Name: The Construction of Social Reality
ISBN: 9780684831794

John R. Searle

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues that there are two kinds of facts--some that are independent of human observers, and some that require human agreement.

The Construction of Social Reality

This short treatise looks at how we construct a social reality from our sense impressions; at how, for example, we construct a ‘five-pound note’ with all that implies in terms of value and social meaning, from the printed piece of paper we see and touch. In The Construction of Social Reality, eminent philosopher John Searle examines the structure of social reality (or those portions of the world that are facts only by human agreement, such as money, marriage, property, and government), and contrasts it to a brute reality that is independent of human agreement. Searle shows that brute reality provides the indisputable foundation for all social reality, and that social reality, while very real, is maintained by nothing more than custom and habit.

Tim Pendry

John Searle's 'The Construction of Social Reality' (1995) is that rare thing - a work of fairly detailed analytical philosophy that is (mostly) accessible to the intelligent general reader. This is because Searle can write well when he is not 'analysing' and his subject is about how we make sense of things. I write 'mostly' because it is also engaged in a polemic with his profession and so significant tracts of the book are really only for professionals in philosophy. The section on the 'Slingshot Argument' for example can be skimmed and either not understood or cared about by mere mortals. The argument that matters is neatly summarised by Searle in a page and a half at the very end and really, really lazy readers can just go to that. On the other hand, really, really lazy readers are missing the point of philosophy if they do so. The core is that, just as mind and body cannot be separated as in the Cartesian fantasy, so our species-biology and our emergent culture cannot be separated. There is an underlying biological structure to culture much as there is an underlying brain structure to the mind. This meets a socio-political prejudice of mine that humanity is a paradox - a 'hive' species constructing its reality through species-conformity up to a point but with individuals within it having sufficiently independent minds to adapt it creatively to new needs through struggle or persuasion. Individual consciousness (my view not necessarily Searle's) is genetically adaptive to different degrees in different humans. Creative tension between this individuality and the instinct for social conformity within our many 'hives' (cultures and societies) makes us evolutionarily adaptive. Without being overly 'Darwinian' (because consciousness has enabled us to move beyond simple genetic competition), individual and social competition in real time creates the thing - humanity - that has become impossible to model or fully control especially by itself. Searle argues that there is no ontological break between biological and social reality and that consciousness and 'intentionality' are the bridges between them. He puts forward the existence of a collective intentionality that creates social facts that are 'bigger' than their physical baselines. Examples might be money, religious architecture, sports or nation states. These involve things (such as bits of paper or built things) that have a meaning as a social fact within the collective. It requires the collective to accept them (believe in them) as facts. Are they facts in the way that the atoms that define the periodic table are facts? No, but Searle argues that they are still facts because they make up a shared social reality that operates as the background to social functionality. The rules of a game are necessary to a game in order for it to be a game. Here I am more cautious because of the contingency of these facts although Searle argues his case (as you would expect) extremely well and logically. It keeps nagging at me that more of social reality is contingent and liable to collapse than he or we might think or even hope. Searle recognises that philosophical choices have something to do with personality. For all the sharp logic within its professional framework, there is the American pragmatic liberal wanting social cohesion lurking underneath the analytical scholasticism. The truth values apparently aligned to the social - shared belief systems - certainly look a lot more contingent in the third decade of the twenty first century than they did to the liberal community of the penultimate decade of the twentieth century. Searle is protecting something but while his assault on post-modernist philosophical destruction of truth is well-timed and definitely works on its own terms, perhaps he failed to see that the destruction of social truth and so of a shared social reality would emerge from below. He cannot be blamed for this. The book seems to be partly a rearguard action against philosophy as a out-rider for what was to come. Certainly 'continental philosophy' contributed to the process by which the 'Left' sought to manipulate social reality for political and cultural ends. It would have been interesting to have his views today on one bio-cultural conflict that might be highly relevant to the 'construction of social reality' - the idea that a human can change gender by an act of conscious will regardless of biological 'facts' previously accepted as absolute. In fact, the post-modern-cultural Left struggle to change social reality is only part of the picture. The resistance to it also appears to have 'decided' on its own account in a hive-like manner to construct itself around the invention of 'facts' that are mere instruments of political struggle. As we write, we are reaching perhaps the most interesting stage where geo-political struggle is conducted as 'narrative war' where the combatants not only challenge each other in material terms (physical war) but in terms of culture wars so that telling half-truths and non-truths is normal. The changes in mass media since the 1990s have unravelled socially shared assumptions imposed by the worker bees of the hive on the drones at the orders of the Queen Bee and have created a new type of drone war where winning is more important at every stage than 'truth'. Of course, everyone has always lied in war, struggle or competition but the lies are told and repeated despite being known widely to be lies in a completely new way. 'My' lie has become a truth because it strikes at the lies and truth of the opponent. It simply works as expression of sentiment. This is not a moral complaint at all. The narratives of the Queen Bees were generally fairly shaky as truths in any case. They merely represented the pragmatic consensus that we could call social reality but they worked for cohesion as well as promoting sclerosis and protecting elites. We are into a new age where it is hard to see where there can be a bridge between Searle's undoubtedly philosophically persuasive account of how social reality is constructed and the fact that the social reality of which he is writing is collapsing around us. Are we seeing an equivalent in terms of 'meaning' to the feared collapse of physical reality in some form of 'vacuum bubble'? Things are not that bad simply because Searle's point about the biological structures underpinning social reality stand regardless and may be the saving of the system. The probability is that 'hives' (evolved into new forms) will re-emerge from the current struggle. War regrettably may be the crucible. However, people today might not recognise the world to come any more than Puritan divines or Roman orators would recognise our world. The central issue for Searle and for us becomes consciousness - that is, the mental states that emerge out of our being human (which is nothing to do with other philosophical concerns like relations with Being or God). He emphasises the symbolism inherent in our institutional structures. So, perhaps this is where we have to look hardest for clues to both survival and the future , especially of institutions, many of which are going to crash and burn or have to adapt in ways that would may be unthinkable today. After all, a female Archbishop of Canterbury would certainly surprise Victorians. Searle puts the construction of our social reality down to a biological capacity to engage in symbolisation as the underpinning of language and institutional reality. The university Left's war on 'normal' or common sense use of language is a form of reverse engineering in this respect. By capturing institutions and language, the hope and intent is to control symbolisation and so make biology irrelevant. To the radical Enlightenment, biology is embarrassing and restrictive, the source of inherent injustice and inequity. It must be overcome. It is interesting here that, as an unintended consequence of this attempt to reconstruct social reality, the New Right (or at least the 'Tech' elements) have sought to subvert this by enhancing biology through transhumanist lines in order to promote inequity as a sort of Nietzschean elite. Searle (as an analytical philosopher) is particularly concerned with language as an institutional structure that imposes "a special kind of function on brute physical entities that have no natural relation to that function". All the normal functions of society - marital states, property relations, ownership and transactions, administration and institutions - require agreement on linguistic terms relating to some shared position on social truth. This shared position is ultimately relating to our biological being. Again, we see a struggle over language to have become central to the apparent collapse of cultural cohesion and as weapon in struggle between interests and nations although (we might be pleased or alarmed according to our politics) institutional structures still remain fairly solid regardless. The 'hive(s)' are in ferment but they are still hives. Searle's book is worth reading three decades on as an analytical framework for critiquing the collapse of 'truth'. There may be no truth in an absolute sense but our hives depend on their having an (admittedly flexible) shared truth of some kind.

The Construction of Social Reality

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