Ontological Dependence and Essential Laws of Social Reality the Case of Promising

Abstract

Adolf Reinach, phenomenologist and philosopher of law, developed a social and legal theory (Reinach, Die apriorischen Grundlagen des burgerlichen Rechtes. In: Reinach, Adolf. 1989. Samtliche Werke, pp 141–278. English translation: Reinach, Adolf. 1913. The Apriori Foundations of the Civil Law. (trans Crosby John). Aletheia 1983, pp 1–142, 1913) which provides an interesting answer––alternative to that of John Searle (Speech acts. An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1969, The construction of social reality. Allen Lane, London, 1995, Making the social world. The structure of human civilization. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010)––to the question of the nature of social and legal reality. For Reinach, unlike Searle, social and legal entities are not grounded in constitutive rules, collective intentionality, and status functions declarations. They are grounded, instead, in a priori structures [apriorische Gebilde] and essential laws [Wesengesetze]. These are the “a priori foundations of law,” dependent neither on positive law nor on beliefs, individual or collective, about them.