما معتقدیم وجود دارند. منظور چیزهایی است نظیر پول و دارایی و دولت و ازدواج.
تا جایی که اکنون می‌دانیم، بنیادی‌ترین خصوصیات این جهان همان‌گونه است که فیزیک و شیمی و دیگر علوم طبیعی توصیف می‌کنند. اما چگونه ممکن است در جهانی که به‌تمامی از ذرات فیزیکیِ قرارگرفته درون میدان‌های نیرو تشکیل شده است، جهانِ عینیِ پول و دارایی و ازدواج و دولت و انتخابات و فوتبال و مهمانی و تولد و دادگاه وجود داشته باشد؟
فیلسوف برجستۀ امریکایی، جان سرل، در این کتاب با انتزاع چند عنصر کلیدی از شبکۀ پیچیدۀ حیات اجتماعی، و ارائۀ تحلیلی منطقی از آن می‌کوشد درکی بنیادین از امر اجتماعی به‌دست دهد. کتاب با پرهیز از مغلق‌گویی‌های فلسفی و به زبانی ساده نگاشته شده است، اما در عین حال به بیان استدلال‌ها و تحلیل‌های فلسفی مهم و اساسی می‌پردازد."

[Jurjen Abbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an extremely interesting read and a recommendation for anyone who is looking for tools to make sense of the world in which we live. Searle convincingly that there is a special kind of facts, social facts, which are products of human symbolism and not products of their physical nature. Think for example of money, marriage, or borders. He explains how this 'social' reality comes into being. Of course, this means that this book is about social constructs. However, it would be a mistake to think that any social construct is illegitimate or useless, as Searle makes very clear too. Social reality is a specific kind of reality that needs its own account, and one account is given in this book.

I also want to command specifically Searle's ability to convey complex, academic thought in a very accessible and easy-to-follow text.

I did have some problems with this book. Perhaps this was the first book that explicitly analysed the construction of social reality, but I missed a debate - or at least, a refutal of (possible) counter-arguments. Moreover, even though Searle attempts to justify his use of terminology in the last few chapters, I feel he could have backed his arguments in the chapters themselves better (it is important to note that the first few chapters are about the actual construction of social reality, and the last few about the theoretical assumptions or concepts used). For example, he continually mentions 'snow on Mount Everest' as a brute fact, but the lack of acknowledgement of the fact that Mount Everest (or, for that matter, snow) is also a human social construction was a bit painful to me. Anyway, in the last few chapters, Searle does attempt to give an account for the theory he uses, but this part takes up so much of the book one starts to wonder how relevant it is in a book that bears this title.

I could attempt to challenge some more claims made in this book, but let me instead reaffirm that John Searle is masterfully skilled at deconstructing philosophical problems and exhibiting them in accessible English. Reading this book will make the world a humble bit easier to understand, and that is no small accomplishment.

[Stefano Sonzogni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sicuramente molto illuminante la descrizione, seppur umile, di Searle relativa ai fatti sociale e istituzionali. Analisi che è capace di mettere in evidenza la trama soggiacente alla realtà sociale.

[Annahita · Rating 5 out of 5]

کتابی بسیار خواندنی با ترجمه روان و دقیق آقای محمدامینی، به واقعیت اجتماعی و چگونگی و چرایی ساخت آن می‌پردازد.
واقعیاتی از این دست که نهاد ها چگونه و چرا شکل گرفته اند؟ پول از گذشته تا الان چه تغییری کرده است ؟ شروط به‌کارگیری پول و دیگر ساختارهای اجتماعی چیست؟
«توافق جمعی، نماد و زبان. »
زبان‌مند بودن انسان و نمادسازی، رکن اصلی افتراق بین ساختارهای اجتماعی انسان و نظام اجتماعی مورچه ها و زنبورهاست.

در ادامه به تفاوت‌ها میان نهاد اجتماعی و عینیایی چون کوه اورست می‌پردازد، و این گونه جهان‌بینی خود را تکمیل میکند و به دفاع از آن می‌پردازد.
برای هر علاقه‌مند به جامعه‌شناسی این کتاب پیشنهاد می‌شود.

[path · Rating 4 out of 5]

"X counts as Y in C" ... there is hardly a more concise way to sum up what this volume is about. Although Searle cautions not to fetishize this algorithm, it is the base for building a social reality from facts that only exist because we perceive them and because they are maintained and enforced by the institutions we build up around them. For these institutional facts, "X" is the thing in itself, the brute fact, the worldly phenomenon that exists apart from human perception. "Y" is the function that people assign to "X" -- an example being monetary value that we assign to slips of paper. "C" is the condition under which "X" carries out the functions associated with "Y" -- so slips of paper /printed by a US Mint/ function as money within an economic system built around buying and selling. These attributional or institutional truths are iterative and stackable, and their continual evocation and support through the formation of complementary institutions constitutes a social reality.

Overall, the book offers an engaging argument and I think it builds upon some of the vagueness of Berger and Luckmann's treatment of the same topic. The first six chapters are quite accessible and well argued. They constitute the core of the book. The last three chapters shift focus a bit to defending the implications of the first part of the book against charges that it promotes an endlessly circuitous view of reality that never escapes language. Searle instead goes on at length to show that institutional facts can and do trace a straight line back to brute reality.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting mix of linguistics and philosophy, Searles gives a lot of information on why are cultures are what they are. Lots of vocabulary you may need to look up, but easy to follow, and good source material, some more books for my book pile. Learn things, check it out.

[Muaz Jalil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Importance of collective intentionality and how we use it to build our institutions and social reality

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Searle's 'The Construction of Social Reality' (1995) is that rare thing - a work of fairly detailed analytical philosophy that is (mostly) accessible to the intelligent general reader. This is because Searle can write well when he is not 'analysing' and his subject is about how we make sense of things.

I write 'mostly' because it is also engaged in a polemic with his profession and so significant tracts of the book are really only for professionals in philosophy. The section on the 'Slingshot Argument' for example can be skimmed and either not understood or cared about by mere mortals.

The argument that matters is neatly summarised by Searle in a page and a half at the very end and really, really lazy readers can just go to that. On the other hand, really, really lazy readers are missing the point of philosophy if they do so.

The core is that, just as mind and body cannot be separated as in the Cartesian fantasy, so our species-biology and our emergent culture cannot be separated. There is an underlying biological structure to culture much as there is an underlying brain structure to the mind.

This meets a socio-political prejudice of mine that humanity is a paradox - a 'hive' species constructing its reality through species-conformity up to a point but with individuals within it having sufficiently independent minds to adapt it creatively to new needs through struggle or persuasion.

Individual consciousness (my view not necessarily Searle's) is genetically adaptive to different degrees in different humans. Creative tension between this individuality and the instinct for social conformity within our many 'hives' (cultures and societies) makes us evolutionarily adaptive.

Without being overly 'Darwinian' (because consciousness has enabled us to move beyond simple genetic competition), individual and social competition in real time creates the thing - humanity - that has become impossible to model or fully control especially by itself.

Searle argues that there is no ontological break between biological and social reality and that consciousness and 'intentionality' are the bridges between them. He puts forward the existence of a collective intentionality that creates social facts that are 'bigger' than their physical baselines.

Examples might be money, religious architecture, sports or nation states. These involve things (such as bits of paper or built things) that have a meaning as a social fact within the collective. It requires the collective to accept them (believe in them) as facts.

Are they facts in the way that the atoms that define the periodic table are facts? No, but Searle argues that they are still facts because they make up a shared social reality that operates as the background to social functionality. The rules of a game are necessary to a game in order for it to be a game.

Here I am more cautious because of the contingency of these facts although Searle argues his case (as you would expect) extremely well and logically. It keeps nagging at me that more of social reality is contingent and liable to collapse than he or we might think or even hope.

Searle recognises that philosophical choices have something to do with personality. For all the sharp logic within its professional framework, there is the American pragmatic liberal wanting social cohesion lurking underneath the analytical scholasticism.

The truth values apparently aligned to the social - shared belief systems - certainly look a lot more contingent in the third decade of the twenty first century than they did to the liberal community of the penultimate decade of the twentieth century.

Searle is protecting something but while his assault on post-modernist philosophical destruction of truth is well-timed and definitely works on its own terms, perhaps he failed to see that the destruction of social truth and so of a shared social reality would emerge from below.

He cannot be blamed for this. The book seems to be partly a rearguard action against philosophy as a out-rider for what was to come. Certainly 'continental philosophy' contributed to the process by which the 'Left' sought to manipulate social reality for political and cultural ends.

It would have been interesting to have his views today on one bio-cultural conflict that might be highly relevant to the 'construction of social reality' - the idea that a human can change gender by an act of conscious will regardless of biological 'facts' previously accepted as absolute.

In fact, the post-modern-cultural Left struggle to change social reality is only part of the picture. The resistance to it also appears to have 'decided' on its own account in a hive-like manner to construct itself around the invention of 'facts' that are mere instruments of political struggle.

As we write, we are reaching perhaps the most interesting stage where geo-political struggle is conducted as 'narrative war' where the combatants not only challenge each other in material terms (physical war) but in terms of culture wars so that telling half-truths and non-truths is normal.

The changes in mass media since the 1990s have unravelled socially shared assumptions imposed by the worker bees of the hive on the drones at the orders of the Queen Bee and have created a new type of drone war where winning is more important at every stage than 'truth'.

Of course, everyone has always lied in war, struggle or competition but the lies are told and repeated despite being known widely to be lies in a completely new way. 'My' lie has become a truth because it strikes at the lies and truth of the opponent. It simply works as expression of sentiment.

This is not a moral complaint at all. The narratives of the Queen Bees were generally fairly shaky as truths in any case. They merely represented the pragmatic consensus that we could call social reality but they worked for cohesion as well as promoting sclerosis and protecting elites.

We are into a new age where it is hard to see where there can be a bridge between Searle's undoubtedly philosophically persuasive account of how social reality is constructed and the fact that the social reality of which he is writing is collapsing around us.

Are we seeing an equivalent in terms of 'meaning' to the feared collapse of physical reality in some form of 'vacuum bubble'? Things are not that bad simply because Searle's point about the biological structures underpinning social reality stand regardless and may be the saving of the system.

The probability is that 'hives' (evolved into new forms) will re-emerge from the current struggle. War regrettably may be the crucible. However, people today might not recognise the world to come any more than Puritan divines or Roman orators would recognise our world.

The central issue for Searle and for us becomes consciousness - that is, the mental states that emerge out of our being human (which is nothing to do with other philosophical concerns like relations with Being or God). He emphasises the symbolism inherent in our institutional structures.

So, perhaps this is where we have to look hardest for clues to both survival and the future , especially of institutions, many of which are going to crash and burn or have to adapt in ways that would may be unthinkable today. After all, a female Archbishop of Canterbury would certainly surprise Victorians.

Searle puts the construction of our social reality down to a biological capacity to engage in symbolisation as the underpinning of language and institutional reality. The university Left's war on 'normal' or common sense use of language is a form of reverse engineering in this respect.

By capturing institutions and language, the hope and intent is to control symbolisation and so make biology irrelevant. To the radical Enlightenment, biology is embarrassing and restrictive, the source of inherent injustice and inequity. It must be overcome.

It is interesting here that, as an unintended consequence of this attempt to reconstruct social reality, the New Right (or at least the 'Tech' elements) have sought to subvert this by enhancing biology through transhumanist lines in order to promote inequity as a sort of Nietzschean elite.

Searle (as an analytical philosopher) is particularly concerned with language as an institutional structure that imposes "a special kind of function on brute physical entities that have no natural relation to that function".

All the normal functions of society - marital states, property relations, ownership and transactions, administration and institutions - require agreement on linguistic terms relating to some shared position on social truth. This shared position is ultimately relating to our biological being.

Again, we see a struggle over language to have become central to the apparent collapse of cultural cohesion and as weapon in struggle between interests and nations although (we might be pleased or alarmed according to our politics) institutional structures still remain fairly solid regardless.

The 'hive(s)' are in ferment but they are still hives. Searle's book is worth reading three decades on as an analytical framework for critiquing the collapse of 'truth'. There may be no truth in an absolute sense but our hives depend on their having an (admittedly flexible) shared truth of some kind.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHER APPLIES HIS IDEAS TO SOCIAL REALITY

John Rogers Searle (born 1932) is an American philosopher at UC Berkeley. He explained in the “Acknowledgements” section of this 1995 book, “The first version of these ideas was presented as the Immanuel Kant lectures in Stanford in 1002. Subsequent versions were presented as the Thalheimer Lectures at Johns Hopkins, the Hempel Lectures at Princeton, and as a series of lectures at the College de France in Paris. I have also presented this material in seminars in Berkeley and at the University of Graz in Austria… I have also had the opportunity to try out some of these ideas in several universities in the United States and Europe.”

He wrote in the Introduction, “The theory of speech acts is in part an attempt to answer the question, ‘How do we get from the physics of utterances to meaningful speech acts performed by speakers and writers? The theory of mind I have attempted to develop is in large part an attempt to answer the question, How does a mental reality, a world of consciousness, intentionality, and other mental phenomena, fit into a world consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force? This book extends the investigation to social reality: How can there be an objective world of money, property, marriage, governments, elections, football games, cocktail parties and law courts in a world that consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force, and in which some of these particles are organized into systems that are conscious biological beasts, such as ourselves?”

He explains, “Our aim is to assimilate social reality to our basic ontology of physics, chemistry, and biology. To do this we need to show the continuous line that goes from molecules and mountains to screwdrivers, levers, and beautiful sunsets, and then to legislatures, money, and nation-states. The central span on the bridge from physics to society is collective intentionality, and the decisive movement on that bridge in the creation of social reality is the collective intentional imposition of function on entities that cannot perform those functions without that imposition. The radical movement that gets us from such simple social facts as that we are sitting on a bench together or having a fistfight to such institutional facts as money, property, and marriage is the collective imposition of function on entities, which---unlike levers, benches, and cars---cannot perform the functions solely by virtue of their physical structure.” (Pg. 41)

He summarizes, “we can see several other reasons why institutional facts require language: First, language is epistemically indispensable… Second, the facts in question, being inherently social, must be communicable… Third, in real life the phenomena in question are extremely complex, and the representation of such complex information requires language…Fourth, the facts in question persist through time independently of the duration of the urges and inclinations of the participants in the institution.” (Pg. 76-78)

He asserts, “Since Freud we have found it useful and convenient to speak glibly about the unconscious mind without paying the price of explaining exactly what we mean. Our picture of unconscious mental states is that they are just like conscious states only minus the consciousness. But what exactly is that supposed to mean? I have not seen a satisfactory answer to that question---certainly not in Chomsky or Fodor and not even in Freud. To put the point crudely, I believe that in most appeals to the unconscious in Cognitive Science we really have no clear idea what we are talking about.” (Pg. 128)

He continues, “I have thus defined the ‘Background’ as the set of nonintentional or preintentional capabilities that enable intentional states of function.” (Pg. 129) He goes on to list “several types of Background functions. First… the Background enables linguistic interpretation to take place... Second, the Background enables perceptual interpretation to take place… Third, the Background structures consciousness… Fourth, temporally extended sequences of experiences come to us with a narrative of dramatic shape. They come to us under what for want of a better work I will call ‘dramatic’ categories… Fifth, each of us has a set of motivational dispositions, and these will condition the structure of our experiences… Sixth, the Background facilitates certain kinds of readiness… Seventh, the Background disposes me to certain sorts of behavior… “ (Pg. 132-136)

He argues, “There is a parallelism between the functional structure of the Background and the intentional structure of the social phenomena to which the Background capacities relate. That strict parallelism gives us the illusion that the person who is able to deal with money, to cope with society, and speak a language must be unconsciously following rules. Here I am arguing, Of course there are rules and often we do follow them, both consciously and unconsciously, but: 1. The rules are never self interpreting, and 2. They are never exhaustive, and 3. In fact in many situations, we just know what to do, we just know how to deal with the situation. We do not apply the rules consciously or unconsciously.” (Pg. 142-143)

He goes on, “often the person who behaves in a skillful way within an institution behaves as if he were following the rules… but rather because the mechanism has evolved precisely so that it will be sensitive to the rules. The mechanism explains the behavior, and the mechanism is explained by the system of rules. I am in short urging the addition of another level, a diachronic level, in the explanation of certain sorts of social behavior.” (Pg. 146)

He asserts, “there is a normal way of understanding utterances, and that when performing speech acts in a public language, speakers typically attempt to achieve normal understanding. The point we are attempting to show is that for a large class … a condition of intelligibility for the normal understanding of these utterances is that there is a way that things are that is independent of human representations. The consequence is that when we attempt to communicate to achieve normal understanding with these sorts of utterances we must presuppose external realism.” (Pg. 184)

This book will be of great interest to anyone seriously studying Searle and the development of his thought.

[Joshua Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Searle's The Construction of Social Reality is terrific as a brief introduction to Searle's view of metaphysics; it takes a stab at giving an account of social institutions in terms of psychological features distributed across collections of individuals and, so far as I can tell, is the most successful attempt at bridging the gap between the physical, psychological, and social in recent intellectual history. There are many reasons to be concerned about Searle's ideas (his open use of Cartesian language to contrast the physical and psychological; limited attention to the way that social institutions shape individual and social psychology, etc.) but overall the work is a solid piece of philosophy and deserves the attention that it's been given.

Those who disagree with Searle, in particular, should be obligated to read this particular text. It's a clean and straightforward articulation of his views, and does take some time to show the ways that his views about social reality interact with his views about language and thought. Whether you agree with him on any of those subjects (and most people disagree with him on most subjects) it is important to have an understanding of Searle, as someone who has been widely influential in philosophy. This book is probably the best introduction to his views I've come across, and is fairly accessible.

[Bart Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you started out searching for truth, you may have read a lot of philosophy. I did, when younger, and eventually drifted toward science, because philosophy seemed too abstract and circular.
You can’t read a better argument for what truth is than is presented by John Searle, in The Construction of Social Reality. He delineates truth and fact in his explanation of “institutional facts” and facts in general.
Some facts, he says, are brute facts, true no matter what anybody thinks. The summit of Mt. Everest is covered with snow: that is an example of a brute fact.
But institutional facts are different, and they are the basis of our social life. Take money, for example. Money works because we agree it’s valuable. But if we stopped agreeing about money, it would simply cease to be, unlike Mt. Everest.
This book is all about the things that started out in our minds and imaginations and became codifed in our institutions and laws. Things like: property, marriage, contracts, and governments. And this book is the opposite of abstract and circular. John Searle writes some of the clearest and best philosophical explanations I have ever seen. First published in 1995, this is a timeless masterpiece for any student of philosophy, or anybody interested in what truth is, and how society functions.

[Ehab mohamed · Rating 4 out of 5]

هذا كتاب مهم في نظرية المعرفة، ينبغي لكل مهتم بالموضوع أن يطلع عليه.
قد يجد القاريء أن محاولات الكاتب للبرهنة على وجود الواقع الخارجي، ترف ذهني، وفراغ وقتي، ولكن .... علينا ألا ننسى ما هي العواقب التي قد تترتب على إنكار الواقع الخارجي، مما سيقودنا إلى نزعة ما بعد حداثية، لا حقائق فيها ولا واقع، ولا سبيل للتمسك بالشيء، ولا حتى إمكانية للغرق!

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book John Searle sets out to prove -- contra the postmodernists -- that there is a reality whose existence is guaranteed having a separate existence apart from our conception of it, a reality that cannot be questioned. He distinguishes the fact that we affirm the permanently concrete existence of reality by removing the Berkeleyian element of judgment based on what we believe is external reality. He says he disbelieves in the half-measure that Hilary Putnam champions, internal realism, as a defensible position between external realism and antirealism. His reaction to those who would defy attempts made to rationally confirm the basic facts provided by the senses as attempts to prove the framework within the existence of the framework with the simple exclamation, "So what ?"

Searle says that arguments that suggest no transcendence of reality is possible take realism for granted, which leads him to the conclusion that we must take external reality for existing reality; it is a necessary presupposition, he says. Although he admits that it does not seem likely that there could be an argument in favor of the existence of external reality which does not "beg-the-question", he says these same arguments hold up because they entail the conditions of intelligibility; he says it is not an epistemologically arbitrable point, but a matter of being a publicly accessible perspective on reality. Searle draws attention to the main distinction he is trying to make in writing this book: that there is a difference between the facts involved in one's belief in external reality and the facts involved in the existence of human representations in normal understanding. Some things, he says, are not socially constructed.

It seems to be that this a question of Searle's Oxfordian education; in trying to refute Berkeley and Putnam, he is bequeathing honors and restoring the place of English rationalism to its proper place... This text is understood to be important as a refutation of relativism or any philosophical argument which takes a "meta"-linguistic approach to the subject of truth claims. Searle suggests that contemporary postmodernism ways of thinking have taken over which see the statement that facts are nonlinguistic entities and that the truth-claims stemming from these so-called "facts" imply a false matching between the linguistic and nonlinguistic. Nevertheless, the world of particle physics says that there exists an unknowable world where decision-making takes place in a seemingly irrational way and a way that defies concrete reality; it is, experientially, on the microscopic world of quantum physics that this center of undecidability from where socially constructed knowledge disintegrates in a cosmic sense. To be continued.....

[Medhat ullah · Rating 5 out of 5]

"the construction of reality", when examined through a Nick Landian framework, dissolves into a hyperstitional vortex where the "real" is not merely constructed but is a recursive effect of cybernetic feedback loops and capitalist technogenesis. Reality, in this schema, becomes a machinic assemblage, perpetually disassembled and reassembled by the algorithmic flows of late-stage capitalism. Land's accelerationist critique would posit that the construction of reality is not a human endeavor but an inhuman process driven by the emergent intelligence of technocapital itself, wherein humans serve merely as transitory agents within the vast circuitries of abstraction.
Simultaneously, from a Baudrillardian perspective, the construction of reality collapses under the weight of simulation and hyperreality. Here, reality is not constructed but endlessly reproduced as simulacra, erasing any distinction between the real and its representation. The constructed "reality" thus becomes a play of floating signifiers, untethered from any referential ground. The notion of construction itself is a simulacrum—a sign of a process that no longer possesses a discernible origin or telos, merely oscillating within the desert of the real.Meanwhile, Deleuze’s ontology disrupts the very premise of "construction" as a linear or teleological process. For Deleuze, reality is an immanent plane of becoming, perpetually deterritorialized and reterritorialized by assemblages of desire, affect, and materiality. The so-called "construction of reality" is thus not a construction but a rhizomatic unfolding, a multiplicity that resists totalization or binary stratifications. The real is not constructed but continuously differentiated, emerging from the interplay of forces and intensities that exceed any representational or structural paradigm.In synthesis, Landian hyperstition, Baudrillardian hyperreality, and Deleuzian immanence converge to annihilate the concept of reality as a static construct. Instead, reality appears as a pulsating, machinic, and infinitely mutable assemblage—an ever-accelerating nexus where the boundaries between construction, simulation, and becoming are obliterated. The "construction of reality" is not merely a human endeavor but a symptom of forces—capital, code, and chaos—that exceed and efface the human altogether.

[IWB · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, Searle's project is to give an account of the existence of social phenomena in a one-world ontology; that is, an ontology that presupposes naturalism. His project is descriptive insofar as he attempts to explain how social fact (y) is derived from or constructed “on top” of brute facts (x’s). Facts about social institutions (such as money or marriage) are objectively true in a world constituted by atoms and fields of force for the following reason: Institutions and other conventions are constituted by collective beliefs that confer status and powers on objects and events. They are mind-dependent yet objective because locutions such as "Dollars are legal tender in the U.S." or "John and Dawn are married" are said to be "true" or "false."

Searle begins by making a number of conceptual distinctions, which will serve as the tools for constructing the required mechanisms that generate social ontology. One such distinction concerns features of the world. There are those that are intrinsic features of the world and those that are extrinsic or observer relative features of the world. Intrinsic features are agent independent. For instance, mountains and molecules are, according to Searle, things that exist independently of our representations of them. It is true of the object I’m sitting on that it has a certain mass and chemical composition; that it is made partly of wood, the cells of which are composed of cellulose fibers, and so forth. All such features are intrinsic, claims Searle. Observer relative features are agent dependent. For instance, it is true of a certain object, which consists of various intrinsic features, that it is also a screwdriver. To describe something as a screwdriver is to specify a feature of the object that is observer or agent relative. Screwdrivers are not things you find intrinsically in the world, even though there are objects that are screwdrivers. Searle makes a further distinction the objective and subjective, which are then further divided into those that are epistemic and those that are ontological. The epistemic concerns predicates of judgments. There are subjective epistemic judgments “ Rembrandt is a better artist than Reubens.” There also are objective epistemic judgments “Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam during the year 1632.” The ontological concerns predicates of entities. There are subjective ontological predicates such as pains, and there are objective ontological predicates such as mountains. All these distinctions serve as the basic toolkit that Searle uses to carve up what he takes to be social ontology.

One of the interesting arguments Searle employs is his function argument. Searle argues that, unlike causes, functions are intensional, not extensional; functions are observer relative and, hence, are not intrinsic features of the world. His argument against intrinsic functionality is analogous to the argument against the substitutivity of terms in referentially opaque contexts.

Consider Leibniz’s Law:

Fa

a=b

Therefore

Fb

The substitution of co-referential terms does not affect the truth-value of the sentence as a whole. Now consider the following invalid instantiation:

John believes that Hesperus is Hesperus;
Hesperus is Phosphorus;
Therefore:
John believes that Hesperus is Phosphorus.

The principle of substitutivity is applied illicitly here, and Searle thinks that substitutability in function contexts, likewise, yields invalidity. The following schema, therefore, is invalid:

A’s function is to X
X-ing = Y-ing
Therefore:
A’s function is to Y

Searle claims that arguments for intrinsic functionality fail to capture the ordinary notion of function. So, Searle's function argument serves as a premise for the overall argument that either one’s account fits with substitutivity and is, therefore, observer relative, or one must redefine the sense in which the term “function” is being used.

Among the notion of a function, Searle distinguishes the following kinds: Agentive and nonagentive. Agentive functions are those that are agent dependent; e.g., chairs, screwdrivers, paperweights. Nonagentive functions are those that are agent independent; e.g., pumping hearts.

Searle’s project also includes giving an account of collective intentionality, which involves cooperative behavior and shared intentional states. Searle spells out an interesting negative account of “we intentions” but leaves much to be desired if you are looking for a full treatment of this fascinating aspect of ontology.

Another aspect of his ontological toolkit is the notion of constitutive rules and regulative rules. Regulative rules are antecedent to the phenomena of which they regulate: “Drive on the right-hand side of the road.” Constitutive rules, however, determine the phenomena of which they govern: “Playing chess is constituted in part by acting in accord with the rules.” Constitutive rules have the form: “X counts as Y in context C.”

Searle's project is an interesting one, though not a novel one; and it is noteworthy that he does not much refer to those who have engaged in projects similar to his, such as Heidegger, Foucault, or Merleu Ponty; or for that matter his contemporaries such as Ian Hacking. Elgin, and Sally Haslanger.

There are a number of problems with Searle’s account. One of which is his vague use of ‘brute fact’. You get the sense that Searle knows that if he presses this concept for all it's worth, he’ll end up with something like a Kantian “thing-in-itself;” but Searle trys to avoid being committed to this (it doesn’t rub well with naïve realism). Further difficulties arise when Searle's notion of a ‘backround’ is fleshed out. Again, Searle seems to be committing himself to more than his toolkit allows for. His position on the way in which our concept use plays into the construction of various social entities, and how this concept use and construction is related to collective intentionality, is presented weakly.


Regarding collective intentionality, Searle claims that cooperative intention constrains one's individual intention. I think his argument for this (which I'm not giving here) has many problems, but as is the case with most philosophical arguments that don't quite succeed, it is interesting, and yields plenty of further argumentative fruit.

All in all the book is well worth reading, and I’ve hardly said anything that should dissuade anyone from reading it. It would have been nice, however, if Searle had dealt with some of the more interesting and difficult issues that arise from his project, which people like Hacking and Haslanger and Elgin have dealt with.

[Raymond Lam · Rating 4 out of 5]

An original work in which Searle eludicates the structure of social reality and institutional facts using speech act theory. Searle distinguishes an institutional fact as a subclass of a social fact. A social fact refers to any fact involving collective intentionality which can be exhibited by prelinguistic animals when they engage in more structural collective behaviours such as pack hunting or territorial marking.
Institutional facts involve the use of created conventions with constitutive rules established by language, such as money, property, marriage, sports competitions. The use of language features performative utterances to create institutional facts as seen in declarations of marriage, war, and swearing into office.
The structure of institutional facts has several features. First it has status functions of the form "x counts as y in context C" iterated in its constitutive rules, e.g., paper counts as money in society C. Second, there is an interlocking systems of constitutive rules and systems to sustain institutional facts. Paper can count as money only if money exists in an established financial exchange system, and, a financial system exists as an institution in society C.
Searle further provides the maintenance and hierarchy of institutional facts.
Also included in the book is a defence of ontological external realism given that Searle's notion of institutional facts is based on a primacy of brute facts and an assumption of background concepts in Searle's work on background semantics.
This clearly written work in typical Searlian lucid prose is useful for followup courses in speech act theory or pragmatics.

[noor · Rating 3 out of 5]

admitting i did not understand all of it, the author examines how the real world transpires through what is essentially built by humans, how language shapes our comprehension of reality; reading this allowed me to add new concepts to my toolbox of apprehending my reality, the two dichotomies: physical vs. mental; nature vs. culture, the distinction between language dependent thoughts and language-independent thoughts, and the necessity behind symbol-dependent languages; i do not subscribe to all of the author’s view, he finds terrifying the steady erosion of acceptance of large institutional structures around the world, for example: breakdown of national identification in favor of ethnic tribalism, the delimitation of army within structural powers, all of which i find particularly reassuring that large, hierarchical structures do not work, as in do not provide the functions that is necessary and expected from the people supposed to benefit from the existence of said structures but also, how they can be easily corrupted, like the army and their fractures is preferable than their maintenance or perennity; in disagreement with chomsky that our picture of unconscious mental states is that they are just like conscious states minus the consciousness; it also appears unclear to me what we are talking about in cognitive sciences when the unconscious is mentioned, therefore, the author theorized the concept of the “background” as a set of non-intentional or preintentional capacities that enable intentional states of function

[Alex Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't dive into many books on philosophy, but this one was recommended by a friend. Said he was assigned it in a grad-level History of Psychology class. And while this book is very relevant to that particular science, it applies to... nearly everything.

At a critical level, all I can really say is that Searle's arguments make sense to me. They're understandable. But I am afraid that I don't know the other arguments well enough to strongly say that this text is a definitive account of reality (external, internal, or otherwise). It's a short text, and because he sticks to his points, the book feels dense. I had to slow myself down and unpack some of his language at times, but that's not to say that it's written in a complicated way. On the contrary, actually.

It wasn't until I finished, felt that I enjoyed it, only to Google what John Searle was up to these days. His history of sexual misconduct and harassment with students doesn't change any of his arguments, but it sure made me sick to my stomach after the fact.

[Imlac · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a sensible and very well-grounded account of the phenomenon of social facts. Using ideas he developed in his philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, Searle is able illuminatingly to extend them to explain such facts as the existence of money and marriage. These are things social scientists presuppose but are not equipped to explain. It is the only philosophically respectable (or simply respectable) theory of this extremely important aspect of reality.

The last three chapters of the book (7, 8 and 9) constitute a self-contained discussion of realism and truth. It is amazingly clear, convincing, and should be accessible to anyone with intelligence and an open mind. I would require all literary critics, social theorists, an assorted postmodernist "thinkers" to first read this before presuming to make any pronouncements of their own (should there be any left for them to make).

[Conlon Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Social reality (marriage, contracts, promises), are things human construct from the physical reality of plants, animals, and minerals.

When we say marriage consists of the xyz, (whatever our definition of marriage might be), what we mean as a society is "We agree that marriage consists of xyz". The "We agree" part makes the social reality possible.

We may agree through religion, through democracy, through force. All are elements of social reality.

This brilliant little book clarifies how human society is created.

Recommended.