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8898879 Lprob 1.Pdf FM.qxd 23/5/07 4:33 PM Page i INTENTIONAL ACTS AND INSTITUTIONAL FACTS ESSAYS ON JOHN SEARLE’S SOCIAL ONTOLOGY FM.qxd 23/5/07 4:33 PM Page ii THEORY AND DECISION LIBRARY General Editor: Julian Nida-Rümelin (Munich) Series A: Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences Series B: Mathematical and Statistical Methods Series C: Game Theory, Mathematical Programming and Operations Research SERIES A: PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME 41 Assistant Editor: Thomas Schmidt (Göttingen) Editorial Board: Raymond Boudon (Paris), Mario Bunge (Montréal), Isaac Levi (New York), Richard V.Mattessich (Vancouver), Bertrand Munier (Cachan), Amartya K. Sen (Cambridge), Brian Skyrms (Irvine), Wolfgang Spohn (Konstanz) Scope: This series deals with the foundations, the general methodology and the criteria, goals and purpose of the social sciences. The emphasis in the Series A will be on well-argued, thoroughly analytical rather than advanced mathematical treatments. In this context, particular attention will be paid to game and decision theory and general philosophical topics from mathematics, psychology and economics, such as game theory, voting and welfare theory, with applications to political science, sociology, law and ethics. The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume. FM.qxd 23/5/07 4:33 PM Page iii INTENTIONAL ACTS AND INSTITUTIONAL FACTS Essays on John Searle’s Social Ontology Edited by SAVAS L. TSOHATZIDIS Professor of General Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Greece FM.qxd 23/5/07 4:33 PM Page iv A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-4020-6103-5 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-6104-2 (e-book) Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 2007 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. FM.qxd 23/5/07 4:33 PM Page v CONTENTS Contributors vii Introduction 1 Savas L. Tsohatzidis Social Ontology: The Problem and Steps toward a Solution 11 John R. Searle PART I: ASPECTS OF COLLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY Searle and Collective Intentions 31 Margaret Gilbert Foundations of Social Reality in Collective Intentional Behavior 49 Kirk Ludwig Joint Action: The Individual Strikes Back 73 Seumas Miller Collective Speech Acts 93 Anthonie Meijers PART II: FROM INTENTIONS TO INSTITUTIONS: DEVELOPMENT AND EVOLUTION The Ontogeny of Social Ontology: Steps to Shared Intentionality and Status Functions 113 Hannes Rakoczy and Michael Tomasello Social Reality and Institutional Facts: Sociality Within and Without Intentionality 139 Robert A. Wilson v FM.qxd 23/5/07 4:33 PM Page vi vi CONTENTS PART III: ASPECTS OF INSTITUTIONAL REALITY The Varieties of Normativity: An Essay on Social Ontology 157 Leo Zaibert and Barry Smith A Behavioural Critique of Searle’s Theory of Institutions 175 Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca Searle versus Durkheim 191 Steven Lukes Searle’s Derivation of Promissory Obligation 203 Savas L. Tsohatzidis Index 219 FM.qxd 23/5/07 4:33 PM Page vii CONTRIBUTORS Professor Margaret Gilbert, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, California, USA Professor Kirk Ludwig, Department of Philosophy, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA Professor Steven Lukes, Department of Sociology, New York University, New York, USA Professor Anthonie Meijers, Subdepartment of History, Philosophy and Technology Studies, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Professor Seumas Miller, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia Dr Hannes Rakoczy, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Professor Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, Juan March Institute, Madrid, Spain Professor John R. Searle, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, California, USA Professor Barry Smith, Department of Philosophy, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York, USA Professor Michael Tomasello, Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany Professor Savas L. Tsohatzidis, Department of Linguistics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece vii FM.qxd 23/5/07 4:33 PM Page viii viii CONTRIBUTORS Professor Robert A. Wilson, Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Professor Leo Zaibert, Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Parkside, Wisconsin, USA Intro.qxd 23/5/07 2:26 PM Page 1 INTRODUCTION Savas L. Tsohatzidis John Searle is famous for his contributions to two fields with long and distin- guished traditions within analytic philosophy—the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind—, but his interests and achievements extend beyond these fields. From the early 1990s he has added to his research agenda a theme that was not only largely new to his philosophical preoccupations, but also largely absent from the concerns of analytic philosophy as a whole: the system- atic examination of the mode of being of a particular kind of facts, institutional facts, that appear to be no less objectively knowable than ordinary physical facts, yet seem to be essentially dependent for their existence on the subjectivity of human minds (to recall one of his favourite examples, one can know that something is a piece of paper as objectively as one can know that it is a twenty-dollar bill, but something’s being a piece of paper does not depend on anyone’s taking it to be a piece of paper, whereas its being a twenty-dollar bill crucially depends on a lot of people taking it to be a twenty-dollar bill). Searle’s attempt to give a systematic account of the combination of epistemic objectivity and ontological subjectivity that, in his view, characterizes institutional facts has led to a full-blown theory that he presented in his 1995 book, The Construction of Social Reality, and further developed in his 2001 book, Rationality in Action. The present work, prefaced by a new contribution by Searle, is the first book of original essays specifically devoted to the critical examination of central aspects of Searle’s theory of insti- tutional facts, whose interdisciplinary relevance is evident from the extensive attention it has already received in specialist journals representing an unusually wide range of academic subjects.1 According to Searle, institutional facts are a subclass of social facts, and social facts are all and only those facts that are manifestations of collective, as distinct from individual, intentionality. A proper account of institutional facts, then, could not, in Searle’s view, be developed unless a satisfactory account of the nature of collective intentionality could become available. That larger topic was for independent reasons coming to the centre of attention of some analytical 1 Symposia on The Construction of Social Reality have been published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57(2): 1997; History of the Human Sciences, 10(4): 1997; Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 28(1): 1998; and Journal of Economic Methodology, 9(1): 2002. Special issues devoted to the book have been published in The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 62(1): 2003 and in Anthropological Theory, 6(1): 2006. 1 S.L. Tsohatzidis, (ed.), Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts, 1–10. © 2007 Springer. Intro.qxd 23/5/07 2:26 PM Page 2 2 S.L. TSOHATZIDIS philosophers at about the time when Searle’s interest in the nature of institutional reality emerged, and Searle has contributed to discussions of that larger topic by offering a distinctive and controversial view of collective intentionality that he later used as the foundation of his theory of institutional facts. The critical exam- ination of that view of collective intentionality, and its relation to rival views, is the object of the first part of the volume, ‘Aspects of Collective Intentionality’. Although the capacity for collective intentionality, and so for the creation of social facts is, according to Searle, a capacity that many kinds of animals besides humans possess, the particular form of collective intentionality that is deployed when a specifically institutional fact is brought into existence is, in his view, a form of collective intentionality that only human animals are capable of deploy- ing (since, among other things, it essentially involves symbolization abilities of the sort that only human language clearly exemplifies). In Searle’s view, then, institutional facts, unlike other kinds of social facts, are in an important sense uniquely human. Consequently, if his account of them is right, the processes leading to their creation and maintenance should be expected to figure prominently in an adequate account of human evolution and development. The second part of the volume, ‘From Intentions to Institutions: Development and Evolution’, examines that aspect of Searle’s theory in the naturalistic spirit that its evaluation demands, and that
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