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Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization
There are few more important philosophers at work today than John Searle, a creative and contentious thinker who has shaped the way we think about mind and language. Now he offers a profound understanding of how we create a social reality--a reality of money, property, governments, marriages, stock markets and cocktail parties.
The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together.
Searle then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.
The paradox he addresses in Making the Social World is that these facts only exist because we think they exist and yet they have an objective existence. Continuing a line of investigation begun in his earlier book The Construction of Social Reality, Searle identifies the precise role of language in the creation of all "institutional facts." His aim is to show how mind, language and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how a single linguistic operation, repeated over and over, is used to create and maintain the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together.
Searle then applies the account to show how it relates to human rationality, the freedom of the will, the nature of political power and the existence of universal human rights. In the course of his explication, he asks whether robots can have institutions, why the threat of force so often lies behind institutions, and he denies that there can be such a thing as a "state of nature" for language-using human beings.
208 pages, Hardcover
First published December 11, 2009
About the author
John Rogers Searle
70 books331 followersJohn 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
July 17, 2014
Unlike Searle's original The Construction of Social Reality, this book jumps around quite a bit and attempts to tie Searle's accounts of social reality to a wide array of domains. I think that's an ambitious and worthwhile thing to do, especially since the social world is supposed to be tied in to so much. The purpose of the book is to take Searle's original theories, refine and correct them, and eventually ensure that they are being appropriately applied where and how he hopes to apply them.
The problem with the book is that this is too ambitious a goal to be accomplished in such a short piece. Searle prides himself on being witty and pithy without losing depth, and often he is. Much of this book has his depth and his wit; it also has his clarity. All of these are good things. The problem is that it doesn't have the cohesion itself, with the excepting element of its being written by and about the ideas of John Searle. I still think that the book is important, and a worthwhile read for those readers who are interested in Searle, but if you're interested in a particular mode of application of Searle's theories, try to find a paper he's written on that dimension, because it's likely that trying to work through this will leave you frustrated. "Why can't he just focus on x for a minute so I can soak this up?" Because he's got places to be and things to do.
Overall, the book is fine. I don't want that one knock on it to sound like I'm venting a ton of frustration. I think that his ideas are important, and incredibly useful for a lot of social scientists who are trying to construct simple philosophical theories within which to work. Searle allows for a good social theory that behaves well with contemporary philosophy of science and mainstream understanding of science. As a philosopher mediating between theorists and scientists, I think Searle is enormously underappreciated (though that's in part due to his own unwillingness to be the conciliatory figure; he doesn't want that role and doesn't have the temperament to allow it to be thrust upon him). But I also don't think this is his strongest piece of writing on the subject.
The problem with the book is that this is too ambitious a goal to be accomplished in such a short piece. Searle prides himself on being witty and pithy without losing depth, and often he is. Much of this book has his depth and his wit; it also has his clarity. All of these are good things. The problem is that it doesn't have the cohesion itself, with the excepting element of its being written by and about the ideas of John Searle. I still think that the book is important, and a worthwhile read for those readers who are interested in Searle, but if you're interested in a particular mode of application of Searle's theories, try to find a paper he's written on that dimension, because it's likely that trying to work through this will leave you frustrated. "Why can't he just focus on x for a minute so I can soak this up?" Because he's got places to be and things to do.
Overall, the book is fine. I don't want that one knock on it to sound like I'm venting a ton of frustration. I think that his ideas are important, and incredibly useful for a lot of social scientists who are trying to construct simple philosophical theories within which to work. Searle allows for a good social theory that behaves well with contemporary philosophy of science and mainstream understanding of science. As a philosopher mediating between theorists and scientists, I think Searle is enormously underappreciated (though that's in part due to his own unwillingness to be the conciliatory figure; he doesn't want that role and doesn't have the temperament to allow it to be thrust upon him). But I also don't think this is his strongest piece of writing on the subject.
September 21, 2018
It's hard for me to review this book with any detachment; I've read too much Searle already, and this book directly addresses too many specific questions that I have had. I suppose I will say: if you are interested in the nature of institutions, in *what* exactly they are and how it is possible for them to do what they do (and what it is they do and how), you really ought to give this book a chance. Along the way are discussions of the mind, language, and power relations, any of which would be helpful on its own but put together adds up to quite a lot more than the sum of its parts.
The book does have significant weaknesses, however, at least from my point of view. While we live in an age that undervalues the wisdom of drawing distinctions, Searle has perhaps gone too far in the other direction. He makes a dizzying array of distinctions, couched in jargon that are either borrowed from the analytic philosophy tradition or are his own. There are definitely times when it seems he is strictly sticking with a distinction that doesn't make a difference; in his discussion of Foucault for example, there were moments when it seemed as though he were merely saying that Foucault used the word "power" in a different sense than Searle does (but ultimately he does discuss Foucault more substantively).
It also has a bit of a last chapter problem, which begins in the last third of the next to last chapter. When he ventures into the specifics of modern democracies, and in his last chapter on human rights, the discussion feels far too much like someone who is cozy with the assumptions of their historical moment and their particular culture. This is in sharp contrast with the rest of the book, which is careful and precise to a fault.
Searle has the (to me) annoying tendency of putting things into formal logic, but he is also very careful to restate it in plain English, and then rephrase both, offering several forms of the logic that are equivalent but more or less readable (depending on who you are I suppose), and different plain English explanations. The result risks seeming repetitive but minimizes that chances that you will be left behind. Which is important, because there are a lot of moving parts in Searle's system.
I am still processing it all but it seems to me that there is a great deal which must be correct, or (more pragmatically), is an extremely useful lens through which to understand the nature of human social reality.
So again I say: if you are interested in understanding language, power relations, status, and institutions, you owe it to yourself to give this remarkably short and remarkably comprehensive book a read.
The book does have significant weaknesses, however, at least from my point of view. While we live in an age that undervalues the wisdom of drawing distinctions, Searle has perhaps gone too far in the other direction. He makes a dizzying array of distinctions, couched in jargon that are either borrowed from the analytic philosophy tradition or are his own. There are definitely times when it seems he is strictly sticking with a distinction that doesn't make a difference; in his discussion of Foucault for example, there were moments when it seemed as though he were merely saying that Foucault used the word "power" in a different sense than Searle does (but ultimately he does discuss Foucault more substantively).
It also has a bit of a last chapter problem, which begins in the last third of the next to last chapter. When he ventures into the specifics of modern democracies, and in his last chapter on human rights, the discussion feels far too much like someone who is cozy with the assumptions of their historical moment and their particular culture. This is in sharp contrast with the rest of the book, which is careful and precise to a fault.
Searle has the (to me) annoying tendency of putting things into formal logic, but he is also very careful to restate it in plain English, and then rephrase both, offering several forms of the logic that are equivalent but more or less readable (depending on who you are I suppose), and different plain English explanations. The result risks seeming repetitive but minimizes that chances that you will be left behind. Which is important, because there are a lot of moving parts in Searle's system.
I am still processing it all but it seems to me that there is a great deal which must be correct, or (more pragmatically), is an extremely useful lens through which to understand the nature of human social reality.
So again I say: if you are interested in understanding language, power relations, status, and institutions, you owe it to yourself to give this remarkably short and remarkably comprehensive book a read.
Read
November 9, 2017I enjoy reading Searle because of the clarity with which he presents his ideas. A case in point is Searle's discussion of power. Searle would have us distinguish between power (as potential) and the exercise of power. Further, he contends that when discussing the exercise of power in human affairs it is important for our understanding to attend to both the intentional content of the exercise of power AND exactly who is doing what to whom. With these definitional constraints in mind Searle follows with a short critique of Foucault's concept of "Bio power" making clear his own dissatisfaction with the Foucault's amorphous conceptualizations.
However, while Searle's theory of the social construction of reality via iterative performences of status function statements I wonder to what extent Searle's own thought has sufficient explanatory power
However, while Searle's theory of the social construction of reality via iterative performences of status function statements I wonder to what extent Searle's own thought has sufficient explanatory power
May 26, 2023
This book is not for everyone, yet, I believe everyone should read it. Aside from this apparent paradox, this text is a sublime exploration of what linguistics is and how it creates the world around us. An amazing work for: philosophers, linguists, sociologists, and psychologists alike.
September 18, 2023
This book came out in 2009. Started it back then but put it down for many years. I picked it up a few weeks ago and began reading from where I stopped.
He is updating his earlier work on the same subject. Collective intentionality, status functions and declarative speech acts are all still there. He does spend the last chapter discussing human rights. He thinks they exist, unlike Bentham and Macintyre. He does not think there are positive rights. But, like Hayek, he thinks that the government can decide to offer positive rights to the people. After all, we are a democracy. He never once mentions limits, as say, might exist in a republic.
2023 Review
We live in a world, composed of things that were here before us, the natural world, and things which we have created – notably, cars in bridges and medicines, etc. These things are all composed of particles in motion, as physics tells us.
The things we have created we might call artifacts. Ayn Rand called them “man-made.” But then there are other things which we have created which are less substantial, in a sense. These include money, marriage, government, property, and Searle argues the most important of all being language.
When I buy or sell things, I exchange the thing for money, little coins, or pieces of paper which represent value. Nowadays, this includes bits in the memory of some server somewhere. Where does value come from? Physics cannot explain it and would say there is no such thing. The same goes for God, minds and consciousness.
Searle’s goal in this book is to explain the social world and institutional facts by using his theory of mind and speech acts to underpin it.
His theory of mind consists of the fact that we are intentional beings and that we have the power to impose functions on objects and people, such as “this is money”, “He is the president”, etc.… No one would be president without the existence of the US and its particular form of government and the processes by which elections are held.
When we cooperate and collectively recognize the status of green pieces of paper as money, those pieces of paper are money. We have all given those green pieces of paper a status function, “these are currency.” When we all agree so-and-so is the President, or sheriff, we have given him deontic power. These powers carry rights, duties, responsibilities, requirements, permissions entitlements and so on.
“It is because status functions carry deontic powers that they provide the glue that holds human civilization together.”
Where do these status functions come from? They are created by a specific type of speech act. In earlier works, he has argued there are five types of speech act: assertions, directives, expressives, commissives and declarations. It is with declarations that we create social reality. All status functions are created with declarations. Declarations “change the world by declaring a state of affairs exists and thereby bringing it into existence.” Such declarations typically take the form of a constitutive rule. As opposed to a regulative rule “Do this”, constitutive rules can be stated as “X counts as Y in context.” So, moving at angles, counts as a legitimate bishop move in chess. We impose ideas on objects in this way.
The social world cannot exist without language. We can imagine animals hunting, seeking shelter and the like, but not discussing the weather or some past event in their lives. Hunter gatherers created language, thus creating the possibility of education, long-term planning, memory, politics, etc....
Mountains, planets and galaxies and the natural world are mind-independent entities; artifacts and social institutions are mind-dependent. Without minds to create them, they would not exist.
Although this book is nearly fifteen years old, there is a sense that he is arguing for a restrained theory of social facts. They do not replace the natural world. They have power but limited powers. They can create massive institutions, but declarations are not magic. They are not like spells or incantations or witchcraft. We can use some physical fact for our own purposes giving it a status that it does not naturally have, think again of paper money here. Our declarations do not turn water into wine or lead into gold.
He is updating his earlier work on the same subject. Collective intentionality, status functions and declarative speech acts are all still there. He does spend the last chapter discussing human rights. He thinks they exist, unlike Bentham and Macintyre. He does not think there are positive rights. But, like Hayek, he thinks that the government can decide to offer positive rights to the people. After all, we are a democracy. He never once mentions limits, as say, might exist in a republic.
2023 Review
We live in a world, composed of things that were here before us, the natural world, and things which we have created – notably, cars in bridges and medicines, etc. These things are all composed of particles in motion, as physics tells us.
The things we have created we might call artifacts. Ayn Rand called them “man-made.” But then there are other things which we have created which are less substantial, in a sense. These include money, marriage, government, property, and Searle argues the most important of all being language.
When I buy or sell things, I exchange the thing for money, little coins, or pieces of paper which represent value. Nowadays, this includes bits in the memory of some server somewhere. Where does value come from? Physics cannot explain it and would say there is no such thing. The same goes for God, minds and consciousness.
Searle’s goal in this book is to explain the social world and institutional facts by using his theory of mind and speech acts to underpin it.
His theory of mind consists of the fact that we are intentional beings and that we have the power to impose functions on objects and people, such as “this is money”, “He is the president”, etc.… No one would be president without the existence of the US and its particular form of government and the processes by which elections are held.
When we cooperate and collectively recognize the status of green pieces of paper as money, those pieces of paper are money. We have all given those green pieces of paper a status function, “these are currency.” When we all agree so-and-so is the President, or sheriff, we have given him deontic power. These powers carry rights, duties, responsibilities, requirements, permissions entitlements and so on.
“It is because status functions carry deontic powers that they provide the glue that holds human civilization together.”
Where do these status functions come from? They are created by a specific type of speech act. In earlier works, he has argued there are five types of speech act: assertions, directives, expressives, commissives and declarations. It is with declarations that we create social reality. All status functions are created with declarations. Declarations “change the world by declaring a state of affairs exists and thereby bringing it into existence.” Such declarations typically take the form of a constitutive rule. As opposed to a regulative rule “Do this”, constitutive rules can be stated as “X counts as Y in context.” So, moving at angles, counts as a legitimate bishop move in chess. We impose ideas on objects in this way.
The social world cannot exist without language. We can imagine animals hunting, seeking shelter and the like, but not discussing the weather or some past event in their lives. Hunter gatherers created language, thus creating the possibility of education, long-term planning, memory, politics, etc....
Mountains, planets and galaxies and the natural world are mind-independent entities; artifacts and social institutions are mind-dependent. Without minds to create them, they would not exist.
Although this book is nearly fifteen years old, there is a sense that he is arguing for a restrained theory of social facts. They do not replace the natural world. They have power but limited powers. They can create massive institutions, but declarations are not magic. They are not like spells or incantations or witchcraft. We can use some physical fact for our own purposes giving it a status that it does not naturally have, think again of paper money here. Our declarations do not turn water into wine or lead into gold.
January 30, 2021
Searle presents his view on the existence of social facts, such as money, marriage, private property, government, and many others. The question is “how does institutions (money, court, corporations, sport events, marriage) exist?”, or in other words “what does it mean to say that these institutions exist?”
I have mixed feelings about the book. There are many good ideas there, but the delivery is disappointing.
Searle introduces a lot of conceptual apparatus that he uses in some places, but then drops almost entirely never to get back to them. It may be frustrating to learn all of this just to use it in 2 or 3 chapters.
Searle also takes critical mental phenomena — obligations, duties, rights, requirements, permissions, promises — as a given, and treats them as one of the foundations of his ontology. But these phenomena aren't properly explained.
Searle repeats many points through the book ad nauseam. Near the end of the book you may think to yourself "I'm reading this for the 200th time now..." This is not conducive to understanding, as he's repeating the same things over and over again.
Another issue I have with the book is that a lot of claims are not sufficiently argued for. Searle seems to merely state additional claims in place of support of his theses. But these additional claims don't really function as a justification for many theses.
I have mixed feelings about the book. There are many good ideas there, but the delivery is disappointing.
Searle introduces a lot of conceptual apparatus that he uses in some places, but then drops almost entirely never to get back to them. It may be frustrating to learn all of this just to use it in 2 or 3 chapters.
Searle also takes critical mental phenomena — obligations, duties, rights, requirements, permissions, promises — as a given, and treats them as one of the foundations of his ontology. But these phenomena aren't properly explained.
Searle repeats many points through the book ad nauseam. Near the end of the book you may think to yourself "I'm reading this for the 200th time now..." This is not conducive to understanding, as he's repeating the same things over and over again.
Another issue I have with the book is that a lot of claims are not sufficiently argued for. Searle seems to merely state additional claims in place of support of his theses. But these additional claims don't really function as a justification for many theses.
April 26, 2014
You will never look at money, police, or picnics in the same way. He admits that his analysis cannot give an account for human consciousness (to be fair, no one can), but Searle does take you from pre-linguistic expression, to representation, to language, then all the way to Status Function Declarations. He does this in such a way that helps the reader understand how we build and maintain massive, invisible social structures. His accounting of individual and collective intentionality will also set some of your paradigms on fire. My only critique: he constrains himself to two arbitrary and unnecessarily limiting conditions of adequacy - I realize those two conditions drive the whole argument, but it still seems to stop him too short.
Read
August 29, 2011bleh. uninteresting. perfect example of philosophers making stuff up
December 6, 2023
Language and human exceptionalism
Linguistic philosophy in the twentieth century brought out the importance of the relationship between language and reality. While logical positivism was concerned about how language represented reality, linguistic philosophy post positivism had a broader understanding of language, its features and its functions. Linguistic philosophy went beyond truth and meaning to analyse speech acts, intentionality, uses of language in contexts or generally speaking pragmatics.
Language was mainly thought as a mirror to reality or a tool for communication in the analytical tradition for the major part of last century. Language as constitutive of reality came to be realised in England only in the second half of the century, an idea familiar to the continental tradition at least since 17th century.
John Searle in his book 'Making the Social World' elaborates on the idea of language as constituting reality, a thesis he had sketched out in his previous work 'The Construction of Social Reality'. According to Searle language is to society, as atom is to physics, chemical bond to chemistry and cell to biology. It is the binding principle of social reality.
He thinks a study of the nature of human existence is more fundamental than the philosophy of science political and social philosophy. By that he means a study of the mode of existence of social entities such as property, money, families, cocktail parties, baseball games and passports. And he thinks it is philosophy and not empirical sciences that is more suited to study social ontology as society has a logical (conceptual, propositional) structure that requires logical analysis.
The glue to society is status functions that humans give to objects and persons. When a row of stones is seen as a boundary it is given a status by virtue of its function. It presupposes collective intentionality or acceptance that carries deontic powers like the obligation to respect it (the boundary) and not cross it. In agreeing to see it as a boundary a social object is created out of a cluster of physical objects.
Similarly, baseball (game), marriage (relationship) and cocktail party (activity) are status functions that are created, not out of physical objects, but from constitutive rules.
Searle points out that the higher species before humans might have known cooperative behaviour and had a sense of collective intentionality when collaborating with each other, but what makes collective intentionality unique in the human case is that it requires adherence to rules, obligation to respect the other and right to make or contest claims, all deontic powers that requires language of a higher order. And this language cannot be separated from the reality that is created in it.
As an example, he says, to say that the diameter of the earth is 12756 km is to state a brute fact. It is so whether we say it or not. Whereas Obama was the President of America is a linguistic fact, meaning it is true only in so far as the Americans have recognised it collectively through an election system with rules that they accept as valid to elect a president. That Obama was the president is an institutional fact because it exists within the system of constitutional rules.
The moment collective recognition is withdrawn the social reality collapses. As an example Searle cites the collapse of Soviet Russia in 1989 when Gorbachev lost confidence in the prevailing system.
Ontologically, for a social reality to exist three things are needed: human beings with cognitive capacities, collective intentionality with the capacity to impose status functions and language capable of speech acts.
The centrality of language to society is evident in the fact that one can imagine a society with language but without property, money, marriage etc, but can't imagine a society with property, marriage, money etc but without a language. That is why Searle thinks social contract theorists are wrong about how society was formed.
Searle believes the higher order language that humans have is what creates social reality and not thinking or rationality as philosophers thought. Evolutionary biology says hominids before humans could think and be rational in an instrumental manner. It is only humans with higher order language that has deontic powers with capacities like commitment, promising, duty etc exhibit the capacity to exercise their freedom.
Linguistic philosophy in the twentieth century brought out the importance of the relationship between language and reality. While logical positivism was concerned about how language represented reality, linguistic philosophy post positivism had a broader understanding of language, its features and its functions. Linguistic philosophy went beyond truth and meaning to analyse speech acts, intentionality, uses of language in contexts or generally speaking pragmatics.
Language was mainly thought as a mirror to reality or a tool for communication in the analytical tradition for the major part of last century. Language as constitutive of reality came to be realised in England only in the second half of the century, an idea familiar to the continental tradition at least since 17th century.
John Searle in his book 'Making the Social World' elaborates on the idea of language as constituting reality, a thesis he had sketched out in his previous work 'The Construction of Social Reality'. According to Searle language is to society, as atom is to physics, chemical bond to chemistry and cell to biology. It is the binding principle of social reality.
He thinks a study of the nature of human existence is more fundamental than the philosophy of science political and social philosophy. By that he means a study of the mode of existence of social entities such as property, money, families, cocktail parties, baseball games and passports. And he thinks it is philosophy and not empirical sciences that is more suited to study social ontology as society has a logical (conceptual, propositional) structure that requires logical analysis.
The glue to society is status functions that humans give to objects and persons. When a row of stones is seen as a boundary it is given a status by virtue of its function. It presupposes collective intentionality or acceptance that carries deontic powers like the obligation to respect it (the boundary) and not cross it. In agreeing to see it as a boundary a social object is created out of a cluster of physical objects.
Similarly, baseball (game), marriage (relationship) and cocktail party (activity) are status functions that are created, not out of physical objects, but from constitutive rules.
Searle points out that the higher species before humans might have known cooperative behaviour and had a sense of collective intentionality when collaborating with each other, but what makes collective intentionality unique in the human case is that it requires adherence to rules, obligation to respect the other and right to make or contest claims, all deontic powers that requires language of a higher order. And this language cannot be separated from the reality that is created in it.
As an example, he says, to say that the diameter of the earth is 12756 km is to state a brute fact. It is so whether we say it or not. Whereas Obama was the President of America is a linguistic fact, meaning it is true only in so far as the Americans have recognised it collectively through an election system with rules that they accept as valid to elect a president. That Obama was the president is an institutional fact because it exists within the system of constitutional rules.
The moment collective recognition is withdrawn the social reality collapses. As an example Searle cites the collapse of Soviet Russia in 1989 when Gorbachev lost confidence in the prevailing system.
Ontologically, for a social reality to exist three things are needed: human beings with cognitive capacities, collective intentionality with the capacity to impose status functions and language capable of speech acts.
The centrality of language to society is evident in the fact that one can imagine a society with language but without property, money, marriage etc, but can't imagine a society with property, marriage, money etc but without a language. That is why Searle thinks social contract theorists are wrong about how society was formed.
Searle believes the higher order language that humans have is what creates social reality and not thinking or rationality as philosophers thought. Evolutionary biology says hominids before humans could think and be rational in an instrumental manner. It is only humans with higher order language that has deontic powers with capacities like commitment, promising, duty etc exhibit the capacity to exercise their freedom.
January 13, 2022
This book builds on and refines the argument that Searle started in The Construction of Social Reality. In many places, Making the Social World reads as if Searle is responding to criticism of his earlier work toward what he sees as a "Philosophy of Society," and there is some of that. One of the implicit criticisms is about how individuals organize themselves into "society" that is mediated by institutional facts, which are created through the formulation "X counts as Y in C," where X is the named thing, Y is the function or power given to X, and C is the condition or circumstance in which X has the capacity or ability given by Y.
Despite the detailed argument and logic-based articulation of social construction, I'm left with the relatively simple-sounding observation that social reality exists … because we say that it does. Of course, if social reality really were as tenuous as this statement makes it seem, then reality would be written and rewritten continuously. But it is, just at different speeds and to different degrees.
So how can a social reality that flows and changes at different rates be made of the same "speech" stuff? Searle starts his argument with speech acts or the idea that we do things with words -- things like making claims (assertives), commanding people to do things (directives), obligating ourselves to do other things (commissives), expressing our inner states (expressives) and declaring things to exist (declaratives). It is this last category of speech acts, the declaratives, through which individuals act on their individual intentions and assign meaning to them that then acts on and shapes the world (e.g., I intend to move my arm. I assign the function of voting to my arm movement. I vote by moving my arm. My vote brings about the passage of another declaration that orders the world further by combining with other speech acts). We act on our own intentions but also use speech acts to build up and act on collective intentions. As these effects become routine and recognized as serving some desirable end, we can assign those declarative functions to gestures, technologies, people, and objects under certain conditions (i.e., the formulation "X counts as Y in C"). They become institutional facts or "standing speech acts" that we no longer have to declare, assert, promise, or express but instead enact through the various actors or institutions that stand in for those acts: offices, roles, positions, states, rights, etc. The more that we act through speech and invoke standing speech acts in the guise of institutional facts, the richer and more interconnected the "network" of speech acts becomes and the more real it seems like a condition of existence and reality.
At least that's how I read it.
Despite the detailed argument and logic-based articulation of social construction, I'm left with the relatively simple-sounding observation that social reality exists … because we say that it does. Of course, if social reality really were as tenuous as this statement makes it seem, then reality would be written and rewritten continuously. But it is, just at different speeds and to different degrees.
So how can a social reality that flows and changes at different rates be made of the same "speech" stuff? Searle starts his argument with speech acts or the idea that we do things with words -- things like making claims (assertives), commanding people to do things (directives), obligating ourselves to do other things (commissives), expressing our inner states (expressives) and declaring things to exist (declaratives). It is this last category of speech acts, the declaratives, through which individuals act on their individual intentions and assign meaning to them that then acts on and shapes the world (e.g., I intend to move my arm. I assign the function of voting to my arm movement. I vote by moving my arm. My vote brings about the passage of another declaration that orders the world further by combining with other speech acts). We act on our own intentions but also use speech acts to build up and act on collective intentions. As these effects become routine and recognized as serving some desirable end, we can assign those declarative functions to gestures, technologies, people, and objects under certain conditions (i.e., the formulation "X counts as Y in C"). They become institutional facts or "standing speech acts" that we no longer have to declare, assert, promise, or express but instead enact through the various actors or institutions that stand in for those acts: offices, roles, positions, states, rights, etc. The more that we act through speech and invoke standing speech acts in the guise of institutional facts, the richer and more interconnected the "network" of speech acts becomes and the more real it seems like a condition of existence and reality.
At least that's how I read it.
March 24, 2018
As always, Searle's writing was extremely clear and engaging. I've never read anything in this area before, and I found his explication of how human institutions are created (through collective intentionality, or more simply, collective recognition) quiet plausible. He contends that institutions are basically sets of power relations that are generally recognised, and I find this similarly plausible. The main point of disagreement that I found between his account and what I find plausible is that he contends that the existence of institutions provides desire-independent reason for action. I would be happy to contend that the existence of institutions causes us to THINK that there are desire-independent reasons for action, which correspond to the demands of institutions, but I am sceptical that they ACTUALLY provide reasons for action. This scepticism might be due to my prior normative commitments, but it's worth noting.
November 27, 2021
This is one of those extremely academic writing that took me half a year to finish at barely 10-20 pages at a time.
“The fact that there is a ceteris paribus condition in the application of all these deontic powers does not show that when we make explicit the other-things-being-equal considerations we are changing the constitutive rules that give rise to the deontic powers in the first place” < so this …
I’m sure people who want to learn ALL the ins and outs of the ontology of the Social Sciences will want to read it. Otherwise … I got other recommendations for you.
“The fact that there is a ceteris paribus condition in the application of all these deontic powers does not show that when we make explicit the other-things-being-equal considerations we are changing the constitutive rules that give rise to the deontic powers in the first place” < so this …
I’m sure people who want to learn ALL the ins and outs of the ontology of the Social Sciences will want to read it. Otherwise … I got other recommendations for you.
December 29, 2018
So fundamental for social science is the ontology. Interesting model.
June 29, 2016
I'm mainly on board with this short book, with some minor quibbles about the discussion on human rights. John Searle in Making the Social World tries to give an account as to how human beings create a social world out all, how the human social world is an extension of the natural world. The key component is the human faculty for language, according to Searle. Language allows us to think about the world in more complex ways, to apply new concepts to the world that did not exist.
This view might seem strange but just think for a moment about complicated concepts that we deal with everyday, the idea of which you could not have without language. Take the concept of a financial crisis, for example. A financial crisis can occur for a whole host of reasons. In the United States, there was almost complete economic collapse out of the subprime housing mortgage loans defaulted. These complicated kinds of activities are ways in which we are thinking about the world in ways that any other animal could not symbolically represent them. Financial crisis, subprime mortgage, loan default, and so on are all concepts we have imposed upon the world for our own interests and purposes. Complicated social reality as a result of the human capacity for language is one of the basic conclusions, and you can read more in the book to see what Searle means if you don't quite understand my explanation.
I would like to address one interesting discussion in the book, one that I am trying to come to terms with and which for all I know may be true, and that is how human rights are created. First, to try to answer the question as to whether or not human rights are real or subjective might not get us very far, according to Searle, unless we make some basic distinctions. In a sense, human rights are both real and a product of the human mind, but this needs to be properly understood. Human rights are a product of the human mind in that we impose them onto social relations but once they have been so imposed as a construction of the mind they are as real as anything else. Take, for instance, freedom from harm. Freedom from harm is an imposition onto social relations to the extent that we all recognize that we have certain obligations and responsibilities not to harm others, and by way of the imposition of this human right, we all hope that the right will receive widespread recognition since it is more as less generalizable and acceptable to others.
Searle's account of rights here still seems too thin to me. I don't doubt his rough claim that human beings impose rights upon the world. As I said, that may be true. But it seems as though he needs a richer explanation about what goes into the construction of such rights. Another quibble is that Searle rules out positive rights in addition to negative rights. This is because, he argues, that rights imply responsibilities and obligations that everyone else has in view of a single individual. But if we are to take positive rights seriously, like the right of a child to have an education, this means that it is everybody else's responsibility that that child has an education. But Searle thinks that it is absurd for everyone to be so obligated for someone else to have such a right, and so should not be in any account of rights. I find this unconvincing. Searle is right, I think, that positive rights do put a large burden on everyone else to help provide that right, but that doesn't rule the right out out of hand. It may just be the case that we have such everyday burdens in life. I'm willing to accept that as a consequence.
This view might seem strange but just think for a moment about complicated concepts that we deal with everyday, the idea of which you could not have without language. Take the concept of a financial crisis, for example. A financial crisis can occur for a whole host of reasons. In the United States, there was almost complete economic collapse out of the subprime housing mortgage loans defaulted. These complicated kinds of activities are ways in which we are thinking about the world in ways that any other animal could not symbolically represent them. Financial crisis, subprime mortgage, loan default, and so on are all concepts we have imposed upon the world for our own interests and purposes. Complicated social reality as a result of the human capacity for language is one of the basic conclusions, and you can read more in the book to see what Searle means if you don't quite understand my explanation.
I would like to address one interesting discussion in the book, one that I am trying to come to terms with and which for all I know may be true, and that is how human rights are created. First, to try to answer the question as to whether or not human rights are real or subjective might not get us very far, according to Searle, unless we make some basic distinctions. In a sense, human rights are both real and a product of the human mind, but this needs to be properly understood. Human rights are a product of the human mind in that we impose them onto social relations but once they have been so imposed as a construction of the mind they are as real as anything else. Take, for instance, freedom from harm. Freedom from harm is an imposition onto social relations to the extent that we all recognize that we have certain obligations and responsibilities not to harm others, and by way of the imposition of this human right, we all hope that the right will receive widespread recognition since it is more as less generalizable and acceptable to others.
Searle's account of rights here still seems too thin to me. I don't doubt his rough claim that human beings impose rights upon the world. As I said, that may be true. But it seems as though he needs a richer explanation about what goes into the construction of such rights. Another quibble is that Searle rules out positive rights in addition to negative rights. This is because, he argues, that rights imply responsibilities and obligations that everyone else has in view of a single individual. But if we are to take positive rights seriously, like the right of a child to have an education, this means that it is everybody else's responsibility that that child has an education. But Searle thinks that it is absurd for everyone to be so obligated for someone else to have such a right, and so should not be in any account of rights. I find this unconvincing. Searle is right, I think, that positive rights do put a large burden on everyone else to help provide that right, but that doesn't rule the right out out of hand. It may just be the case that we have such everyday burdens in life. I'm willing to accept that as a consequence.
May 27, 2016
Searle's Big Idea: "Human society is largely constitued by distinctive institutional structures that create and distribute deontic power relationships by assigning status functions, and with those status functions differing social roles in society" (200). I can actually state his big idea a lot better than that, and that statement also completely leaves out the linguistic aspect of his big idea. He argues that human society is distinct from anything else in nature because it is created by language, specifically by one particular "logico-linguistic operation": status function declarations (SFDs). In other words, whether implicit or explicit, human society is structured by statements that assign value or role to people or objects. The extent to which those values and roles are collectively recognized is the extent to which human society is successful and this "massive fantasy" can be maintained (201). The word "fantasy" is not polemic; it simply points out that human society (e.g., paper currency, political offices, social authority) is qualitatively different from natural phenomena.
Searle's Big Step for Social Sciences: Whether or not Searle is right about human society being structured and maintained by linguistic operations (specifically SFDs), he has offered a clear, understandable explanation of the centrality of language to human existence. With the linguistic turn in philosophy (and subsequently literary studies) in the 20th century, it has become commonplace to insist on humans as linguistic beings, but that truism has seldom been thoroughly explained.
Searle's Big Problem: Searle's account clearly distinguishes the social sciences from the natural sciences (indeed, the function of language in structuring human society is what distinguishes them at a foundational level), but his account remains purely naturalistic. He states his only presuppositions as being the natural world, and that any account of social ontology must assume the basic facts of the natural sciences. That does not go far enough. The natural sciences are limited, and philosophers must account for epistemology of the natural sciences, and they must also account for the supernatural. Within a purely naturalistic account, Searle cannot give epistemological or metaphysical bases for his argument. He is explicitly not concerned with doing so, and I do not thus fault his account in that regard. Yet, his final chapter, "Human Rights," attempts to explain how universal human rights can exist within a purely naturalistic account that sees social ontology as based on linguistic functions. He completely fails. His critique of a theological basis for human rights is abysmal ("critique" is a far too elegant word for it), and he does not prove that foundational or universal human rights exist outside of the "massive fantasy" of social ontology, even though that seems to be what he thinks he proves.
Conclusion: Searle's brilliantly lucid book is great as far as it goes. Restricting social ontology or any aspect of social science to a naturalistic account is, of course, unnecessarily restrictive.
Searle's Big Step for Social Sciences: Whether or not Searle is right about human society being structured and maintained by linguistic operations (specifically SFDs), he has offered a clear, understandable explanation of the centrality of language to human existence. With the linguistic turn in philosophy (and subsequently literary studies) in the 20th century, it has become commonplace to insist on humans as linguistic beings, but that truism has seldom been thoroughly explained.
Searle's Big Problem: Searle's account clearly distinguishes the social sciences from the natural sciences (indeed, the function of language in structuring human society is what distinguishes them at a foundational level), but his account remains purely naturalistic. He states his only presuppositions as being the natural world, and that any account of social ontology must assume the basic facts of the natural sciences. That does not go far enough. The natural sciences are limited, and philosophers must account for epistemology of the natural sciences, and they must also account for the supernatural. Within a purely naturalistic account, Searle cannot give epistemological or metaphysical bases for his argument. He is explicitly not concerned with doing so, and I do not thus fault his account in that regard. Yet, his final chapter, "Human Rights," attempts to explain how universal human rights can exist within a purely naturalistic account that sees social ontology as based on linguistic functions. He completely fails. His critique of a theological basis for human rights is abysmal ("critique" is a far too elegant word for it), and he does not prove that foundational or universal human rights exist outside of the "massive fantasy" of social ontology, even though that seems to be what he thinks he proves.
Conclusion: Searle's brilliantly lucid book is great as far as it goes. Restricting social ontology or any aspect of social science to a naturalistic account is, of course, unnecessarily restrictive.
August 29, 2015
Searle hopes to provide a social ontology, building on his theory of speech acts and intentionality, to account for our social world and how things have a hold on us. Written as if he dictated the entire thing over a lunch time conversation, the book is easy to approach but often unconvincing. Perhaps adding another hundred pages of bulk and really nutting everything out would have helped, but to be honest, I think the problem is with the ideas still. His ideas around further splitting the subjective/objective along another axis of ontological and epistemological is quite helpful and interesting, as are some parts of his theory of speech acts, but the entire duration of the book seems to be heading towards the account of power that he is promising – an account which is ultimately disappointing.
After dedicating two or three pages to discussing Foucault's work (they were buddies back in the day, apparently), without much rigour, and with many simplifications and distortions, Searle then briskly moves on stating that he need not actually discuss or compare ideas with Foucault, or analyse his work in depth, because... well because he doesn't want to. And that's that! From there, a very limited and disappointing account of power is put forward, which begs more questions than it want to answer.
It is a worthy project, but I think Searle feels that he can dodge certain questions about power or social categories etc. because he is doing the philosophical part of the project, and not the sociological part or whatever. I fear that this attitude has the double effect of elevating philosophy while also making it look silly.
After dedicating two or three pages to discussing Foucault's work (they were buddies back in the day, apparently), without much rigour, and with many simplifications and distortions, Searle then briskly moves on stating that he need not actually discuss or compare ideas with Foucault, or analyse his work in depth, because... well because he doesn't want to. And that's that! From there, a very limited and disappointing account of power is put forward, which begs more questions than it want to answer.
It is a worthy project, but I think Searle feels that he can dodge certain questions about power or social categories etc. because he is doing the philosophical part of the project, and not the sociological part or whatever. I fear that this attitude has the double effect of elevating philosophy while also making it look silly.
December 6, 2015
Searle amends late Wittgenstein's project (which I have troubles fully seeing as a part of the Enlightenment tradition) with a number of Kantian considerations. The paradoxicality of this task, however, ends up in a number of quite interesting discussions, and in fact, the stress on the Kantian assault on teleology is something social scientists should rather keep in mind (but oh my, isn't philosophy 200 years behind that... I mean, if social sciences need to be reminded about issues in philosophy that have been settled 200 years ago, there's something deeply pathetic about the whole tradition). However, it still does not really tempt me to read more of Searle's works to figure out how exactly is he resolving some of the more problematic incompatibilities of the above-mentioned systems. On this account, he's clear, as he always stresses, but such clarity doesn't make for transparency, instead, rather avoids the difficulties, unfortunately. Despite the discussion of human rights feels fairly incomplete (which is a shame, because it makes a few interesting points), Searle makes some of this rather clear and comprehensible, which, because I also like the van Eyck cover, makes me right now feel like generously adding a third star.
May 13, 2015
If you've read Searle's Social Construction of Reality, then a lot of this may seem repetitive. This work is a continuation of the theory presented in that book, but I don't think it's necessary to have read that one to understand this work. He spends a sizable amount of space going over the basics of his theory, but he also clarifies some things and addresses a few concerns that have arisen since the 15 or so years since the initial work.
In general, this work is a strong continuation of his thinking, but it begins to unravel when he gets to the last chapter on human rights. I think his near dismissal of positive human rights is misplaced, and he also provides no argument for his claim that utilitarian considerations that override deontic rights do not imply that the right was utilitarian in the first place; he just asserts it as true (admittedly, this latter quip is pretty minor).
Still, the theory itself carries quite a bit of weight and is something worth giving attention to.
In general, this work is a strong continuation of his thinking, but it begins to unravel when he gets to the last chapter on human rights. I think his near dismissal of positive human rights is misplaced, and he also provides no argument for his claim that utilitarian considerations that override deontic rights do not imply that the right was utilitarian in the first place; he just asserts it as true (admittedly, this latter quip is pretty minor).
Still, the theory itself carries quite a bit of weight and is something worth giving attention to.
May 16, 2015
Every few sentences, it seems, the accessibility of the style flits from "regular academic" to quasi-mathematical logic abdominal crunches and back again. Despite this barrier, it was clear to me that something important was being discussed, so someday I shall give it a second read to absorb more of it. This is about how societies are built on shared language systems and how they come to a vast number of agreed-upon concepts such as promises and contracts, licenses and passports, group identities, money, etc. which is rather astonishing to contemplate when one considers that these things do not physically exist. (They may be given some physical representation, but those physical objects are mere symbols of the real meaning).
May 24, 2010
Searle makes the claim that certain states of intentionality, brought about only through language, form the framework of our social world. Searle explains (very logically and precisely) how humans go about producing objective facts that are not epistemically objective, such as "the earth is round," but ontologically objective facts, such as "Barrack Obama is President of the United States," which only exists because of our established social world. If you're interested in how states of intentionality relate to the construction of the social world, read it!
March 16, 2012
This book is not for the faint-hearted or the philosophy novice. It is a very hard book to read, you will need a lot of concentration and a background in basic philosophical notions to fully appreciate it. However, it is fully worth the perseverance required because it will inform your understanding of how and why institutions (such as money, government and marriage) exist in the human world. A great, but difficult read.
June 9, 2015
Currently reading this (started during holidays). I'd read Searle's "Construction of Social Reality" when it came out in the mid 90s (I was studying philosophy at the time) and found it very appealing.
So far this is a *very* interesting update of his ideas. I'll write a better review when I've finished it.
So far this is a *very* interesting update of his ideas. I'll write a better review when I've finished it.
April 23, 2014
Because my review of this book is too extensive for Goodreads to publish in it's "review" section, I have posted it on my own blog, www.ThisExplainsMore.com
My review of Searle's Making the Social World can be found here:
http://www.thisexplainsmore.com/2014/...
My review of Searle's Making the Social World can be found here:
http://www.thisexplainsmore.com/2014/...
December 15, 2017
Reading this was like being stuck in the classroom in "The Paper Chase" for as long as Bill Murray was stuck in Punxsutawney in "Groundhog Day".
November 23, 2013
The chapter on universal human rights was a nice surprise.
September 5, 2014
Without question one of the most interesting, and therefore best, works of philosophy I have ever read.
February 15, 2017
definitely worth reading. his style is a bit boring. but he moves through topics quickly and gives great insight to myriad topics
Read
January 10, 2016Ch.1
May 5, 2019
By now we are all familiar with the brilliant slogan mocking the “reality based community” that Ron Suskind attributed to a White House aide in 2004 (usually thought to be Karl Rove but, if so, then Rover was almost certainly just a proxy for the ultimate source of the quote):
“That's not the way the world really works anymore,” ... “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do”
This quote came to define the neocon project in many people’s minds (briefly, the project was to create a world-wide clash of civilizations that would overwhelm democratic societies and replace them with a new kind of feudalism based on a never-ending series of crises that create opportunities for capitalist exploitation). Those who took “reality” to mean physical reality, simply scoffed at the idea; history’s actors can no more change the law of conservation of energy than they can jump over the moon. Yet still, these same actors have seemed to get away with murder, leaving hundreds of thousands of dead bodies in the wake of their bizarre, but always profitable, schemes. How on earth do they do it?
The trick is the conflation of socially created reality with physical reality. Although it’s difficult to believe that anyone could ever mix the two up, our lives are so thoroughly dependent on, and embedded within, the technological fabric of social reality that we just don’t have the time, or even a reason, to reflect on the differences. For, as John Searle reminds us in “Making The Social World”, social reality is epistemically objective, like physical reality, though it is ontologically subjective. Searle’s book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the foundations of social reality, how it is created and maintained and how it can be confused with physical reality. The book is concise and a model of clarity.
The magic that allows humans to create the structures and institutions of social reality, things like governments, nation states, money, and ski clubs, is language. Through language we can state our beliefs with assertive statements, fulfill our desires with directed commands or requests, state our intentions with promises, express our emotions, or make declarations. It is this last ability that has no analog in pre-linguistic communication. A declaration both states how the world is and brings that state into being at the same time.
Declarations work by assigning status functions to people or objects. Once those people or objects have a certain status, then they are able to perform the functions suited to that status (a ten dollar bill does not function as money because it is a piece of paper with fancy printing; it functions as money because it has been declared to have that status. You can read it right on the bill, “This note is legal tender…”). Status functions have meaning because humans are able to have collective intentionality; that is they are able to cooperate in actions, beliefs, desires, and intentions, and they are able to collectively recognize facts as being objectively true. Collective intentionality allows status functions to have “deontic powers”. These are powers that assign rights, duties, obligations, permissions, etc. to individual humans giving them reasons for acting in a desire-independent manner. This is what allows the entire corpus of constitutive rules and institutional facts that make up social reality to be created.
That last paragraph will make perfect sense after reading the book, but it is probably pointless to try to summarize the general theory that Searle lays out as he presents it so clearly and concisely that one would be tempted to follow him completely and that would just be a re-telling of the book.
There are two instances where I think he gets things wrong, or perhaps his arguments rely on some context that is taken for granted. The first is in his discussion of collective intentionality, and more specifically, cooperative acts between humans. Searle appears to treat cooperation as a point action, something that happens in an infinitesimally small time interval. His treatment rests on the premise that as long as the co-operators assume that the other person, or people, are doing their part, that cooperation will occur. Though this might be true for the prior intention to cooperate, the action itself requires a feedback loop with measurement and adjustment between the co-operators. If the time lag between measurement and adjustment becomes too large, then cooperation fails. Searle’s own example of a duet between a piano and violin illustrates this perfectly (unless you have never played a duet, then you might think as Searle does…). The other instance where he goes off the rails is in his discussion of free will and the necessity of the causal gap between the reasons for our decisions and actions and the actual decisions and actions. Searle argues that a robot programmed with language, beliefs, inclinations, representations of actions and consequences, including counterfactuals, etc. can not meaningfully make promises without a sense of the gap. He suggests that if the robot is going to carry through with the promise, there is no sense in making the promise in the first place. This is obvious nonsense and one must wonder why Searle has presented such a mistaken view of computation. The robot may function deterministically, but neither it, nor any other non-omniscient being knows the future behaviour of the robot. Interaction with the environment makes the robot’s future behaviour unknowable. The robot makes the promise to show that it intends to keep the promise, not knowing if circumstances will permit it. No woolly-headed notions of consciousness are needed to justify making a promise. Here, I think Searle has simply assumed the reader is familiar with a vast literature and is unable to present his argument in such a limited manner. As written, it seems quite absurd, and as it is unnecessary for the general theory of social reality, it can be safely ignored.
We live in a world where we are bathed in the structures and institutions of socially-constructed reality. Our dependence on technology, indeed our love of technology, has made all of us willing pawns in the game of belief modification. So much so that children are dying from diseases that are easily prevented with vaccines or antibiotics. The methods of science that have given us a way to discover reliable knowledge about the physical world are now under attack by those whose greed for social power knows no limits. We are facing an existential threat due to anthropogenic climate change and the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet have formed a suicide cult and are sparing no expense on recruiting the world’s population to join them in their death orgies. If you want to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie this race to the end-times, how disaster capitalism and surveillance capitalism get us to actively work against our own interests, then “Making The Social World” is the place to start. A magnificent achievement.
“That's not the way the world really works anymore,” ... “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do”
This quote came to define the neocon project in many people’s minds (briefly, the project was to create a world-wide clash of civilizations that would overwhelm democratic societies and replace them with a new kind of feudalism based on a never-ending series of crises that create opportunities for capitalist exploitation). Those who took “reality” to mean physical reality, simply scoffed at the idea; history’s actors can no more change the law of conservation of energy than they can jump over the moon. Yet still, these same actors have seemed to get away with murder, leaving hundreds of thousands of dead bodies in the wake of their bizarre, but always profitable, schemes. How on earth do they do it?
The trick is the conflation of socially created reality with physical reality. Although it’s difficult to believe that anyone could ever mix the two up, our lives are so thoroughly dependent on, and embedded within, the technological fabric of social reality that we just don’t have the time, or even a reason, to reflect on the differences. For, as John Searle reminds us in “Making The Social World”, social reality is epistemically objective, like physical reality, though it is ontologically subjective. Searle’s book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the foundations of social reality, how it is created and maintained and how it can be confused with physical reality. The book is concise and a model of clarity.
The magic that allows humans to create the structures and institutions of social reality, things like governments, nation states, money, and ski clubs, is language. Through language we can state our beliefs with assertive statements, fulfill our desires with directed commands or requests, state our intentions with promises, express our emotions, or make declarations. It is this last ability that has no analog in pre-linguistic communication. A declaration both states how the world is and brings that state into being at the same time.
Declarations work by assigning status functions to people or objects. Once those people or objects have a certain status, then they are able to perform the functions suited to that status (a ten dollar bill does not function as money because it is a piece of paper with fancy printing; it functions as money because it has been declared to have that status. You can read it right on the bill, “This note is legal tender…”). Status functions have meaning because humans are able to have collective intentionality; that is they are able to cooperate in actions, beliefs, desires, and intentions, and they are able to collectively recognize facts as being objectively true. Collective intentionality allows status functions to have “deontic powers”. These are powers that assign rights, duties, obligations, permissions, etc. to individual humans giving them reasons for acting in a desire-independent manner. This is what allows the entire corpus of constitutive rules and institutional facts that make up social reality to be created.
That last paragraph will make perfect sense after reading the book, but it is probably pointless to try to summarize the general theory that Searle lays out as he presents it so clearly and concisely that one would be tempted to follow him completely and that would just be a re-telling of the book.
There are two instances where I think he gets things wrong, or perhaps his arguments rely on some context that is taken for granted. The first is in his discussion of collective intentionality, and more specifically, cooperative acts between humans. Searle appears to treat cooperation as a point action, something that happens in an infinitesimally small time interval. His treatment rests on the premise that as long as the co-operators assume that the other person, or people, are doing their part, that cooperation will occur. Though this might be true for the prior intention to cooperate, the action itself requires a feedback loop with measurement and adjustment between the co-operators. If the time lag between measurement and adjustment becomes too large, then cooperation fails. Searle’s own example of a duet between a piano and violin illustrates this perfectly (unless you have never played a duet, then you might think as Searle does…). The other instance where he goes off the rails is in his discussion of free will and the necessity of the causal gap between the reasons for our decisions and actions and the actual decisions and actions. Searle argues that a robot programmed with language, beliefs, inclinations, representations of actions and consequences, including counterfactuals, etc. can not meaningfully make promises without a sense of the gap. He suggests that if the robot is going to carry through with the promise, there is no sense in making the promise in the first place. This is obvious nonsense and one must wonder why Searle has presented such a mistaken view of computation. The robot may function deterministically, but neither it, nor any other non-omniscient being knows the future behaviour of the robot. Interaction with the environment makes the robot’s future behaviour unknowable. The robot makes the promise to show that it intends to keep the promise, not knowing if circumstances will permit it. No woolly-headed notions of consciousness are needed to justify making a promise. Here, I think Searle has simply assumed the reader is familiar with a vast literature and is unable to present his argument in such a limited manner. As written, it seems quite absurd, and as it is unnecessary for the general theory of social reality, it can be safely ignored.
We live in a world where we are bathed in the structures and institutions of socially-constructed reality. Our dependence on technology, indeed our love of technology, has made all of us willing pawns in the game of belief modification. So much so that children are dying from diseases that are easily prevented with vaccines or antibiotics. The methods of science that have given us a way to discover reliable knowledge about the physical world are now under attack by those whose greed for social power knows no limits. We are facing an existential threat due to anthropogenic climate change and the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet have formed a suicide cult and are sparing no expense on recruiting the world’s population to join them in their death orgies. If you want to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie this race to the end-times, how disaster capitalism and surveillance capitalism get us to actively work against our own interests, then “Making The Social World” is the place to start. A magnificent achievement.
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