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I'm on Goodreads.com. If you're a reader you might enjoy this site. I just posted some thoughts about Searle's (and here) The Construction of Social Reality.


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 a certain status and power on various 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:

Wolfgang believes that Hesperus is Hesperus

Hesperus is Phosphorus

Therefore

Wolfgang 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. 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 yeilds plenty of further argumentative fruit.

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 greatly 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 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 cached out. Again, Searle seems to be committing himself to more than his toolkit allows for. There also is not a strong 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. So, it seems true on Searle's account to say that there were these entities that once existed, but now are extinct, that had a certain mass and chemical compound, and so forth. One kind of entity fitting such a description is the dinosaur. But it doesn’t seem correct to say that dinosaurs enjoyed agent independent existence. Certainly the entities that once lived were independent of our intentions, but the concept of a dinosaur is one delimited by our interests and values; namely, those that govern the sciences of zoological and paleontological taxonomy. So, as per the constitutive rule: Extinct entity having a certain mass and chemical composition, etc, counts as a dinosaur in context (fill in the blank). This seems to hold for mountains and molecules as well. What counts as a mountain or a molecule is determined by our conceptual use, which is governed by our values and interests. No doubt there are entities out in the world, independent of our intentions, but we cannot conceptualize them as mountains or molecules or dinosaurs apart from our conventional values and interests, which is ultimately agent dependent. One does not look out the window and see mountains, one sees a mass of chemical compounds, whose boundaries are delimited by a concept of being a mountain. For that reason, it is coherent to claim the following:

If there were no concept mountain, then mountains would not exist.

Denying this would put Searle in the uncomfortable position of having to claim that mountains are observer relative, though he could still claim that there is an entity that exists; namely, the one we refer to when using the term "mountain." But this, again, seems too Kantian for him, I suspect, since Searle's toolkit is unable to account for that entity apart from specific concept use, which just seems trivial.

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.