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INTENTIONAL ACTS AND INSTITUTIONAL FACTS ESSAYS ON ’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: 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

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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

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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, , 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

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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

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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 his own formulations clearly invite. The distinctive feature of institutional facts is, according to Searle, that they only exist because they are collectively recognized as existing; the collective recognition in question takes the form of the collective acceptance of linguisti- cally expressible constitutive rules through which entities are assigned functions of a special kind, called status-functions; and the characteristic effect of the assignment to entities of such status-functions is that the entities in question come to thereby posses certain deontic powers that their physical constitution would not, by itself, enable them to possess. (Thus, a piece of paper is a twenty- dollar bill because it is collectively recognized as a twenty-dollar bill, and its being so recognized endows it with certain deontic powers—e.g., the power of being legally exchangeable against valuable commodities—that, considered merely as piece of paper, it would not have.) The third part of the volume, ‘Aspects of Institutionary Reality’, examines questions raised by the wide-ranging theory of institutional facts that Searle has constructed on that simple basis, in particular the question whether it can give a fully satisfying account of the relevant features of the institutional facts that it recognizes, and whether there are kinds of such facts, or relevant features thereof, that it cannot recognize. The volume’s three parts are preceded by a new essay by Searle that offers a uniquely authoritative and characteristically lucid synopsis of his theory of institutional facts, revisits aspects of its original formulation with the purpose of clarifying their content and implications, and indicates directions that should be explored with a view to its further development. Since that essay is more than sufficient for introducing readers to the details of Searle’s position, I shall devote the remainder of this introduction to some remarks on each of the ten Intro.qxd 23/5/07 2:26 PM Page 3

INTRODUCTION 3

critical essays of the volume and their relations to Searle’s work. The remarks follow the order of presentation of the essays in the volume’s three parts. *** Though the broad notion of intentionality used by Searle covers all sorts of cases in which an entity is ‘about’ entities other than itself, the particular variety of intentionality that is typically under discussion when he and others raise the question of the distinctive character of collective as opposed to individual inten- tionality is the intentionality of action: is there something distinctive that takes place when a group of agents are intentionally doing something together, which is more than the sum of what each individual member of the group does? Searle’s answer is that there is indeed something distinctive that takes place, but that what is distinctive can be elucidated without admitting that there are any minds other than individual ones, and, furthermore, without supposing that anything external to an individual mind can be constitutive of its contents. All that is required, according to Searle, is to assume that each individual mind can con- tain two mutually irreducible kinds of intentions, I-intentions and We-intentions, which are such that realizing the latter can be an end for which the realization of the former can be a means; two or more individuals will then be doing something together when, and only when, they satisfy a type-identical We-intention that each of them individually has, by means of satisfying appropriate I-intentions, which might or might not be type-identical, that they also have. The authors of the four essays of the first part of the volume agree with Searle that, when a group of agents are intentionally doing something together (when, in other words, there is joint or collective action at work), there is something distinctive that takes place that is more than the sum of what each individual agent does. They argue, however, that Searle’s attempt to specify what is distinctive about joint action in terms of a special kind of individually held We-intentions is not successful (either because the We-intentions in questions are not necessary or because they are not sufficient for collective action), and develop alternative suggestions as to how a proper analysis should proceed. Margaret Gilbert argues that there are situations where all the conditions that Searle would take to be definitional of a joint action are met, but where it is evi- dent that no joint action exists, and that, therefore, whether or not Searle’s con- ditions are necessary, they are certainly not sufficient in order for two or more agents to be doing something together. Gilbert also suggests that the crucial property of joint actions that is missing from Searle’s account is that they require a kind of antecedent agreement between their participants, and that it is only if such an agreement is already in place that their participants could form (assuming that they do form at all) the sorts of We-intentions that Searle’s account posits. Since, furthermore, an agreement between individuals could hardly be an episode internal to each one of a set of non-interacting minds, Gilbert’s suggestion implies that the distinctiveness of joint actions is unlikely to be captured, as Searle and others have been assuming, in purely mental terms, Intro.qxd 23/5/07 2:26 PM Page 4

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and that it can certainly not be captured in the explicitly internalist mental terms that Searle’s account requires. Kirk Ludwig accepts, with Searle, that it is the internal structure of its partic- ipants’ intentions that determines the special character of a collective action (and that therefore accounts for the difference between someone’s merely doing things that others do as well and someone’s doing things together with others), but argues that, contrary to what Searle claims, that special character can be acknowledged without having recourse to any conceptual resources other than those required for understanding individual action—and, in particular, without supposing that individual minds contain a special mode of We-intending besides the ordinary mode of I-intending. Instead of assuming that individuals have these two distinct modes of intending, one should only posit, Ludwig argues, a single I-mode of intending, and, by exploiting Searle’s distinction between the mode and the content of a mental state, one should capture the dif- ference between situations where an individual merely does things that others do as well and situations where it does things together with others as a difference in the contents to which individual I-modes of intending are attached in the two cases. Assuming that, in both cases, the content to which an I-mode of intend- ing is attached is expressible by a plural action sentence (in other words, that, in both cases, the individual intentions involved have the form “I intend that we VP”), the difference between the two cases corresponds, according to Ludwig, to the difference between the ‘distributive’ and ‘collective’ readings that plural action sentences can have, and so can be elucidated only if the logical difference between these two kinds of reading is properly analysed. In order to provide such an analysis, Ludwig adopts the influential Davidsonian account of singu- lar action sentences as involving quantification over events, and sets out to investigate how that account should be extended from the singular to the plural case, in a way that would be sensitive to the distinction between distributive and collective readings of plural action sentences. Concerning the distributive read- ing of a plural action sentence, he proposes that it should be handled by treat- ing the plural subject term as, in effect, a restricted quantifier that takes wide scope over the event quantifier introduced by the action verb. The collective reading of the same plural action sentence can then be generated, Ludwig argues, by reversing the order of the quantifiers, so that it is the event quantifier introduced by the action verb that now takes wide scope over the restricted quantifier represented by the plural subject term. Given this purely structural account of the difference between distributive and collective readings of plural actions sentences, and assuming that such sentences express the contents to which individual I-modes of intending are attached in the cases under consider- ation, Ludwig contends that the difference between an individual’s merely doing things that others do as well and an individual’s doing things together with others can be readily explained. In the former case, the individual realizes an I-intention whose singular mode attaches to a content that has the logical form of a plural action sentence in its distributive reading. In the latter case, the Intro.qxd 23/5/07 2:26 PM Page 5

INTRODUCTION 5

individual realizes an I-intention whose singular mode attaches to a content that has the logical form of a plural action sentence in its collective reading. And that explanation, if correct, makes it superfluous to assume, as Searle does, that, when an individual participates in genuinely collective activity, that individual’s mind contains a special mode of We-intending besides the ordinary mode of I-intending. Seumas Miller also rejects Searle’s fundamental assumption that individual minds can contain special We-modes of intending besides ordinary I-modes of intending, and specifically addresses the reason Searle has given for making that assumption—namely, that the special character of collective action appears incapable of being accounted for just by reference to sets of individual actions and to mutual beliefs of their agents to the effect that those actions occur. Miller argues that Searle’s scepticism about the prospects of an individualistic analysis of collective action underestimates the power and flexibility that particular indi- vidualistic analyses can have, and outlines his own individualistic analysis, where collective actions are held to be fully accountable in terms of individual actions, relations of dependence among those individual actions, collective ends that individual actions can serve (where the notion of a collective end is con- strued individualistically as a single state of affairs that each of a group of agents has as its individual end to realize), and, finally, mutual beliefs among the participants about the occurrence of those individual actions, the relations of dependence holding between them, and the collective ends served by them. Miller then argues that that analysis, though strictly individualistic, is not open to counterexamples of the kind that Searle and others have proposed against individualistic analyses of collective action, and so undermines Searle’s main reason for positing special We-modes of intending in the analysis of the latter. Miller finally suggests that the analysis can be naturally extended to provide illu- minating accounts of a variety of complex social phenomena, and that it is unclear how, if at all, these phenomena could be systematically accounted for on anti-individualist premises. While Miller claims, like Ludwig, that We-intentions, as analysed by Searle, are not necessary for collective action, Anthonie Meijers claims, like Gilbert, that, even if they were necessary, they would not be sufficient for collective action. Meijers focuses on the common but almost entirely unexplored phe- nomenon of collective speech acts—that is, speech acts whose agents or addresses, or both, are groups rather than individuals (e.g., acts of collective acceptance or collective rejection performable by utterances such as “Our team accepts the committee’s decision” or “This committee rejects the union’s allega- tions of unfairness”)—and adduces various reasons why such collective speech acts cannot be held to be equivalent to conjunctions of corresponding individ- ual speech acts of the relevant group members. The most important of these rea- sons, according to Meijers, is that collective speech acts generate special types of inter-individual entitlements and commitments that could not possibly be gen- erated by multiple individual speech acts performed by each one of the relevant Intro.qxd 23/5/07 2:26 PM Page 6

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group members, even if the members in question were individually holding the kinds of We-intentions posited by Searle: for, an individually held We-intention is, in Searle’s view, an intention that is purely internal to the individual holding it (in the sense that it would exist even if no other individuals existed), and We-intentions that are purely internal to each individual in that sense cannot possibly ground, Meijers contends, inter-individual entitlements and commit- ments. Meijers further claims that collective speech acts not only show that Searle’s account of collective action is unsatisfactory, but that they create an independent problem for Searle’s influential theory of speech acts, which has been constructed by taking only individual speech acts into consideration. Meijers proposes that the latter problem should be addressed by recognizing that each one of the five major categories of speech acts that Searle posits (assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations) includes not only, as Searle was supposing, individual but also irreducibly collective members, and concludes by suggesting that the irreducibly collective members of one among those five categories (the category of declarations) is especially signifi- cant in articulating the crucial role that, in Searle’s view, language plays in the creation of extra-linguistic institutional facts. *** As already noted, Searle believes, on the one hand, that institutional facts, unlike other social facts, are uniquely human phenomena, and, on the other hand, that, just like all other social facts, they are products of collective inten- tionality, which is not a uniquely human phenomenon, but is, on the contrary, widespread in the animal kingdom. The question then arises as to why collective intentionality has led to the creation of institutional social facts in the human case, whereas it has only issued in social facts that are not institutional in the non-human case. Searle does not address that question in great detail, apart from suggesting that it is the existence of language that, in the human case, has allowed collective intentionality to move beyond the merely social and towards the institutional level. The two essays in the second part of the volume address from different (and in part opposite) perspectives certain wider developmental and evolutionary aspects of the question, each noting respects in which Searle’s position is weak and each proposing ways in which its weaknesses could be remedied. Hannes Rakoczy and Michael Tomasello begin by arguing (partly on the basis of experimental investigations of the behaviour of chimpanzees in the domains of cooperation, communication and social learning) that, contrary to what Searle assumes, genuinely collective intentionality cannot be attributed to non-human animals, since, even those among non-humans animals that can be supposed to be capable of attributing mental states to others, do no interact with those others in ways that satisfy certain minimal requirements (such as commitment to the attainment of a common goal or commitment to mutual support in attempted realizations of such a goal) that should be taken to be the