Philosophers, often enough, have carried their questions on their shoulders in search of a fertile ground that will do justice to the questions asked. Jonathan Dancy’s 1993 book Moral Reasons is one of the recent examples. His thinking about reasons for action drove him away from the land of moral principles and towards what has become known as Dancy’s particularism, a version of particularism which contains the claim that morality can get along perfectly well without principles.
For John Searle, too, although in a very different way, the preoccupation with reasons for action took him to a new philosophical territory. What Searle has been searching for is a deeper understanding of the reasons why we create and maintain elaborate institutional structures such as money, government, cocktail parties, marriages and universities. His proposal of a new discipline of philosophy he calls “the philosophy of society’” is an attempt to explain the structures of our society by an appeal to the two important aspects of the social reality. First, the facts about social institutions have motivating power because they offer desire-independent reasons for action. Second, social institutions, whilst defining power relations in a society, could not exist without collective intentionality.
Searle, one of the most influential contemporary analytic philosophers who has made important contributions in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of the mind, has spent the past 50 years examining a wide range of philosophical topics including speech acts, free will, rationality, desire-independent reasons for acting and intentionality. This, his latest book, which is an extension of his earlier work, The Construction of Social Reality, published in 1995, could be described as a departure from the philosophy of language, a philosophical tradition recognised in the late 19th and early 20th century through the works of a number of philosophers led by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
But in some ways Searle’s latest effort is not a departure from the linguistic world at all as he emphasises in this book the importance of language in the creation, constitution and maintenance of social reality. In The Construction of Social Reality, he argued that all of institutional reality is created by linguistic representation. In this book he tells us why it makes sense to see the institutional facts created by language as being a part of rather than apart from the natural world.
Searle’s central question is this: how can we give an account of ourselves as conscious, free, social and rational agents in a world that we know consists of unconscious, mindless physical particles in fields of force? In answering that question, he suggests, “we have to avoid postulating different ontological realms, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social.” There is only one reality and “we have to explain how human reality fits into that one reality.” He believes the idea of one reality can be best understood within the philosophy of society which he endorses as a line of research that is more fundamental than other relatively new philosophical disciplines including the political philosophy.
Famously, Searle notes, Margaret Thatcher said society does not exist, only people and their families exist. This cannot be further from the truth. He argues: “society consists not just of people and their families but includes ski clubs, nation states, corporations and other social entities.” Searle’s commentary about real life examples of social institutions and institutional facts admirably compliments his logical analysis of the social ontology. But in order to get to, what might be for many the most interesting parts of the book, one has to get past such things as the deontic powers, syntactical compositionality, and epistemic objectivity.
His discussion of the human reality connects particles to general elections and essences of things to the meaning of words and, as such, may seem a little too much to take in. Also, a keen sceptic may judge his attempt to unite what Jacques Derrida once called the metaphysical core of Western thought with the post-structuralist claim that language constitutes reality to be an overambitious philosophical endeavour. Yet a patient reader may find it hard to deny that there is something deeply convincing about his approach as much of what he says makes a great deal of logical sense.
Searle points out that whether certain institutions and thus institutional facts exist at all depends on what we think of them; whether we are prepared to treat them as having a certain status without which they cannot function and therefore exist. A $5 bill, he notes, cannot function as money solely by virtue of its physical structure – we need to collectively recognise its function. On the other hand, how we think and communicate our thoughts through language depends on “neurobiological processes in the brain, and the neuronal processes themselves are manifestations of and dependent on even more fundamental processes at the molecular, atomic, and subatomic level.” The obvious and yet often neglected connection between these natural and social processes reveal the logical structure of the social reality.
Once we get the gang of this complex structure of institutional reality, the true rewards come: Searle’s ontological picture rather than displaying itself exclusively to a theoretical audience aims to add a new quality to our thinking about the reasons we do things like vote, support charities, join trade unions and watch baseball games, pay taxes and give in to commercial pressures. The aim of this book is not to merely offer a general theory of social ontology but to “apply the theory to special questions, such as the nature of political power, the status of universal human rights and the role of rationality in society.” Making the Social World is graced with a positive charm with which Searle confronts the cynicism of our time by asking us to “imagine what life would be like if we did not have money, schools, property rights and, above all, language.”
