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John R. Searle
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Jonathan Friedman raises more questions in his provocative article than I can hope to
answer in the space of this reply. I will try to pick out what I think are some of his most
important themes and comment on them. I will do this, rather briefly, as a series of
numbered responses.
Natural phenomena may very well be independent of the observer, but once observed
and interpreted by human agents they become something different. At least this was
the problem of Kant and the foundation of Boasian anthropology as well as Gestalt
psychology. (p. 71)
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formulations with which we express our knowledge claims, and indeed the knowledge
claims themselves, are human constructions and subject to all of the limitations that
human beings bring to bear on the organization of their experiences. But from the fact
that the knowledge claims, and indeed even the categories in which they are stated, are
human constructions, it does not follow that the reality represented by these claims is a
human construction. We do indeed construct the sentences that we believe express our
best knowledge. But if we are right, the reality represented by those sentences is not itself
a human construction. Institutional reality is an exception to this general principle, and
that is the reason I find it so philosophically fascinating.
It might be said that intentionality and consciousness are involved in the constitution
of such phenomena, but it is not clear why that should make such phenomena
observer dependent, not unless the same person is both observer and constructor of
a particular reality. (p. 72)
The answer to this is that the construction involves the participants in the institution,
and not the observer from outside. He is right to point out that my observations have
no effect on money, but without users of money, there is no money, whereas without
physicists, hydrogen atoms still have one electron. ‘Observer dependent’, in short, does
not name an epistemic category, but an ontological category.
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SEARLE Reality and social construction. Reply to Friedman
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the spot’. I make no such assumption. But I am struck by the fact that institutions with
entirely different histories can have similar logical structures. For example, the history
of money in the United States is quite different from its history in other parts of the
world. All the same, when I go into a bank in a foreign country I can exchange our
money for their money. When I go to remote countries I can buy things with money
and sell things for money. There appears to be a common logical structure that can be
described independently of the peculiarities of the individual histories in question.
Friedman here raises a question that comes up elsewhere in these discussions, and that
is that I seem to be neglecting the historical component. I intend no such neglect. I think
that, for example, to understand slavery in the United States you have to understand its
peculiar history. But I am trying to provide us with the tools within which that history
can be intelligibly described. There is no opposition between the historical approach and
the analytical approach. They are complementary to each other and, indeed, unless we
have our analytic categories right to begin with, we cannot hope to give an intelligent
account of the histories in question.
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SEARLE Reality and social construction. Reply to Friedman
Actually, there are at least three different levels of acceptance involved. First, the
system of constitutive rules (such as the rules of baseball or the structure of the economic
system) has to be collectively accepted or the institutional processes cannot take place.
Second, there are specific outcomes of a type which are envisioned by the rules but not
in each specific token case determined by the rules (such as the facts that Boston won
the World Series and Bill Gates has a lot of money). The acceptance of the rules commits
the participants to accepting the existence of these outcomes. Third, there are outcomes
not envisioned by the rules but which just happen once the rules come into play (left-
handed batters do better against right-handed pitchers and the American economy
undergoes business cycles). It does not matter if the participants accept these, they just
happen, given the acceptance of the system and the processes that acceptance generates.
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have a semantic content that defines a specific set of relations between abstract
categories rather than actual people. There is no operation of the form X counts as
Y in condition C that can account for their existence because, except in special cases
of planned organizations, no such operation has ever occurred. (p. 79)
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SEARLE Reality and social construction. Reply to Friedman
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example, the power to acquire objects and employ people. To see both the power and
the merits of the institution of money one has only to try to imagine what it would be
like to return to a system of barter. The objection I would make to the economists, but
not to Friedman, is that they assume that everything can be measured on the money
scale. And, of course, that is not true.
References
Searle, John R. (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R. (1979) Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R. (1983) Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
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