A PREDOMINANTLY LINGUISTIC WORLD VIEW

John R. Searle, in his book The Construction of Social Reality, is trying to answer such questions as ‘How a world of consciousness, intentionality and other mental phenomena can fit into a world “consisting of physical particles and fields of forces”?’(Intro. p.xi) and ‘How social constructs such as money property, marriage, government, football games, law courts and myriads of others can exist in a world of what he calls “brute facts”, i.e. the world of physics and the laws of nature?’

Being a linguist – Searle is well known for his works on speech acts, performative utterances, illocutionary acts and other language-linked behaviour – he tackles these questions through a theory of the “ontology of social and institutional facts” which is based on formal logic and language.

In our social world things exist because we believe them to exist. Through consensus and common acceptance we have constructed a highly complex world that penetrates into all of our human experience, much of it going back through history and pre-history. We live in a world of innumerable institutions with their thousands (or millions?)  of rules, regulations, conventions, documentations and codes. We often talk about the red tape of bureaucracy, but we seem top be unaware of the invisible net that keeps us bound hand and foot in every facet of our public and private lives. I think we like it that way or we wouldn’t tolerate it!

Searle wants to examine the why and the how of an objective reality existing through human agreement, e.g. that the bits and pieces of paper in our purse are money – a medium of exchange, and also the role of language in such social constructs. He calls the object of his quest “the metaphysics of ordinary social relations” (p.3). To use his example, whenever we sit down in a café and order a drink, such a simple act is one of staggering complexity, because it involves a huge invisible ontology of social facts and institutions. The concept of  ‘café’, ‘waiter’, ‘order’, ‘chair’, ‘table’, ‘money’, ‘drink’ cannot be defined in physical/chemical formulae. Each of them is linked to numerous rules and regulations of all kinds, such as trading hours, liquor licences, wages and awards, legal tender, credit cards, foreign exchange rates (if the café is in France), manufacturing standards for furniture, etc. etc.

In fact, we cannot get away from our man-made constructions of social reality; we are caught in them in every turn and with every instance of social interaction. Even dear old Robinson Crusoe couldn’t get away from conventions – he knew exactly what day of the week it was when he met up with his companion.

Rather than use the distinction physical vs mental, Searle talks of ‘intrinsic’ vs ‘observer-relative’ features of the world. He posits that ‘intrinsic’ is always logically prior to ‘observer-relative’, or – in other words – the ontological is always prior to the epistemic. We build up our social and mental constructs from basic facts as they present themselves. By saying this, Searle is making his ‘social reality’ into an ‘observer-relative’ world. This is one of the problems in his arguments which he later tries to justify by writing two chapters on Realism. He does not altogether succeed in proving that there is a ‘real’ world, but that will have to be the subject of another paper.

How is social reality built up from brute facts? There is an apparatus needed with three elements: 1) the assignment of function; 2) collective intentionality; 3) constitutive rules. He later adds a fourth element ‘Background’, i.e. the capacity of human beings to cope with their environment. It is an interesting concept to which Searle has devoted a separate book.

(1)	Assignment of Function
This appears to be something typically human. We always look for the usefulness of things (and people). Whether it is natural phenomena, such as a stream, which can be harnessed for irrigation, a tool or a man-made object, such as a bathtub, we find a function for it. With imagination we even use a shoe for a hammer or a hammer as a paperweight. These are all observer-related, but there are also intrinsic functions, e.g. the function of the heart is to pump blood through the body. Assignment of function gives meaning and value to objects. In the case of money, the coins and bills symbolise a means of exchange and also have a certain prescribed value (gold coins even use to have an intrinsic value).

(2)   Collective Intentionality
Searle is being deliberately vague about his definition of ‘intentionality’. He refers to his work Intentionality, an Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. He is also going into greater detail on this term in his recent book Mind, Language and Society (Guernsey press 1999). I gather that he uses the word in a much wider sense than Husserl, as having the sense of ‘intending’ as well as being a conscious state of beliefs, desires; as well as one that can be individual or collective. To translate it into Husserl’s language, Searle’s ‘intentionality’ is wider than the ‘cogito’, does not originate in transcendental subjectivity, but is possible individually as well as on an inter-subjective level.

His example of collective intentionality is a violinist who states “I am playing my part in our performance of a symphony”, therefore it involves the individual in beliefs and rules directed at doing something collectively. Each member of an orchestra would have a ‘we’-consciousness rather than an ‘I’-consciousness. Collective intentionality cannot be reduced to individual intentionality; it is a different way of thinking, acting, believing, and any social fact/institution/behaviour involves collective intentionality – ‘we’-consciousness.

I cannot agree with this view. Searle has left out the initial step, that of the individual musician grasping and understanding his/her part in the collective endeavour of performing with the orchestra. Similarly, we have to understand our individual roles in society before we can act in conformity with its rules.

(3)   Constitutive Rules
We need to distinguish between ‘brute’ facts and ‘institutional’ facts in matters of culture and society. Brute facts exist independently of human institutions (even that of language, although we use language to describe them), e.g. “the earth is spherical in shape”. An example of an institutional fact is “John Howard is prime minister of Australia”. How are these institutional facts made up? The answer is ‘by means of rules’.

Searle distinguishes between regulative and constitutive rules. An example of the former are traffic rules to regulate traffic in order to prevent chaos on the roads. Rules of games, on the other hand, are usually constitutive, because they make it possible to play the game, e.g. chess. Such rules have the formula:

		X counts as y in context c

To use a simple example: bills issued by the Mint (x) count as money (y) in Australia (c). Although many institutional facts are made up of regulative and constitutive rules, there is more to the construction of institutional reality.

Searle is linking the process of creating institutional facts to language as the essential medium of expressing our thoughts. There can be no institutional facts without brute facts; many of our institutions evolved from primitive beginnings. We used to barter before some smart-aleck invented a non-perishable medium of exchange, such as a piece of metal, a shell, token or whatever that was accepted by the community. If, for some reason we stop believing that a piece of paper can buy goods, bills will cease to have any function or value.

Language figures prominently in institutional facts. Think of the linguistic edifice of religion, the scriptures, rituals, procedures for baptisms, marriages, funerals, codes of conduct. These are all containing language, and so are national constitutions, rules, and by-laws for organizations such as banks, trading firms, clubs, etc. Just visualize the tons of written material, computer files and archival material that are housed in buildings in every small town and big city in this world. A clear illustration of the centrality of language.

Language itself is an institutional fact, which means it is also constitutive of the rules of language use. This raises the paradoxical notion that language requires language. A dive into circularity or infinite regress? Searle solves this problem by stating, “Language does not need language, because it is already language.” (p. 72)

He explains that language is used as a ‘marker’ in constitutive rules, especially where it is necessary to confirm in language that ‘x has the status of y in c’. For instance, we need a written licence to drive a car, a verbal swearing-in formula is needed for the new US President, we need a title deed to prove our lawful right to a piece of property. In these cases language is the vehicle for the expression of the constitutive rules, but it is at the same time a conventional medium of communication with its own systems of rules.

Institutional facts do not exist in isolation. They are related to other institutional facts in systems of social constructs. Marriage as an institution, for instance, interlocks with systems of property ownership, lawful contracts, human relationships, marital duties and responsibilities, child-rearing obligations, etc.

Background
Searle introduces this intriguing thesis as part-explanation of human social phenomena. Briefly, his definition of ‘Background’ (capital B) is: The set of non-intentional and pre-intentional capacities that enable intentional states to function (p. 129).  He argues that ‘capacities’ are abilities, dispositions, tendencies and causal structures in general. He assumes that all intentional states are either actually or potentially conscious, but he confines himself to conscious forms of intentionality. This does not explain the meaning he gives to ‘conscious’ or ‘consciousness’. Is ‘non-intentional’ unconscious or potentially conscious? He does not believe in the unconscious à la Freud. And what does he mean by ‘pre-intentional’? Is day-dreaming pre-intentional?

Into this great vat called ‘Background’ he throws mental processes such as understanding, interpretation, knowledge about the world, abilities for coping with the world, reasoning, imagination, creativity, intuition, memory, intelligence, personal history, in general the whole gamut of human cognition and reason.

We bring all of this to bear in the creating of social institutions; Background is a causal force. In a long exposition of how we cause our creation he mentions that intentionality is not enough to explain all the capabilities assigned to his Background, e.g. intentionality is not self-interpreting. He rejects such notions as ‘connectionism’ (computer-type functioning) or ‘behaviourism’ as being too mechanical. But he proposes a ‘mechanism’ which matches our behaviour to the systems of rules we create. “This mechanism need not itself be a system of rules,” he says, (p. 1460 but there is a diachronic level at which it is compatible with such systems.

One wonders whether these systems of rules are the cause of our social behaviour (we’re born into cultures and societies) or whether our Background is the cause of these systems? In trying to prove a causal link we could get bogged down into a chicken-and-egg dilemma. I wonder also whether, in positing a ‘diachronic’ level (across time, historical) he makes an attempt at suggesting a transcendental level?

								Vera Rado 
Leura, 12/11/00