John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality

Abstract

John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality is beguiling. It tempts one into an individualistic understanding of society and institutions, not by arguing so much as by telling a seemingly plausible individualistic story. That story has three main components: collective intentionality (collective intentionality is individualistic, because in spite of its we-content, it is always the intentions of individuals); functions and particularly a special subclass of agentive functions, namely status functions; and finally constitutive rules. In this discussion note, I focus on the third of these, an idea I have long felt to be problematic. The idea of constitutive rules is a theme that goes back to Searle's own 'How To Derive Ought From Is' (1964) and Speech Acts (1969), and before that to John Rawls' 'Two Concepts of Rules' (1955). First, in my view, what Searle construes as a distinction between two kinds of rules is, on his own analysis, really a distinction between two kinds of action descriptions. I do not dispute that there are rules with the form that Searle attributes to so-called constitutive rules: 'X in circumstances C counts as Y'. So I am unclear whether my first point about the constitutive v. regulative rule distinction will matter to his construction of social reality. However, I have long been sceptical of this distinction, and it is a scepticism I want now to air. What is the alleged contrast between constitutive and regulative rules? A regulative rule 'regulates', but merely (Searle's word) regulates, a type of behaviour which is logically independent of those rules. Constitutive rules also regulate, but they do more as well: 'they create or define new forms of behavior' (Speech Acts, p. 33) which could not possibly exist independently of those rules. 'Create' is a metaphor in this context, and there is no clear sense in which rules can define or regulate anything; persons regulate or define. These characterizations of the distinction are, as Searle admits, 'rather vague' (SA, p. 35). One of the ways in which Searle tries to make this more precise is this. Consider these two action sentences: 'He sent out the invitation at least two weeks in advance' ('He R-ed') and 'They played football'