Searle: Contract with Reality

Abstract

Abstract When philosophers concern themselves with what fundamentally exists, they are apt to limit themselves to physical facts and mental facts, with perhaps a soupcon of the abstract thrown in. There are mountains and muons, beliefs and tickles, and maybe numbers and propositions. Then questions are raised about how these broad ontological categories are related, these questions constituting the core of traditional metaphysics. But this is to ignore at least one other broad category of facts: the social ones. We also have incomes and marriages and presidencies. How are facts about sqcieties to be fitted into our general ontological framework? How, in particular, are they to be connected with mental and physical facts? What is, if you will forgive the expression, the ontology of civilization? There is a reason that philosophers tend not to be powerfully exercised by questions of social ontology, and it is that social facts are less primitive than the other facts. Social facts depend for their existence on mental and physical facts, but the opposite is not the case. This is the basic intuition from which John Searle starts his inquiry: the ontological dependence of the social on the nonsocial. Searle’s aim is to develop a theory that spells out the nature and consequences of this dependence.