Social Reality and Institutional Facts: Sociality Within and Without Intentionality

Abstract

John Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality (1995) offers an account of the nature of social reality that complements and builds on the views of language and mind that Searle has developed in his earlier books (Searle 1969, 1983, 1992). It shares with those books a combination of a high level of both philosophical rigor and accessibility, and takes the reader down a persuasive path from the basic questions “What is social reality?” and “What are institutional facts?” to Searle’s detailed answer to these questions. My twofold aim in this paper will be to provide reasons for questioning Searle’s answer, and to sketch an alternative way of thinking about the relationships between intentionality and “social facts” or “social reality”—both expressions that Searle uses freely, and what I would prefer to call, in parallel with intentionality, sociality. As the title of Searle’s book on social reality suggests, his aim is to provide an account of sociality that shows how sociality can be both a construction and a part of reality, how there can be objective facts that we nonetheless play a role in constructing. Institutional facts, which are a focus of his work here and more recently (e.g., Searle 2003), are paradigms of such facts. I want to suggest that that focus, and perhaps Searle’s broader concern to address social constructivism and attacks on realism in epistemology that frames his discussion in Construction, results in a view of sociality that is misleading in several important ways, including in how we should view certain forms of nonhuman cognition and in how we should think about the relationship between intentionality and sociality. My argument will turn on the innocuous-sounding point that the two questions listed above—about social reality and about institutional facts—require importantly different answers, and that by focusing primarily on the latter question, the one about institutional facts, Searle presents a skewed answer to the former question, the one about social reality. Let me begin with a brief sketch of Searle’s view of institutional facts.