Living in One World: Searle’s Social Ontology and Semiotics

Abstract

Searle’s social ontology concerns the question of how it is that we are to reconcile different aspects of reality but takes for granted a particular kind of naturalism based on his unexplicated “basic facts” of nature. The consequence of this approach is that Searle’s ontology deals specifically with social reality and its institutions, and never directly with the basic facts upon which his position rests. Paradoxically, this naturalistic assumption alienates his theory from its connection with the basic facts because the nature of this connection is taken for granted and not explicitly shown how nature is connectable to the social world. I hope to show that Searle’s project is redeemed by biosemiotic theory that makes an explicit connection between the beginnings of sociality, which is where Searle’s work starts off, and the biological and physical nature of things, which is what Searle’s work takes for granted but what biosemiotics explicates.