Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: Essays on John Searle's Social Ontology

224 Pages·2007·2.18 MB·English

by  Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.)

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INTENTIONAL ACTS AND INSTITUTIONAL FACTS
ESSAYS ON JOHN SEARLE’S SOCIAL ONTOLOGY
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THEORY AND DECISION LIBRARY
General Editor: Julian Nida-Rümelin (Munich)
Series A:Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences
Series B:Mathematical and Statistical Methods
Series C:Game Theory,Mathematical Programming and Operations Research
SERIES A:PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY
OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
VOLUME 41
Assistant Editor: Thomas Schmidt (Göttingen)
Editorial Board:Raymond Boudon (Paris),Mario Bunge (Montréal),Isaac Levi (New York),
Richard V.Mattessich (Vancouver),Bertrand Munier (Cachan),Amartya K.Sen (Cambridge),
Brian Skyrms (Irvine),Wolfgang Spohn (Konstanz)
Scope: This series deals with the foundations, the general methodology and the criteria,
goals and purpose ofthe social sciences.The emphasis in the Series A will be on well-argued,
thoroughly analytical rather than advanced mathematical treatments. In this context,
particular attention will be paid to game and decision theory and general philosophical
topics from mathematics, psychology and economics, such as game theory, voting and
welfare theory,with applications to political science,sociology,law and ethics.
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
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INTENTIONAL ACTS AND
INSTITUTIONAL FACTS
Essays on John Searle’s Social Ontology
Edited by
SAVAS L.TSOHATZIDIS
Professor of General Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Greece
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A C.I.P.Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4020-6103-5 (HB)
ISBN 978-1-4020-6104-2 (e-book)
Published by Springer,
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Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 2007 Springer
No part ofthis work may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted in any form or
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CONTENTS
Contributors vii
Introduction 1
Savas L.Tsohatzidis
Social Ontology:The Problem and Steps toward a Solution 11
John R.Searle
PART I: ASPECTS OF COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY
Searle and Collective Intentions 31
Margaret Gilbert
Foundations of Social Reality in Collective Intentional Behavior 49
Kirk Ludwig
Joint Action:The Individual Strikes Back 73
Seumas Miller
Collective Speech Acts 93
Anthonie Meijers
PART II: FROM INTENTIONS TO INSTITUTIONS:
DEVELOPMENT AND EVOLUTION
The Ontogeny of Social Ontology:Steps to Shared Intentionality
and Status Functions 113
Hannes Rakoczy and Michael Tomasello
Social Reality and Institutional Facts:Sociality
Within and Without Intentionality 139
Robert A.Wilson
v
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vi CONTENTS
PART III: ASPECTS OF INSTITUTIONAL REALITY
The Varieties of Normativity:An Essay on Social Ontology 157
Leo Zaibert and Barry Smith
A Behavioural Critique of Searle’s Theory of Institutions 175
Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca
Searle versus Durkheim 191
Steven Lukes
Searle’s Derivation of Promissory Obligation 203
Savas L.Tsohatzidis
Index 219
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CONTRIBUTORS
Professor Margaret Gilbert, Department of Philosophy, University of
California,Irvine,California,USA
Professor Kirk Ludwig, Department of Philosophy, University of Florida,
Gainesville,Florida,USA
Professor Steven Lukes, Department of Sociology, New York University, New
York,USA
Professor Anthonie Meijers, Subdepartment of History, Philosophy and
Technology Studies, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The
Netherlands
Professor Seumas Miller, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics,
Australian National University,Canberra,Australia
Dr Hannes Rakoczy, Department of Developmental and Comparative
Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig,
Germany
Professor Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, Center for Advanced Study in the Social
Sciences,Juan March Institute,Madrid,Spain
Professor John R.Searle,Department of Philosophy,University of California,
Berkeley,California,USA
Professor Barry Smith, Department of Philosophy, State University of New
York at Buffalo,Buffalo,New York,USA
Professor Michael Tomasello,Department of Developmental and Comparative
Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig,
Germany
Professor Savas L.Tsohatzidis,Department of Linguistics,Aristotle University
of Thessaloniki,Thessaloniki,Greece
vii
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viii CONTRIBUTORS
Professor Robert A.Wilson,Department of Philosophy,University of Alberta,
Edmonton,Alberta,Canada
Professor Leo Zaibert, Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin,
Parkside,Wisconsin,USA
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INTRODUCTION
Savas L.Tsohatzidis
John Searle is famous for his contributions to two fields with long and distin-
guished traditions within analytic philosophy—the philosophy of language and
the philosophy of mind—, but his interests and achievements extend beyond
these fields.From the early 1990s he has added to his research agenda a theme
that was not only largely new to his philosophical preoccupations, but also
largely absent from the concerns of analytic philosophy as a whole:the system-
atic examination of the mode of being of a particular kind of facts,institutional
facts,that appear to be no less objectivelyknowable than ordinary physical facts,
yet seem to be essentially dependent for their existence on the subjectivity of
human minds (to recall one ofhis favourite examples,one can know that something
is a piece of paper as objectively as one can know that it is a twenty-dollar bill,
but something’s beinga piece of paper does not depend on anyone’s taking itto
be a piece of paper,whereas its beinga twenty-dollar bill crucially depends on a
lot ofpeople taking itto be a twenty-dollar bill).Searle’s attempt to give a systematic
account of the combination of epistemic objectivity and ontological subjectivity
that,in his view,characterizes institutional facts has led to a full-blown theory that
he presented in his 1995 book, The Construction of Social Reality, and further
developed in his 2001 book, Rationality in Action. The present work, prefaced
by a new contribution by Searle,is the first book of original essays specifically
devoted to the critical examination of central aspects of Searle’s theory of insti-
tutional facts, whose interdisciplinary relevance is evident from the extensive
attention it has already received in specialist journals representing an unusually
wide range of academic subjects.1
According to Searle,institutional facts are a subclass of social facts,and social
facts are all and only those facts that are manifestations of collective,as distinct
from individual, intentionality. A proper account of institutional facts, then,
could not, in Searle’s view, be developed unless a satisfactory account of the
nature of collective intentionality could become available.That larger topic was
for independent reasons coming to the centre of attention of some analytical
1 Symposia on The Construction of Social Realityhave been published in Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research,57(2):1997;History ofthe Human Sciences,10(4):1997;Philosophy ofthe Social Sciences,28(1):1998;
and Journal ofEconomic Methodology,9(1):2002.Special issues devoted to the book have been published in
The American Journal ofEconomics and Sociology,62(1):2003 and in Anthropological Theory,6(1):2006.
1
S.L.Tsohatzidis,(ed.),Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts,1–10.
© 2007 Springer.