True Reality and Real Truth

Abstract

In the last three chapters of The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle propounds a realist manifesto. He realizes that the analysis of social facts he has offered in earlier chapters, an analysis that depends ultimately on the notions of constitutive rules and, accordingly, of collective intentionality, presupposes a distinction between “facts dependent on us and those that exist independently of us.”1 With what Searle calls “constitutive rules”, individuals collectively impose functions on objects. In this way, conscious beings can create facts, facts that would not have existed but for the existence of thinking agents, specifically and distinctively social facts. Social facts depend on us, they concern institutions that are constituted by systems of rules that we institute. But constitutive rules, with the characteristic form “X counts as Y in C”, presuppose society-independent characterizations of those items to which a function is assigned. The picture that emerges is that yes, Virginia, there is a real world, to parts of which conscious agents, exploiting collective intentionality and a distinctive variety of speech act, can assign function and thereby construct social reality. Searle realizes that this presupposition of a society-independent reality is not universally accepted; and in the last three chapters of his book does some “philosophical housekeeping”.