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Home , John Searle

Masaryk University

Faculty of Economics and Administration

Study program: Economics

METHODOLOGICAL : AND

Metodologický Individualizmus: Myseľ a Spoločenská Realita

Bachelor´s Thesis

Advisor: Author: Mgr. Josef Menšík Ph.D. Ján KRCHŇAVÝ

Brno 2020

Name and last name of the author: Ján Krchňavý

Title of master thesis: Methodological Individualism: Mind and Social

Reality

Department: Department of Economics

Supervisor of bachelor thesis: Mgr. Josef Menšík, Ph.D.

Year of defence: 2020

Abstract The submitted bachelor thesis is concerned with the relation between mind and social reality and the role of the mind in the creation of social reality. This relation is examined from the perspective of the social of John Searle, an American who is considered to be the proponent of methodological individualism. This thesis aims to reconsider the standard, mentalistic interpretation of Searle’s social ontology, one that is centred around the primary role of the mind in the construction of social reality, to examine criticisms of such approach which highlight the professed neglect of the role that social practices have for social reality, and to provide an alternative, practice-based reading of Searle’s social ontology. The thesis thus proceeds first by outlining the standard interpretation of Searle’s theory as put forward mainly in his two monographs on social reality. Subsequently, the objections against such an approach from an alternative, practice-based approach, which highlights the role of social practices for the constitution of , are raised. Following these objections, the Searle’s social ontology is looked at again in an effort to find an alternative interpretation that would bring it closer to the and principles of the practice-based approach, and thereby provide a response to some objections against the missing role of the social practices in his theory as well as open the way for the novel interpretation of his social ontology. Before embarking on the central issue, the thesis enquires into the basic outline of the social ontology and the life and work of John Searle, the introduction of which is indispensable for the apprehension of the central part of the thesis. Key words:

Social ontology, methodological individualism, Searle, collective , construction of social reality, mentalistic approach, practice-based approach

Declaration

Hereby I declare that this master thesis has been composed solely by myself under the supervision of Mgr. Josef Menšík, PhD. Except where stated otherwise by reference, the presented thesis is entirely my authorial work. Furthermore, I declare that this work has been elaborated in compliance with the law, the internal regulations of Masaryk University, and the binding internal documents of Masaryk University and the Faculty of Economics and Administration.

In Brno on July 15, 2020

signature of author

Acknowledgment I would like to thank my supervisor, doctor Josef Menšík, for all the support during the writing the thesis, which consisted in stimulating discussions, valuable insights and advices, as well as possibility of attending the Brno and Social Ontology and discussing the topic of my thesis on the regular meetings of this group. I would also like to thank my family and friends for providing me with an encouraging environment and support, which helped me a lot to complete the thesis.

List of contents INTRODUCTION...... 9 1 SOCIAL ONTOLOGY ...... 10 1.1 Mentalistic and Practice-based approaches ...... 11 1.2 Social Ontology and Economics ...... 12 2 JOHN SEARLE: INTRODUCTION ...... 13 2.1 Earlier work: Philosophy of and ...... 13 2.1.2 Intentionality ...... 14 2.3 Main principles: Scientific Naturalism and External Realism ...... 15 2.4. Reasons behind choosing Searle’s social ontology ...... 16 2 SEARLE’S SOCIAL ONTOLOGY: SOCIETY AS THE PRODUCT OF MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS ...... 17 2.1 When think together: the phenomenon of collective intentionality ...... 17 2.1.1 Searle and collective intentionality ...... 18 2.2 Collective intentionality and social ontology...... 19 2.2.1 Collective intentionality and the creation of social facts ...... 20 2.2.2 Collective intentionality and institutional facts ...... 21 2.2.3 Collective Intentionality and the deontic powers of institutional facts ...... 25 2.3 Summary and author’s interpretation ...... 27 3 SEARLE´S SOCIAL ONTOLOGY: THE OBJECTIONS FROM THE PRACTICE-BASED PERSPECTIVE ...... 29 3.1 Practice-based approach to social ontology ...... 29 3.1.1 Practice-based approach and the constitution of social reality ...... 30 3.1.2 Practice-based approach and the mind of the individual ...... 31 3.2 Criticism of Searle’s theory from the perspective of the practice-based approach ...... 33 3.2.1 Searle placing the mind of an individual outside the interactions and social practices ...... 33 3.2.2 Criticism of the role of collective intentionality for the creation of institutional facts ...... 34 3.2.4 Searle’s narrow view on the social reality ...... 37 3.2.5 Embeddedness of brute physical facts in social practices ...... 39 3.3 Summary...... 41 4 SEARLE’S SOCIAL ONTOLOGY AND PRACTICE-BASED APPROACH: POSSIBLE INTERSECTIONS ...... 41 4.1. The emergence of some institutional facts as being a matter of social practices ...... 42 4.2 Continued maintenance of institutional facts as a matter of practice ...... 43 4.3 Primacy of institutional acts over institutional objects ...... 44 4.4 The Background of social reality ...... 46 4.4.2 Background and social reality: The Construction of Social Reality ...... 47 4.4.5 Conclusion: Background as offering a new perspective on looking at the individual and social reality ...... 50 4.5 Summary...... 50 CONCLUSION ...... 51 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 52

INTRODUCTION

I believe it will deepen our of social phenomena generally and help our research in the social sciences if we get a clearer understanding of the nature and the mode of existence of social reality. John Searle

The social reality, a reality whose existence depends on beings, is the fundamental subject matter of any inquiry into social sciences. It is the realm of being in which humans are engaged from the first to the last day of their lives, and which therefore fundamentally shapes all the aspects of their lives. Questions about the nature of the social realm have provoked discussions and controversies ever since the first serious inquiries into social sciences emerged. One of the fundamental dichotomies in the inquiries into the nature of social reality concerns the role of individuals, their actions and interactions, in the constitution and explanation of social phenomena, and, on the other side, the role of social structures and institutions, irreducible to the properties of individuals. The first side of the dichotomy, one that proclaims individualistic explanation in social sciences and argues that any inquiry into social sciences should start from the individuals, is the position of Methodological Individualism1.

The bachelor thesis presents an inquiry into the social ontology, the subfield of ontology that examines the nature of social reality. Specifically, the thesis examines the particular issue in social ontology - the relationship between mind and social reality. Such an issue is examined from the methodological individualism position, the proxy for which is the socio-ontological account of John Searle, one of the most influential authors in the social ontology area in recent decades.

The thesis aims at reconsidering the standard, mentalistic reading of Searle´s social ontology centred around the notion of collective intentionality as the building block of social reality by way of firstly delineating such mentalistic account of social reality, then examining its criticisms which accentuate the professed neglect towards the role social practices have for social reality, and consequently providing an alternative, practice-based reading of Searle´s social ontology based on some of the ideas he proposes.

After the first two chapters, which introduce the subject matter of social ontology, and the life and work of John Searle, the next three chapters concern his account of the social ontology, and in particular the role of the mind for the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of social phenomena. The third chapter delineates the conventional interpretation of Searle’s social ontology, one that conceives social reality as ontologically dependent and built up from individuals’ mental representations in the intersubjective mode of collective intentionality. Such a mentalistic approach to social reality is built around the that social phenomena have their ontological basis in the of individuals. Therefore, they can exist only insofar as they are being encoded in the minds of individuals. This approach, even though it offers many valuable insights about the nature of social reality, has been subject to many objections and critiques. The primary concern of many of these critics is the absence of the role that social practices, established organized ways of human actions and interactions, play for the constitution of social reality. The fourth chapter, therefore, elaborates on some of these objections, raised from the perspective of an alternative, practice-based approach to social reality, the central idea of

1 Methodological Individualism as the methodological principle “exists in a bewildering number of different versions” (Udehn, 2001, 346), that differ from each other in the extent to which the explanations in social sciences should be based on individuals only. Udehn, for example, distinguishes between stronger and weaker accounts of methodological wherein latter, but not in former, some explanatory power is also assigned to the social institutions and social structures, and the individuals are conceived as being ultimately social beings. The most relevant definition of Methodological Individualism is then, according to him following: “Social phenomena must be explained in terms of individuals, their physical and psychic states, actions, interactions, social situation, and physical environment” (ibid. 353-354) 9 which is that it is the field of social practices, on the background of which the constitution of social phenomena, as well as individual mental representations of them, proceed.

The recognition of the objections in the fourth chapter will lead in the final chapter to an effort to look again at Searle’s social ontology to find some links that bring his theory closer to the practice-based approach. Such an alternative reading of Searle’s social ontology, which could be detected from some of the passages of his work and ideas he proclaims might mitigate many of the objections raised against his mentalistic theory as well as to enlarge the scope of his theory and brings it closer to the practice- based approach, in which “the chief dynamo of social existence” is the sphere of human activity. (Schatzki, 2015)

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1 SOCIAL ONTOLOGY

The term ontology refers to the philosophical study of being. Ontology, which itself is a branch of , focuses on the questions of the existence of certain entities, their properties and relations among them. (Hofweber, 2017) The characteristic question in the ontology is, therefore, one that was already articulated in the first paragraph, namely, what is the mode of being of the entity that is to be studied? From the general character of ontological inquiry, it is clear that the aims to investigate the mode of being of particular entities accompanied philosophy since its very beginning. Among some of the more popular ontological inquiries are those about the , universals and particulars, abstract entities such as numbers, or the nature of and its relation to the brain. In general, ontological inquiries to any area of investigation consist of two parts, which are summarized by Thomas Hofweber as follows: “[F]irst, say what there is, what exists, what the stuff in reality is made out of, and secondly, say what the most general features and relations of these things are” (Hofweber, 2017).

The aim of ontological inquiries might either be to elaborate a general scheme of being that would try to answer most general questions, e.g., ‘What is being?’, or to concentrate on one particular domain and study the questions of nature of entities in such particular domain.2 As looks at the division of ontology into many branches, the nature of being itself provides us with good reasons “to demarcate sub-branches of ontology, to instigate projects in domain-specific or regional ontology.” (Lawson, 2014, 3) Lawson himself is a proponent of one of such regional , Social Ontology, the study of which is the focus of this thesis. Social Ontology, like any ontological project, aims at answering the questions of which entities exist, where do they exist, how are they up, or what is the nature of relations among them. The entities whose mode of being social ontology investigates are those that make up the social world. As Brain Epstein, a well-known author in contemporary social ontology, points out, the entities on which the studies in Social Ontology focus can take the form of various such as social laws, social kinds, social facts, institutional facts, social practices and many others (Epstein, 2018). Not only the general character of the social phenomena are scrutinized i.e., whether they are primarily social facts, social laws, or social practices, but also the nature of the normativity - rules, obligations, norms, etc. - that are associated with these social phenomena; their properties; and relations to physical nature and mental states of individuals. (Konzelmann, Schmid, 2014, 1) Social Ontology thus focuses on questions such as: What kinds of social phenomena exist at all? What is the mode of existence of these entities? Are they something over and at least partly independent of individuals? In what manner are they created? What properties do they have? How is it possible that these social phenomena can entail rules that are being followed by individuals? What effects do they have on the actions of individuals? (Epstein, 2018)

1.1 Mentalistic and Practice-based approaches

Although the number of questions one can ask with respect to the ontology of social phenomena and society in general is enormous, answering of the fundamental question of What is the mode of the existence of social phenomena i.e., where do they reside and in what manner do they come to existence, could provide a framework for the subsequent, more specific questions. Thus, my thesis will be primarily concerned with the question of the mode of existence of social phenomena. As with most of the philosophical inquiries, the plurality of different perspectives on the nature of social reality has emerged, and thus even to provide the general classification of approaches, which would cover every single account, is difficult. In subsequent chapters, I will narrow the perspective of looking at the nature of social reality through different lenses and will depict two actual approaches. The demarcation of these two views could be found, for example, in Epstein’s anchoring classification of different approaches (Epstein, 2018; 2015) or the articles of Andreas Reckwitz (2002) and Theodore Schatzki (2003). The

2 Such distinction between general ontology and particular subfields of ontology corresponds with Husserl’s division of ontology into formal ontology dealing with being in general and material ontologies investigating specific regional areas of reality. (Andina, 2016, 29) 11 basic behind the two depicted approaches, leaving the details for the next chapters, could be stated as follows: First – mentalistic approach – is centered around the idea that the society is built up from the mental states of individuals in the sense that social phenomena can exist, be reproduced and transformed only due to individuals having them somehow encoded in their minds. Second – practice- based approach – claims that the basic domain of social reality consists of social practices, organized actions in which the social phenomena are realized, and which individuals socialized into given social environment reproduce or transform in their actual actions. Thus, social phenomena rather than being encoded in human minds are encoded in social practices, and only subsequently, by way of their being internalized by individuals, do they enter the human mind. These two approaches, since they are both in a confirmatory or critical way associated with Searle, will be applied to Searle’s account of social ontology, in the effort to find out whether these two are in mutual discontent, or whether and to what extent both of them could be found in Searle’s theory.

1.2 Social Ontology and Economics

In the final part of this introductory chapter, I want briefly to touch the topic of whether and why it is relevant in economics to conduct the inquiry into social ontology. Economics, as a scientific discipline, is a branch of social sciences. The fundamental subject matter of economics is, therefore, actions and interactions of humans. These are however not located in some vacuum, where people would act as isolated, atomic units entirely on the basis of individual inner desires. Rather, individuals are always embedded in the interactions with others as well as in the realm of social institutions, whether these have the form of material entities, explicit rules of conduct or implicit social norms and customs. All these institutions, established ways of conduct, and principles of human interactions, to a large extent, govern individuals’ actions and, through these actions, have an enormous impact on the overall character of particular social systems. However, they are not the products of nature, but had, in some sense, been brought to existence by human beings.3 Human society is thus not an aggregation of atomic individuals but the complex phenomenon consisting of human actions and interactions anchored in social institutions Social ontology, which has in recent decades attracted a considerable number of social scientists including economists and the interest in which gave rise to the number of research group4, thus studies the mode of existence of the social phenomena from embryonic two-person interactions up to the complex institutions, on the background of which the modern society functions. In this sense, the social ontology provides economics with inquiries into the nature of the stuff that the economic systems consist of, the knowledge of which could be subsequently deployed in the actual economic examinations, thereby making them more consistent with the actual character of social reality. To conclude, I will mention a clear depiction of the three-fold importance of social ontology for economics outlined by Uskali Mäki. Firstly, social ontology can reveal the boundaries of the discipline of economics and turn away the attention of economics from the issues that do not relate to the object of economics. Secondly, ontological assumptions ground the beliefs that the economists hold and guide their study – they can determine the theory choice and its development. And thirdly, the attention to the nature of the stuff that economists deal with can bring more reliability and appropriateness to the methodology that economists use. (Mäki, 2001, 8-11)

3 As Searle himself accentuates, “it is a mistake to treat money and other such instruments as if they were natural phenomena like the phenomena studied by physics, chemistry, and biology” (Searle, 2010, 201) 4 To name some of the authors devoted to social ontology whose area of research includes economics I would mentions names of Tony Lawson, professor at The , Stephen Pratten from King’s College London or Uskali Mäki from the University of Helsinki. The most influential groups in Social Ontology are Cambridge Social Ontology Group (CSOG); International Social Ontology Society registered in Austria (ISOS) ; or Centre for Social Ontology based in Grenoble. In 2005 The Brno Epistemology and Social Ontology Group (BESOG) was established as a research group at Masaryk University, Faculty of Economics and Administration, and regularly meets on a discussion led by Mgr. Josef Menšík, Ph.D.

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2 JOHN SEARLE: INTRODUCTION

John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and one of the leading thinkers of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century in the areas of language, mind, and social ontology. Born in Denver, Colorado, in 1952, Searle began his studies at the University of . After three years, he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to study at the . Searle thus continued his studies in Oxford, where he finally obtained a degree ‘Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil),’ Oxford equivalent to Ph.D. After the almost one decade spent in Oxford, he returned to the U.S.A., where he began teaching in 1959 at the University of California, Berkeley, and from then on he held at Berkeley various positions, the last of which was the position of Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School (Wikipedia 2020a). During the academic career at Berkeley, Searle was also involved in politics e.g., in the form of joining the Free Speech Movement aiming at promulgating the “lift the ban of on-campus political activities and acknowledge the students’ right to free speech and academic freedom.” (Wikipedia 2020b), or outside the university as opposing Berkeley’s rent stabilization ordinance in the 1980s, and openly supporting the neoconservative interventionist foreign policy in response to terrorist attacks in 2001. Although becoming probably the most prominent figure at UC Berkeley, his emeritus status was revoked in 2019 due to the sexual assault allegations raised by the 24-year old research associate, who was not probably the only one with whom Searle sexual relationships. (Weinberg, 2019) These allegations practically destroyed the whole Searle’s reputation and caused that his work has become widely cast-off in the academic sphere. Nevertheless, for several reasons that will be mentioned later, I think that Searle’s work entails a valuable philosophical heritage and offers insights worth analyzing.

2.1 Earlier work: and Philosophy of mind

The first area that attracted Searle in his academic career was the philosophy of language, which he encountered while studying in Oxford. In the times of Searle’s studies, the philosophy in Oxford was influenced by authors including John Austin, , or Peter F. Strawson, who inspired by the later philosophy of , turned their attention to the analysis of language. (Parker- Ryan, n.d., for instance) They studied language not as a structure of having exact referents in the world, but as the device that enable humans to communicate in their ordinary life. Hence their approach to the philosophy of language is known as Ordinary Language Philosophy. One of the characteristic features of Ordinary Language Philosophy, one that is central for Searle’s project, is that it sees the linguistic statements as having a direct link to subsequent actions.5 Searle, in his first major work : Essay in the Philosophy of Language (1969), extended and systematized the analysis made by Austin of illocutionary acts. Emphasis on the necessary connection between language and can be found directly in the introduction, where Searle postulate that “speaking a language is engaging in a (highly complex) rule-governed form of behavior. (Searle, 2011 [1969], 12) As we can read in ’s apprehension of the theory of Speech Acts: “Searle’s achievement, now, was to give substance to Austin’s idea of a general theory of speech acts” which Searle accomplished by “providing a theoretical framework within which the three dimensions of utterance, , and action involved in speech acts could be seen as being unified together. (Smith, 2003, 6)

On the grounds of his analysis of language and amendments to it made in A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts (Searle, 1975), which allowed him to see the common features between the structure and operating of speech acts and mental states, the next big area into which Searle immersed himself was a philosophy of mind. It is in the area of philosophy of mind that Searle proposed several ideas that made him a

5 John Austin mainly in his posthumously published book How to Do Things With Words (1962) introduced the term and thereby laid the barebones of the analysis of all those types of linguistic statements that are directly linked to subsequent actions, the most illustrative example of which is promising

13 prominent figure in the field including (1) his famous Argument introduced in the article Minds, Brains, and Programs (Searle, 1980) targeted against proponents of strong artificial , which aims to prove that the syntactical computations are not sufficient for the acquisition of ; (2) Searle’s original solution to so-called mind-body problem known as , according to which the mind and consciousness is nothing more than structure emerging on the brain structure , “the higher-level of the brain”, and the conscious states are therefore “caused by the behaviour of neurons and are realized in the brain system” (Searle, 2004, 79)6; or (3) the Connection Principle that represents Searle’s perspective on the character of unconscious states that for him consist of “objective features of brain capable of causing subjective conscious thoughts” and therefore “the notion of unconscious state is notion of the state that is possible conscious thought or experience” (Searle, 2002 [1992], 159-160) Even though all these and many other ideas have sparked extensive discussion in the academy, for the thesis, I will turn closer attention to another element of Searle’s philosophy of mind, one that plays a central role in social ontology.

2.1.2 Intentionality

Intentionality, a term that was introduced in Franz Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) and later elaborated and popularized in Logical Investigations of Edmund Husserl (1900), stands for the characteristic of mental states to be about or to represent states of affairs outside one’s mind. In Searle’s formulation: “Intentionality is that property of many mental states and events by which they are directed at or about or of objects and states of affairs in the world.” (Searle, 1983, 1) Notwithstanding the name, the property of being intentional is not conferred only to the for actions but is present also in the states of belief, fear, hope, desire, love, hate, aversion, liking, disliking, doubting, etc. (ibid. 4) All these types of mental states are in most of the cases7 referring to something in the world.

The theory of intentional mental states thus represents Searle’s view on how the mind operates with regards to the outside world, and hence how individuals assess the world that lies outside their minds. And as we will see in the next chapter, the notion of intentional states or mental representations is quintessential for the understanding of Searle’s social ontology (Rust, 2009, 5). In Searle’s conception, all intentional states have a common structure consisting of (1) the type of the psychological mode of given state, i.e., whether it is belief, , desire, perception, etc. , and (2) the content of the state, i.e., what the given state is about, what it represents in outside reality. These two components together form a propositional structure “S(p),” where the S stands for the psychological mode of state and p for its content. Here lies the connection between the structure of intentional states and structure of speech acts that prompted Searle to extend his theory of speech acts to intentional states since the structure of speech acts also consists of such propositional structure the components of which are the types of the illocutionary act8 and the propositional content expressed by the speech act. (Searle, 2010, 28) By way of closer analysis of intentional states, Searle revealed other features of the intentional states such as the (1) , i.e., the character of their directedness, whether the state represents the world in its actual state (e.g., belief) or the possible future state (e.g., intention), (2) conditions of satisfaction that could be correlated with the truth conditions of the and that therefore account for “the conditions in the world which must be satisfied if the intentional state is to be satisfied” (Searle, 2010, 29), or (3) the causal self-referentiality of intentional states i.e., a feature of

6 As Searle states, the idea behind the Biological Naturalism is that Consciousness “is a causally emergent property of systems. It is an emergent feature of certain systems of neurons in the same way that solidity and liquidity are emergent features of systems of molecules” (Searle, 1992, 112) 7 Searle acknowledges that not all the mental states are intentional. There could be states of, for example, anxiety or nervousness that could be not directed at something particular in the world. (Searle, 2010, 26) 8 Searle generally distinguishes five types of speech acts: Assertives (statements, , etc.), Directives (orders, commands), Commissives (promises, pledges, etc.) Expressives (apologies, congratulations, thanks, etc.), and Declarations (see for example Searle, 2010, 69)

14 some of the intentional states to achieve their conditions of satisfaction only if these states themselves causally bring about their conditions of satisfaction. (e.g., the intention is being satisfied only if the action caused by this intention accomplish the intended state to happen)

The analysis of all these features of intentional states resulted in Searle’s embracing substantial conclusion, which is in line with his depiction of himself as being an analytic philosopher “standing on the shoulders” of authors such as Frege, Russell, or Wittgenstein (Searle, 2010, 6) that the whole realm of intentional states forms one large logical structure with “elegant and beautiful” formal relations among intentional states (ibid. 39), and in which individual intentional states are in general the representations of their conditions of satisfaction analysable in terms of their truth conditions. (Searle, 2010,30) The postulation of the logical structure of intentionality has several implications two of which are quite remarkable for Searle’s Scientific Naturalism and his account of social ontology: First, (1) since the mental states are somehow according to Searle’s solution to mind-body problem emerging on the brain and are caused by brain structures, it is at the end the brain structure that has these logical properties (Searle, 2010, 42)9 Second, and more importantly for the account of social ontology, (2) since Searle on various places argues that society is constituted by human taking specific intentional mental attitudes towards entities in the world, the logical structure of intentionality extends to the logical structure of society: “Human have a logical structure, because human attitudes are constitutive of the social reality in question and those attitudes have propositional contents with logical relations” (Searle, 2006, 15)

This conclusion, and more specifically, the argument that human mental states are constitutive of social reality will be in detail elucidated in the next chapter. Before embarking on the Searle’s account of social ontology, which “closes a circle that began with Speech Acts” and continued with the theory of mind intentionality (Meijers, 2003, 171), and in which Searle with the help of his previously developed theories aims at answering the ontological question of “what is the mode of existence of social entities such as , families, cocktail parties, trade unions, baseball games, or passports” (Searle, 2010, 5), I need to mention two metaphysical principles that guide Searle’s analysis throughout his career, and in short outline reasons why it is the social ontology of Searle that is subject of my thesis.

2.3 Main principles: Scientific Naturalism and External Realism

Two main principles from which whole Searle philosophical endeavour sparks, and which have therefore substantial impact on the actual character of Searle’s theories are Scientific Naturalism and External Realism. Scientific Naturalism is a position which states that each phenomenon that is to be analysed should be analysed as part of one and only one world. In Searle’s words, “we live in exactly one world, not two or three or seventeen” (Searle, 1995,1), which at its most elementary level consists of physical particles. When embarking on the inquiry into the mental, linguistic, or social phenomena, Searle thus states that one of the conditions of adequacy is that the basic facts when the analysis ultimately has to bottom are facts “are given by physics and chemistry, by evolutionary biology and other natural sciences. We need to show how all the other parts of reality are dependent on, and in various ways derive from, the basic facts” (Searle, 2010, 4) Searle’s commitment to Scientific Naturalism is in the words of Joshua Rust “issue framing in the sense that this naturalistic fundamental ontology determines what is to count as a philosophical problem” (Rust, 2009, 9) As was already partly touched, Searle’s adherence to Naturalism was the major force that leads him to embrace the doctrine of Biological Naturalism with respect to the location of mental phenomena and consciousness in general as the higher-level property of the brain. Intentional mental states, in turn, according to Searle’s conception, give rise to both derived intentional of linguistic statements10, and social phenomena. The

9 “I am insisting that as you read this , the thoughts going through your mind are also neurobiological processes in the brain, and those processes have logical properties, exactly the same logical properties as thoughts, because they are simply the neurobiological realization of the thoughts” (Searle, 2010, 42) 10 Words and sentences have according to Searle “derived intentionality” (Searle, 1995, 61), which means that they in the same way as intentional states represent things beyond themselves (i.e., have their meanings), but can do so only because such 15 direction of the analysis thus in this way satisfies the basic requirement of showing “how the higher- level phenomena of mind and society are dependent on lower-level phenomena of physics and biology” (Searle, 2010, 25) As will be demonstrated in the next chapter, this requirement, when applied to the analysis of social reality, amounts Searle’s position to the position that the ultimate existence of social reality and individual social institutions in society in the heads of individuals. (McCaffree, 2018, 332)

Second essential principle, the commitment to the metaphysical position of External Realism, in light with the Scientific Naturalism, simply states that the world of the physical particles, the arrangements, and properties of which create the structure of brute facts11 independent of our mental representations, is really out there, the position that is targeted against skeptics and idealists who “see no independent evidence for a reality that exists independent of our mental states” (Rust, 2009, 5) For Searle, the External Realism, the position the world exists independently of our representation, is the “Background condition of intelligibility” (Searle, 1995, 177) in the sense that we presuppose it on our daily communications, and only the that things somehow stand to each other in the external world makes it possible to meaningfully communicate. (ibid. 184)

2.4. Reasons behind choosing Searle’s social ontology

I want to conclude this introductory chapter into the work of John Searle by providing a few reasons that justify the choice of John Searle for being a subject of this thesis. In this regard, I can identify three reasons: (1) Searle is (or at least for most of his career was) a prominent figure in the field of philosophy of mind and language, and his work on social ontology belongs to the most influential contributions in this area. It could be assertively stated that it is to a large extent thanks to Searle’s account of social ontology that social ontology has become a widely examined topic in the philosophy of society as well as in other social sciences, including economics. As Barry Smith claims, Searle’s account of social reality is brilliant and the most impressive account of social reality that we have (Smith, 2003, 15-16)12 (2) Searle denotes himself as a proponent of methodological individualism, which makes his theory suitable for this thesis since, as the name says, it aims to study the relationship between mind and social reality from the position of methodological individualism. For Searle, the adherence to methodological individualism is reflected by a strong conviction that all mental states exist only in the individual mind, and therefore we cannot pose anything like group mind or group consciousness: “The sense in which my views are methodological individualist is that all observer-independent mental reality must exist in the minds of individual human beings” (Searle, 2006, 21) And since Searle for the most of his theory claims that social phenomena are constituted by minds of individuals, this makes his theory consistent with methodological individualism, which in its amounts to the methodological principle that “social phenomena must be explained in terms of individuals, their physical and psychic states, actions, interactions, social situation, and physical environment” (Udehn, 2001, 354) (3) The last, the more personal reason is that I had the honour to meet Searle personally and attend his lecture at Faculty of Economics and Administration organized by Brno Epistemology and Social Ontology Group in spring 2019.

capacity for representation is imposed on them by human intentionality. As Joshua Rust interprets it: “Intentionality, at least in human beings, has the unique and extraordinary power to impart its own structure on otherwise dead or lifeless phenomena.” (Rust, 2009, 96) 11 Searle built his account of brute facts on the theory presented by G.E.M. Anscombe (1958). In Searle’s conception of brute facts, these are, for example, the fact “that has snow and ice near the summit or that hydrogen atoms have one electron” (Searle, 1995, 2) All these facts are in principle independent of any human opinions about them and would pertain even if no people exist. 12 The importance of Searle’s account for social ontology is recognized by various authors e.g., by Tony Lawson (Lawson, 2016, 359-360) or Mattia Gallotti and John Michael who claim that “[t]he recent debate on social facts has grown from the pioneering work of John Searle, whose conceptual apparatus is now taken widely, though not unquestionably, as the starting point of most analyses of social ontology” (Gallotti, Michael, 2014,5) 16

2 SEARLE’S SOCIAL ONTOLOGY: SOCIETY AS THE PRODUCT OF MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS

Searle’s social ontology is commonly interpreted as an account of the social world, according to which the social phenomena are set into existence by individuals’ mental attitudes. These mental attitudes i.e., intentional mental states (section 2.2), are, however, not the mental states of individuals independent of each other, but the mental states in the collective, or, as Searle on one place (Searle, 2006, 16) acknowledges, intersubjective mode. The outcome of such account, which Searle comprehensively elaborates in his two monographs on social reality – The Construction of Social Reality (1995) and Making the Social World (2010) - is the mentalistic approach to social ontology, according to which social phenomena are created and maintained in their existence by mental states in the form of so-called collective intentionality. The interpretation of this mentalistic approach of Searle’s social ontology with the focal point of collective intentionality, which is, according to Searle himself, “the fundamental building block of all human social ontology and human society in general” (Searle, 2010, 43) will be the main subject matter of this chapter. After a short introduction to the of collective intentionality, I want to present its tripartite role in the creation of social phenomena – (1) its role in enabling any collective behaviour entailing cooperation among individuals; (2) its role in the creation of institutional facts also called as status functions, which for Searle are the glue that holds human society together; and, related to the second role, (3) its role in creating of deontic powers i.e., powers conferred to particular status functions that subsequently enable and constraint behaviour of individuals within the institutional structure. The elaboration of these three roles of collective intentionality for the creation of the social world, which in real life are immensely dependent on each other and following each other, could enable the reader better to comprehend the “fundamental credo” (Rüther et al. 2013) of Searle’s theory saying that the social phenomena “can exist only if people have certain sorts of beliefs and other mental attitudes“ which represent these social phenomena, and which as collective refer also to the other members of a given community. (Searle, 1995, 63)

2.1 When humans think together: the phenomenon of collective intentionality

As was pointed out in the introduction to Searle´s work, one of the main concepts that pass through all three major areas of his study is the phenomenon of intentionality, which accounts for the capacity of the mind to be directed at or be about the things outside the mind of an individual. The theory of intentional mental states thus represents Searle’s view on how the mind operates with regards to the outside world and how individuals assess the world that lies outside their minds. (Rust, 2009, 5). Humans, however, do not inhabit the world as atomic units wholly separated from each other, but a large part of their living in the world is permeated by the presence of others whether in the form of interaction, usage of the common language in communication, aiming at collective goals, or the handling of the material objects in ways that conform to some established social standards. The question that immediately follows once all these forms of human sociality (Schatzki, 1996, 14)13 are recognized, about how all these interpersonal phenomena are possible when all the consciousness and with it all the intentionality, at least from the standpoint of authors who refuse to talk about some genuine group mind or group consciousness, exist in individuals’ heads? (Searle, 2010, 44) Searle’s solution to this question, a solution that is followed by the majority of authors working in the realm of philosophy of society, is that we can postulate the form of collective, intersubjective mental states, which although existing entirely in the heads of individuals, can entail the reference to the others. In other words, individuals can be directed at the outside world not only in the singular form but also in the collective “we” form in all those cases when individuals intend, believe, accept, etc. that such and such is the case (or should be the case) only with reference to the other members of group or community.

13 Theodore Schatzki defines human sociality as” hanging-together of human lives that forms a context in which each proceeds individually” (Schatzki, 1996, 14) 17

2.1.1 Searle and collective intentionality

For Searle, collective intentionality is an innate biological capacity that humans14 are born with just like with the individual intentionality, and which enables them to interact in their actions and create human social reality. (Searle,1995, 24; 2010, 8) His account of collective intentionality, which is one of the first and definitely the most influential accounts of this phenomenon in the philosophy of society15, takes collective intentionality as a distinct type of intentionality that resides in the minds of individuals alongside the range of individual intentional states. That means that in the structural notation of intentional states (section 2.2), Searle locates the collective aspect in the psychological mode S of given intentional state. Thus, in the situations when the collective intentionality is present, the intentional states of individuals take the form “We-intend/believe/accept/want such and such”. Such characterization of collective intentionality distinguishes Searle’s account from the (1) the content account, which holds that the collective intentional states are in the form “I-intend/believe etc. that we such and such” accompanied with the mutual beliefs about the others’ states i.e., my belief that you believe that I have such intentional state (e.g., Bratman, Tuomela and Miller16), and also (2) the subject accounts that adhere to the more collectivistic thesis that the groups could be genuine subject or bearers of intentional states (e.g., Pettit; Gilbert, Schmid17) Searle’s refusal to locate collective intentionality on the level of subjects springs from his principal opposition to any notion of group mind distinct from the minds of individuals, and thus from his adherence to “individual ownership claim” that insists that “collective intentionality is had by the participating individuals, and all the intentionality an individual has is his or her own” (Schweikard, Schmid, 2013) The rejection of content accounts, on the other side, is justified by two reasons: (1) the failure of content accounts to deal with the problem of the mutual regress of mutual beliefs i.e., I must believe that you believe that I believe and so indefinitely. (Searle, 1995, 24). (2) Inappropriate analysis of cooperation provided by the content account, which, according to Searle, cannot be achieved only by individual intentions and common knowledge among participants, since as Searle shows, there are cases where the individuals have the same goal and even have the common knowledge about the intentional states of other, but no cooperation is present (Searle, 1990, 406)18 Thus, the collective intentionality is for Searle irreducible to the individual intentionality (cf. the content account) but is still present only in the heads of individuals (cf. the subject account). To apprehend Searle’s account of collective intentionality, therefore, is to imagine two distinct ways how the individual minds could be directed at the outside world – one as independent individuals and the other as part of the collective, the members of which share the intentional states. Searle is in his analyses of collective intentionality primarily concerned with the case of collective intentions that underpin collective actions and how they can, despite being collective, move individual bodies and so amounts to the performance of collective actions.19 Collective intentionality, however, does not refer only to the states of cooperative activities, as individual intentionality is not only about intentions. This fact, not fully recognized in Searle’s earlier writings, is one of the amendments of Searle’s theory in the Making the Social World (2010, 56-58). Here Searle explicitly recognizes the

14 Searle acknowledges that the collective intentionality could be present also in some other social animals (Searle, 2010, 43) 15 Searle was the first author who explicitly coined the term Collective Intentionality (Schweikard, Schmid, 2013) 16 Michal Bratman: Shared Cooperative Activity (1992); R.Tuomela and K. Miller: We-Intentions (1988) 17 Phillip Pettit: Collective Intentions (2001); Groups with Minds of their Own, (2003); Margaret Gilbert: On Social Facts (1989); Bernhard Schmid: Plural Action: Essays in Philosophy and Social Science (2009) 18 “The mere presence of I-intentions to achieve a goal that happens to be believed to be the same goals as that of other members of a group does not entail the presence of an intention to cooperate to achieve that goal. One can have a goal in the belief and even mutual beliefs about the goal that is shared by the members of a group, without there being necessarily any cooperation among the members or any intention to cooperate among the members” (Searle, 1990, 406) 19 The solution that he draws is akin to the cases of complex individual action when individuals intend to do something by means of doing something else. In other words, either one does something that causes the intended effect, e.g., firing the gun by means of pulling the trigger (Searle, 2010, 36), or that constitutes this effect, e.g., voting by way of raising one’s hand (ibid.). Similarly, collective actions are linked to the individual contributions to them in the sense that the content of individual intentional state represents given collective goal by means of individual contribution, and this states causes an individual to perform his contribution, which in turn leads to the achievement of . (Searle, 1990, 408-413; 2010, 50-55) 18 states of collective beliefs or collective desires.20 Most importantly, for the purposes of the thesis, Searle introduces the state of collective recognition or acceptance (ibid. 57) to account for all the states where individuals collectively i.e., as part of the group, represent something as existing. Such a recognition, as the name says, does not require the positive endorsement of the given fact, and in fact, individuals might be individually opposed to the given fact. As long, however, as they recognize the existence of that fact with the knowledge that the others also recognize it, there is a general recognition of this fact. Collective recognition, moreover, since it does not entail actual cooperation among individuals, does not necessities genuine “We-recognize” attitudes on the part of individuals. What it requires are the individual attitudes towards given fact and the belief that there is mutual acceptance or recognition on the part of others. Searle calls such type of collective intentionality the “weaker form” and as will be exposed in the thesis, these states are essential for the analysis of institutional reality. The last point about collective intentionality that I want to touch here since it will form the central point of one of the criticism later in the thesis is Searle’s adherence to internalism with respect to the determination of mental content. In contrast to externalism, internalism amounts to the that the mental content depends solely on the intrinsic properties of the mind of individual. (Lau and Deutsch, 2014) In other words, whereas externalists, the most popular of which are and 21, argue that mental contents are constitutively determined by the relations the individual is in with regards to the environment, internalists hold that even if we are in interactions with the world around us the contents of our mental states are determined entirely from within . Searle on the various places in his work endorses the position of internalism (Searle, 1983, 230; Searle 1990, 407; Searle 2004, 128-134). With regards to collective intentionality, such an internalism amount to the claim that one could be in the mental states of collective intentionality with exactly the same contents i.e., one could have a in the form “We intend/believe, etc. such and such” even if she was completely mistaken about the participation of others, or in Searle’s own words “even if the apparent presence and cooperation is an illusion, even if [she] is suffering total hallucination; even if [she] is a brain in a vat” (Searle, 1990, 407)

This short introduction to the fundamental building block of social reality - collective intentionality – aimed at elucidating how, according to Searle, humans can be directed towards the world, i.e., directed towards the collective activities in case of collective intentions, or more generally towards any entities in the world in cases of collective belief, desire, or recognition, in the collective form. Such collective or intersubjective intentional representations are the representations of individual agents, which, however, take the reference to others as potentially sharing the intentional states, even though such assumptions can be mistaken. In the following chapter I want to reveal how these collective intentional states are foundational for the whole Searle’s enterprise into social reality and help Searle to answer the fundamental question that he poses right at the beginning of his socio-ontological inquiry: “How is it possible in a universe consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force that there can be such things as consciousness, intentionality, , language, society, ethics, aesthetics, and political obligation?” (Searle, 2010,3)

2.2 Collective intentionality and social ontology

Collective intentionality, a coordinated form of the intentionality of individuals that includes the irreducible collective element, is for Searle the basic building block in his account of social ontology that overlay the world of brute physical facts by their social meanings. As Searle himself stipulates, “collective intentionality is the psychological presupposition of society” (Searle, 2006, 57) and the “fundamental building block of all human social ontology and human society in

20 “I might, for example, as a member of religious faith, believe something only as part of our believing it, as part of our faith. I might, as part of a political movement, desire something as a part of our desiring it” (Searle, 2010, 43) 21 Hillary Putnam: The Meaning of Meaning (1975); Meaning Holism (1986). Taylor Burge: Individualism and the Mental (1979); Two Thought Experiments Reviewed (1982) 19 general” (Searle, 2010, 43). Therefore, throughout most of his work, he uses “intentionalistic vocabulary to try to lay bare certain elementary features of social ontology” (Searle, 1995, 5). In the following sections, I will aim to elaborate on this intentionalistic vocabulary, and by outlining three facets of the collective intentionality in the creation of social reality, I want to account for the mentalistic interpretation of social reality, according to which the mind is the primary domain of social reality. In the beginning, I need to note that these three roles are not some distinct, unrelated factors that could be easily detached from one another and studied individually. Rather, all of them are essential for a full understanding of Searle´s account of the social world, and especially the second and third roles are always present together. Therefore, the separation is done primarily for the sake of systematic examination of the main elements of Searle´s social ontology and demonstration of its dependence on the concept of collective mental representations.

2.2.1 Collective intentionality and the creation of social facts

The central role of collective intentionality with regards to social facts is entailed in the very definition of social facts since Searle conceives of social facts to be “all and only cases of collective intentional facts” (Searle, 1995, 122). Such a strong statement itself makes a convincing and for some authors definite argument for conceiving Searle´s social ontology as being centered around the central role of the mind in the form of collective intentionality. As interpreted by John Wettersten, the social ontology of any society is for Searle “fully and exclusively determined, then, by the “we intentions” found in that society” (Wettersten, 1998, 135). Similarly, Nick Fotion, the author of one of the monographs on Searle, considers the fundamental characteristics of Searle´s social ontology to be that “[h]umans create or construct social reality by employing their mental powers. They construct various kinds of social reality. All involve we-intentions. Even the most simple and temporary forms of social reality, such as two people joining together for a minute or two in order to push a car, involve we-intentions” (Fotion, 2000, 247).

To prevent misunderstandings, I want to clarify that Searle, by stipulating that every social fact entails collective intentionality, does not fall into some sort of that would hold that society and social facts are simply ideas in the minds of individuals. Instead, following his adherence to Naturalism, Searle holds that social facts are facts about the physical things in the world. The element of intentionality is that the same physical objects can be assigned their social meanings, thereby becoming social facts, only through human . As Epstein recognizes, Searle does not hold that the social facts are simply collective intentions, but that collective intentionality determines “what sorts of nonmental, nonpersonal stuff constitute social things” (Epstein, 2015, 58) Indeed, the second principle that guides Searle´s theory is that of external realism that for him account to proposition that the “world exists independently of our representations of it” (Searle, 1995, 153) and his fundamental project is, therefore, to show how in this world could there be a vast amount of phenomena that are constitutively dependent on the human intentionality, and which are abiding the scientific naturalism “dependent on, and in various ways derive from, the basic facts” given by natural sciences (Searle, 2010, 4)

When examining which facts create the realm of social facts, Searle divides these facts into two categories. First, there are simple collective actions such as the collective preparation of the meal, playing football, or even simple activity as going for a walk together. The common denominator of all these collective actions is that they are underpinned by the collective intentions in the heads of individuals that take the form “We are preparing a meal/ playing football/ going for a walk” and these mental representations of collective goals subsequently induce individuals to perform their part in these collective endeavors. As Searle claims, “if there is anything special about collective behaviour, it must lie in some special feature of the mental component, in the form of the intentionality” (Searle, 1900, 402), which could amount to the occurrence of the genuine cooperation among the participants. And such cooperation cannot be accounted for by simply coordinated I-intentions of individuals, but only by positing the irreducible we-intentions meaning that the agents do their part in cooperative activity only as part of a collective effort, not as separated individuals. (ibid. 406)

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The second category of social facts consists of a category of “functional facts” (ibid. 122). Functional facts stands for all those facts that are characterized by some function being assigned to some brute physical facts, person, or sequences of action. Examples of these could be the fact that such and such piece of wood functions as a chair, that the particular man is a leader, or that these hand movements function as a greeting. The assumption that all these examples entails the element of intentionality stems from Searle´s perspective on the ontology of functions, which he sees as always “intentionality- relative” (Searle,2010, 59, also in Searle 1995, 13-23). Such assumption implies that whenever we assign functions to objects, even to natural phenomena such as in Searle´s example of assignment function to the heart of pumping the blood, we thereby set the entities with assigned functions relative to our value system, what then allows us to speak about good or bad functioning of these entities. And such attributions of goodness and badness are simply not present on the level of causal processes in nature. As Searle contends, “a function is a cause that serves a purpose. And the purposes have to come from somewhere; in this case, they come from human beings” (Searle, 2010, 59) The mentioned function of the heart is the example of “nonagentive functional facts,” where the function is imposed on some natural phenomena. Another category of functions is the category of agentive functions i.e., the functions imposed on some human artifacts such is the case of the functional of particular objects such as “This is the chair” or “This is a screwdriver” (Searle, 1995, 121).

Not all cases of functional facts are social facts since individuals could assign the functions in virtue of their individual intentionalities without anyone else being aware of these functions. However, when the assigned function becomes collectively accepted i.e., when the imposition of the given function becomes generally agreed on in a given group and thus becomes a manner of some general consensus, can we talk about social facts.

The whole realm of social facts; thus, according to Searle, consists of facts that are constituted by collective intentionality. From these, one subset consists of merely collective actions, where the intentional states of individuals are directed at the achievement of a collective goal, which is the successful performance of the given collective action. The second subset, which as will become clear in the next section covers also all cases of institutional facts, consists of all those facts that are created when humans collectively impose functions on the entities in their surroundings, thereby creating the layer of functional facts ontologically dependent on their intentionality.

2.2.2 Collective intentionality and institutional facts

As Searle proposes, the mere capacity for cooperative actions which are based on collective intentions is not what distinguishes humans from other animals since animals too are able to cooperate in their actions such in the case of hyenas cooperatively attacking a lion. (Searle, 1995, 122, for instance) Animals are, according to Searle, even capable of creating a functional facts by imposing functions on certain physical entities or individuals from their realm, functions that are based on physical features of these entities and individuals. Such are the cases of birds´ nests, primates using sticks for digging food out of the ground, or a pack of wolfs selecting the leader selecting a leader based on its physical force. (Searle, 2010:59, 95)

The main distinguishing mark of human society is thus not our capacity to cooperate nor the ability to use certain objects in certain functional manner. What, however, the animals lack and what therefore is the essential characteristic of human institutional reality is our ability to collectively assign specific type of functions whose main feature is that they are entirely independent of the physical features of the concerned objects, and exist only in virtue of collective intentionality. In other words, the essence of these functions is not that the physical structure and properties of objects are simply intentionally overlaid by functional description, as is the case of chairs whose physical appearance induces their functional descriptions, but that the functions are entirely a matter of intentional ascription. One of the fundamental principles of Searle´s social ontology is therefore that “humans have the capacity to impose functions on objects and people where the objects and people cannot perform the functions solely in

21 virtue of their physical structure” (Searle, 2010, 7) What enables them to perform their functions is the “collective imposition and recognition of a status” (Searle, 2010, 59) Searle thus uses this type of functions as status functions, which are for him equivalent in meaning with the term institutional facts (Searle, 2010, 23) since human institutional reality is essentially a matter of status functions and these are the “glue that holds society together.” (2010, 9) In Barry Smith´s interpreation, “Institutional facts, now, are those special kinds of social facts that arise when human beings collectively award what Searle calls status functions to parts of reality. This means functions – such as those of customs officials (with their rubber stamps) – that the human beings involved could not perform exclusively in virtue of their physical properties.” (Smith, 2003, 14-15)

The instances of status functions are pervasive elements of our everyday life. As Searle´s description of the standard day of an individual within institutional structures demonstrates (Searle, 2010, 90-91), the number of facts whose ontological status is dependent on collective imposition of status function that one encounters during a single day is immense – from individuals having a status of students, policemen or officials, through the money one uses for daily purchases, up to simple promises and other linguistic utterances with imposed functions. What stands behind the existence of all these facts is that people evoke intentional mental representations in the form of collective acceptance or recognition of status functions e.g. the collective acceptance that such and such pieces of paper are money, and through such representations these status functions are created and maintained in existence. According to Searle, such characterization has two implications about the ontological and epistemic character of institutional facts: (1) The status functions are, in a sense, ontologically subjective since their existence depends on the mental representations of individuals. Searle often uses also the term self-referentiality of social concepts (e.g., Searle, 1995, 32) that represents the similar idea as ontological subjectivity, namely that the very existence of such social objects depends on their being “used as, regarded as, or believed to be” (Searle, 1995, 32, edited by author) such concepts. As Searle claims, “self-referentiality is a peculiar logical feature that distinguishes social concepts from such natural concepts as mountain or molecule” (ibid. 33) (2) Despite their ontological subjectivity, the status functions are epistemically objective, since, once accepted they are objective facts in the world, in the sense that they are not “matter of your or my individual preferences, evaluations, or moral attitudes” (Searle, 1995, 1)

Granted that status functions are functions imposed on brute physical facts, which are, however, independent of physical features of these objects, the question emerges, how can we get from the level of brute facts to the level of institutional facts? Here Searle comes with the concept of constitutive rules, which he introduced already in his theory of speech acts. (Searle, 2011 [1969], 35)22 With regards to the institutional reality the constitutive rules have a from: “X counts as Y in the context C” (Searle, 1995, 28), the formula that depicts the move from the level of brute physical fact X to the level of institutional fact Y in the given context C. For example, in the case of the institutional fact of particular objects standing for money, the constitutive rule can be stated as follows: “Bills issued by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (X) counts as money (Y) in the United States (C)” (Searle, 1995, 28) And as Searle on the other place makes clear, and what brings us back to the role of the mind in the creation of institutional facts, “The ´counts as´ locution names a feature of the imposition of status to which a function is attached by way of collective intentionality” (Searle, 1995, 44). In the Brian Epstein´s interpretation, Searle´s theory of institutional facts and how they are put in existence thus consists of two parts – first is about the constitutive rules which ground the existence of individual, institutional facts by stipulating which brute facts count as institutional facts, and the second is about collective intentionality that anchors the constitutive rules by putting them in place in given society23:

22 Searle introduced the distinction between regulative and constitutive rules to distinguish between those rules that merely regulate already existing behavior which could exist even without such rules such as rules regulating driving and those rules that are constitutive of the forms of behaviour such as the rules of football games that are constitutive of the very activity of football game (Searle, 2011 [1969], 33; 1995, 27-28) 23 Epstein deploys his concept of the grounding-anchoring schema for various accounts of social ontology, in which the grounds are the frame principles through which the social phenomena come to existence while the anchors are metaphysical reasons 22

“What puts a constitutive rule in place, according to Searle, is that we collectively accept that rule. Collective acceptance is the glue that binds a constitutive rule to a community” (Epstein,2015, 52-53)

There exist various interpretations and understandings of Searle´s theory of constitutive rules. One of them that I find plausible and comprehensible proposed by Marcoulatos (2003), and in a similar way also by Dreyfus (2001), interprets the employment of constitutive rules by Searle as the introduction of two layers of existence, one of the brute physical facts, and the other of the facts superimposed by the intentionality of participants. Both these layers of existence are, however, referring to just one set of physical objects, which are from one perspective seen as material objects and from the other as institutional facts: “Searle’s concept of the imposition of function presupposes two levels of existence: a primary one where things exist as (meaning/function/value-wise) neutral material entities, and a superimposed one where their particular meanings and functions are assigned subjectively or intersubjectively” (Marcoulatos, 2003, 79)24

2.2.2.1 Constitutive rules, institutions, and institutional facts

The concept of constitutive rules also provides Searle´s answer to the question of what is for him the social institution. As he concludes his article What is an Institution? published in the Journal of Institutional Economics, institutions are systems of constitutive rules that enable people to create institutional facts. Such rules “typically have the form of X counts as Y in C, where an object, person, or state of affairs X is assigned a special status, the Y status” (Searle, 2005, 22; similar definition of institution also in Searle, 2010, 10)

The fact that such simply constitutive formula is able to encompass immensely complex and wide range of social institutions is, according to Searle, due to the possibility that the constitutive formula can be iterated i.e., that the status function Y can serve as X element in the assignment of new status function such is the case of such and such pieces of paper X1 counts as money Y1, and under some circumstances, the particular amount of money Y1 = X2 counts as minimum wage, Y2, or Searle´s example of the institutional fact of promise counting in some circumstances as a legally binding contract (Searle, 1995, 125). These iterations of constitutive formula plus the systematic relations among status functions, where for example one institutional fact become the context for another one, is what makes his account of institutions able to explain “enormous diversity and complexity of human civilization” (Searle, 2010, 201)

What distinguishes Searle´s account of institutions as a system of constitutive rules from the accounts that conceive institutions just as a set of regulative rules, or as equilibria modeled in game-theoretical approach, and what brings us back to the mentalistic approach to social relity, is the fact that there has to be an element of collective intentionality, not just individual intentionality for the institution to obtain. As Guala and Hindriks argue, “A central claim of the constitutive rules approach is that institutions exist only because we believe they exist. Our beliefs are thought to play a constitutive role with respect to institutional actions.” (Guala and Hindriks, 2015, 470)

that account for the existence of these frame principles. (Epstein, 2015, 82, see also Epstein´s article on Social Ontology (2018)) In Searle´s account, the grounds for the social phenomena are constitutive rules, which are set up by anchors in the form of collective mental attitudes. 24 Such interpretation of Searle´s account as deploying two levels of existence that realized on the same physical stuff corresponds with Searle´s refusal to talk about the category of social objects, as suggested by Smith (2003) or Lawson (2016, using the term social entities). Searle argues that the notion of social objects is “at best, misleading because it suggests that there is a of social objects as distinct from a class of non-social objects.”(Searle, 2003, 302) Instead of there being social objects are there, according to Searle institutional facts, which are simply different descriptions of the same brute physical objects: “[W]hat we have to say is that something is a social object only under certain descriptions and not others, and then we are forced to ask the crucial question: What is it that these descriptions describe?” (Searle, 2003, 302)

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To further elucidate on the role of collective intentionality for social institutions it is worthwhile to points toward the distinction Searle makes between types of institutional concepts and individual tokens in the case of codified and uncodified institutions. In the case of codified institutions such as money, the collective intentional attitude is directed towards the type of the social concept concerned and not towards each individual token of this concept. Individual tokens (e.g., individual dollar bills) need not be separately collectively accepted since their acceptance “is already implicit in the acceptance of the (constitutive) rule” (Searle, 2010, 13)25 However, in the case of uncodified, informal institutions such as Searle´s example of cocktail parties (Searle, 1995, 33-34) the collective acceptance applies to each individual token since if no one on the given token of the cocktail party thinks that it is a cocktail party, then it would not be a cocktail party.

The distinction between codified and uncodified institutions is used by Searle in Making the Social World also to amend and broaden his theory of institutional facts and social institutions. In The Construction of Social Reality, Searle argued that all institutional facts are created only within the structures of constitutive rules meaning that there always has to be some established rule of the social institution i.e., constitutive “X counts as Y in C” stipulating the general conditions for the physical object X to be counted as institutional fact, and from which each individual institutional fact emerges. In the Making the Social World, Searle amends his theory by recognizing that some institutional facts can arise on so-called “ad hoc basis” (Searle, 2010, 19-20; 94-96) outside the established systems of institutions. In these cases, there is no general rule stipulating which brute facts count as institutional facts, but the imposition of status function on one particular material object by collective acceptance of such status. The example that illustrates such ad hoc imposition is Searle´s example wall decayed into the line of stones that in community acquires the status function of boundary simply by collective acceptance of this status i.e., without the requirement of there being any explicit rule stipulating the exact conditions that the line of stones needs to possess in order to be counted as a boundary. (Searle, 2010,94-96)

2.2.2.2 Further amendments: Freestanding Y terms and the role of Declarations

In addition to the institutional fact created outside established institutions, Searle in Making the Social World makes two further amendments to his general theory of institutional reality. The first refinement that extends the scope of his account as well as enables Searle to cope with the criticism raised by Barry Smith (2003) and Amie Thomasson (2002) is the acknowledgment that the physical element X on which the status function is imposed needs not always be present. Searle calls such cases of status functions that are created “without there being an existing person or object who is counted as the bearer of the status function,” as the “freestanding Y terms” (Searle, 2010, 20; 97-100) and on other places talks about them as about the “abstract” or “fictitious” entities. (Searle, 2003, 305; 2010, 100) The examples of such freestanding Y terms include the institutional fact of electronic money in fractional reserve system or the creation of limited liability corporation that does not stand for some concrete physical entities on which the functions are imposed. In such cases, the role of collective intentionality is only more visible since without there being any entity X whose physical structure would make it at least more likely that such and such status function will be imposed on it, it is all about the mental representations of the statuses that these status functions are created. For some authors (Gallotti and Michael, 2014; Smith 2014) the account of such freestanding Y terms poses a threat to Searle´s alleged naturalism and brings his theory to the “Platonist account, whereby status functions are self-standing abstract structures that can be instantiated in concrete contexts” (Gallotti and Michael, 2014, 81)

25 This type/token distinction has a consequence that the people could be mistaken about particular tokens of given institutional concept. As Searle demonstrates this point: “There might be a counterfeit dollar bill in circulation even if no one ever knew that it was counterfeit, not even the counterfeiter. In such a case, everyone who used that particular token would think it was money even though it was not in fact money” (Searle, 1995, 33)

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The second amendment to Searle´s earlier account consists of the accentuation of the essential role of language for the creation of institutional facts. Whereas in The Construction of Social Reality Searle only argued that language is essential for the human ability to represent created status functions and through which “a very large number, though by no means all of them [institutional facts], can be created” (Searle, 1995, 34), in the Making the Social World Searle raises the stronger claim that language as the primary social institution plays a constitutive role in the creation of all other institutions. More specifically, Searle now holds that the way how all status functions are created is by declarative speech acts – “Status Functions Declarations” (Searle 2010, 13) that have a peculiar character that they can create the very states of affairs that they declare as already existing. Even though the language and especially declarative speech acts are the essential part of Searle´s theory, for the argument of this chapter, I do not consider it to be essential to present the comprehensive analysis of what is the structure of such Declarations and how they give rise to institutional facts. In fact, even though Searle argues in his novel book that all institutional facts are created by speech acts of Status Functions Declarations, what makes these Declarations efficacious in society is that the declared status functions are being collectively accepted, which brings him back to the mentalistic account. (Searle, 2010, 99-100) Moreover, the notion of a Status Function Declaration as Frank Hindriks argues, “raises more questions than it answers. As it is confusing rather than enlightening, Searle would be better off without it. Given that it features in the main thesis of his latest book, it follows that what Searle claims to be his main theoretical innovation does not advance his social ontology significantly beyond his earlier work.” (Hindriks, 2013, 384; criticism of Declarations also in Lawson, 2016, 373-377; or Prien et al. 2013)

2.2.3 Collective Intentionality and the deontic powers of institutional facts

In the previous section, we saw the operation of collective intentionality with respect to status functions’ assignments. Status functions, however, as Searle contends, are not created for their own sake, but “to create and regulate power relationships between people.” (Searle, 2010, 106) To put it in another, even more convincing claim, “everything we value in civilization requires the creation and maintenance of institutional power relations through collectively imposed status functions” (Searle, 1995, 94). Thus, the creation of status function, at least according to Searle’s most recent theory26, necessarily implies the creation of powers among people - deontic powers - that include various sorts of , obligations, authorizations, requirements, permission or certifications. (Searle, 2010, 123) The presence of these deontic powers is thus an indicator of whether a given phenomenon is an institutional fact or not. (ibid. 91) In the interpretation of Joshua Rust, “[t]he deontic powers—rights and obligations—that underlie institutional facts concern the means by which a person with an institutional status brings about a function” (Rust, 2009, 130) The establishment of the institutional fact of money thus create rights on the parts of their possessors to use their purchasing powers and obligations to accept it, the status of student grants the holder the rights to profit from various student benefits, and the ownership of private property grants the holder the right to exclude other from inhabiting it as well as the obligation to pay taxes from it. As Searle clarifies, by introducing the deontic powers of institutional facts, he does not want to show how constraining these facts are but are primarily “enormously enabling in human life and give us all kinds of possibilities that we could not otherwise conceive of” (Searle, 2010, 124). This statement is also related with the essential meaning of constitutive rules, which was introduced by Searle to account for new forms of behaviour that emerges by it employment: “The creation of constitutive rules, as it were, creates the possibility of new forms of behaviour” (Searle, 2011 [1969], 35)

Based on the assumption that status functions imply the creation of deontic powers, Searle in both his books reformulates the status function creating formula, whether in the form of constitutive rule or Status Function Declaration, to the form that accounts for this power element. Thus, in The Construction of

26 In The Construction of Social Reality Searle claimed that there are examples of honorific status functions such as victory and defeat in the game or institutionally sanctioned forms of honour and disgrace where the status is valued for its own sake i.e., without implying deontic powers in the form of rights, obligations, etc. (Searle, 1995, 101-102)

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Social Reality, we can find that the general structure of we-intentions that establish the deontic powers has the form “We accept (S has power (S does A)” (Searle, 1995, 104) where S stands for particular individual or group of individuals to which the power (either positive in the form of rights and entitlements or negative in the form of requirements or prohibitions) is conferred. Similarly, the account based on Status Function Declarations present in Making the Social World can be transcribed into power-relation creating form: “We (or I) make it the case by declaration that a Y status function in C and is so doing we (or I) create a relation R between Y and a certain person or group of persons, S, such that in virtue of SRY, S has the power to perform acts (of type) A.” (Searle, 2010,102)

In both cases, what stands behind the creation of deontic powers that are attached to institutional facts is that these powers are being mentally represented as existing by participants in a given community, and even if not always positively accepted at least recognized as existing. Therefore, collective acceptance is for Searle the limit to how many types of institutional facts humans can create (Searle, 1995, 96)27. Searle extends his collective intentionality claim for the existence of deontic power even to the realm of political powers where he claims that since police and militarily is ultimately the system of status functions, it is a collective acceptance that is the ultimate source of political power in society: “Governmental power is a system of status functions and thus rest on collective recognition or acceptance […]Because the system of status functions requires collective recognition or acceptance, all genuine political power comes from the bottom up” (Searle, 2010, 163, 166).

The recognition of the deontic power account as the distinct way how Searle employs the collective intentionality in his theory of social reality can be found in the commentaries of Frank Hindriks (2003, 190), Raimo Tuomela (2003) or Stephan Turner (1999, 226). Joshua Rust, author of two monographs on the work of John Searle (Rust, 2006; 2009), conceives the fact that institutional facts involve deontic powers as being their distinguishing mark, which is for him far more adequate than Searle’s emphasis on independence of status functions on physical properties of the entities concerned. (Rust, 2009, 129) The latter is for Rust not the adequate distinction since in many cases the status functions are in some way dependent on the physical features of the objects concerned.28

2.2.3.1 Desire-independent reasons for actions

Searle in his account of the deontic powers also provides an account of how these powers can relate to the behaviour and the processes of reasoning for actions of individuals. In order to stick to his opinion that agents dispose in their decisions for actions with the freedom of the will and act primarily on the basis of their reasons for action29, Searle needs to show how the deontic powers can provide the individuals with such reasons, and thus motivate their actions in the ways that is no deterministic i.e. that does not mechanically induce individuals to particular actions. The way Searle deals with this issue is by introducing the concept of desire-independent reasons for action. (Searle, 2001, chapter 6; 2010, chapter 6) These are the reasons that do not originate from the agent’s motivational set i.e. his inner desires and wants, but from his or her recognition of the deontic powers of institutions. In short, the motivating factor in the case of promise is usually not the desire to fulfil the promise, but the commitment that stems from one’s recognition of the normativity that is inherent part of a promise. In similar manner, what motivates the agent to pay for the bill in restaurant or to obey the rules of state is

27 “So the question How many types of institutional facts could there be? boils down in large part to the question What sorts of power can be created just by collective agreement?” (Searle, 1995, 96) 28 Rust employs the example of the institutional fact of a physical wall on the border between USA and Mexico to demonstrate that “contra Searle, this status is not contingent on whether or not there happens to be a physical barrier between the countries […] Searle is mistaken to think that he can make a reliable distinction between institutional facts and other kinds of functional facts, including social ones, by appeal to the physical structure of those facts alone.” (Rust, 2009, 128) 29 For Searle’s perspective on the issue of the freedom of will, which he sees as the existence of “causal gaps,” i.e., some sort of indeterminacy, between agent’s beliefs and desires and the formation of intentions, and subsequently between the formation of intention and actual actions and their completion in the case of extended actions see chapters 1 and 3 in his book Rationality in Action (2001), or chapter 8 in the Mind: A Brief Introduction (2004) 26 not his or her desires to do so, but the recognition of obligations and rights of institutional facts. The whole system of institutional facts thus works “by enabling agents to created desire-independent reasons for acting. These reasons are capable of motivating behaviour because although they are desire-independent, they can rationally provide the basis for desires” (Searle, 2010, 143) Searle’s account of deontic powers thus shows that there are two links between the minds of individuals and deontic powers of institutional facts. On the one side, the collective acceptance of the deontic powers i.e. mental states of We-acceptance is constitutive of the very existence of deontic powers. On the other side, once these powers are created, they are capable of motivating individuals by providing them with the desire-independent reasons of actions. The following schema depicts authors personal interpretation of Searle’s account of operation of deontic powers.

Figure 1: Author´s interpretation of the functioning of the deontic powers of institutional facts

2.3 Summary and author’s interpretation

The previous subchapters aimed to provide the essential insights into Searle’s social ontology, from the mentalistic perspective that his theory is commonly apprehended. The main argument around which the chapter was built was Searle´s frequently pronounced idea that the social reality is constituted by mental representations of individuals. This argument could naively be interpreted as the statement to the extent that the social, and more specifically, institutional reality, exists only to the extent that humans believe of it as existing. (Searle, 1995,32) However, these beliefs cannot be just beliefs of individuals per se, but are always beliefs in the intersubjective mode of collective intentionality. The postulation of collective intentionality as we saw in section 2.1.1 does not stand for the existence of some kind of group mind or collective consciousness above the minds of individuals, but simply for humans’ biological capacity to produce intentional states in the collective “we” mode. In this sense, collective intentions are structurally similar to individual intentions, which enables Searle to analyze them as having logical, propositional structure, the postulation of which leads him to the compelling claim that social reality itself has a logical structure. (Searle, 1995, 90; Searle, 2006, 15; Searle, 2010, 16)

By defending the idea of the logical structure of society, Searle, however, does not want to propose that all the society consists of are the ideas held by people that are removed from the reality of material entities in the world. On the contrary, Searle, adhering to the Scientific Naturalism, argues that the social reality has a concrete physical realization in the realm of brute facts, whether these are physical objects

27 such as pieces of paper in the case of money, concrete persons in the case of presidents and officials, or even sounds coming out of peoples’ mouths or marks on the paper in the case of language. (Searle, 1995, 35) The principal thesis is that we humans as biological creatures with the of collective intentionality, which itself as every mental phenomenon is realized in and caused by physical brain structures, impose functions on the other brute physical phenomena or people and their activities, and in this respect, create another layer of facts superimposed on the layer of brute physical facts. The creation of this level of reality with superimposed social meanings also entails the establishment of the power relations among people that enable or constrain individuals in their actual actions and create for them the reasons for action that are independent of their actual inclinations. Such a mechanism of the power mechanism of institutional facts facilitating their operation in society is represented by Searle in the following scheme of equivalences and implications:

Institutional facts = status function → deontic powers → desire-independent reasons of action (Searle 2010, 23) To get the full-fledged picture of Searle´s mentalistic account social ontology the starting point of which is the element of collective intentionality, I want to conclude this chapter by my own extension of this Searle´s schema, which on the one side emphasizes that all institutional facts are made possible only in virtue of collective intentionally, and on the other side, shows the move in the building up of the social reality from the realm of brute physical facts to the realm of institutional facts.30 Figure 2: Author´s interpretation of Searle´s mentalistic account of institutional reality Collective intentionality ➔ (brute physical facts “X counts as Y in C” institutional facts = status functions) ➔ deontic powers ➔ desire-independent reasons for actions To conclude this chapter, I would therefore use the words of Joshua Rust that clearly summarize the project that Searle abiding the thesis of Scientific Naturalism aims to achieve in soocial ontology: “In short, Searle bridges the gap between the ontologically objective world as described by science and the ontologically subjective, agent-dependent cultural world by way of another, more primitive ontologically subjective fact—the agent’s mental states. Money and the presidency are possible because we make them possible; we, as conscious agents capable of sustaining intentional states, impose a status function on otherwise brute, blind, ontologically objective phenomena” (Rust, 2006, 132) The aim of the next chapter will be to depict some points of the critism towards Searle´s mentalistic account primarily from the perspective of an alternative, practice-based approach to social ontology that considers human daily social practices, not the mental representations, as the primary domain of society and social order. As will be shown, when the theme of social ontology is approached from too mind-oriented perspective, as some authors claim Searle´s theory does, it carries with itself various forms of criticism steming from disregard to the aspects of the social reality that are only realized in actual human actions, and that are therefore not underpinned by relevant mental representations.

30 In the case of freestanding Y-terms that do not have any concrete physical realization the element of brute physical facts can be absent 28

3 SEARLE´S SOCIAL ONTOLOGY: THE OBJECTIONS FROM THE PRACTICE-BASED PERSPECTIVE

In the previous chapter, the common interpretation of Searle´s social ontology was outlined, one that conceives the mind and its capacity of intentional representations in the collective form as being fundamental for the constitution of the social world. From this perspective, Searle´s social ontology is, in the words of Jonathan Friedman, “reminiscent of certain mentalism suggesting as it does that the structures of societies are propositional schemes” of mental representation. (Friedman, 2006, 73) In Similar manner, Gallotti and Michael (2014) denote Searle´s theory as kind of intentionalism, the position in social ontology in that views “the facts about the intentionality of the “creator,” be it a group of individuals holding collective attitudes or an individual intending to craft an artifact with a certain function, are the sort of property that sets the conditions for social kindhood.” (Gallotti and Michael, 2014, 6)

Searle´s social ontology, even though it had been in years preceding Searle´s legal affairs and accusations the leading contemporary socio-ontological account (Smith, 2003, 16; Gallotti and Michael, 2014, 5; or Epstein, 2015, 8), has been subject to many forms of criticism. In this chapter, I want to focus on a particular aspect that is present in many of these critics, and that can be summarized as the missing role of social practices in Searle´s account of the construction of social reality. This critical argument can be further depicted with the help of some explicit statements from the secondary literature by following points: (1) Searle´s ignorance of “the chief dynamo of social existence -human activity” (Schatzki, 2015) and preferring the talking about the abstract structures in individuals´ mind instead; (2) “almost total absence of categories of ´reproduction´ or ´transformation´ or ´process´“ in Searle´s theory (Lawson, 2019, 63); (3) too individualistic and internalist comprehension of collective intentionality, which according to many itself owes its existence to human interactions, practices, and relations among people and should not be therefore viewed as a precondition for these form of human coexistence; or (4) the fact that many social phenomena rather than being created by mental representations emerge gradually either from human practices and conventions towards particular physical objects and people or as unintended consequences of human interactions and distribution of resources within the society.

The reason why I have chosen this aspect of criticism is its wide-spread appearance in the interpretations of Searle´s theory as well as its potential to point towards an alternative account of the construction of social reality, one that is based on human activities and the patterns thereof– social practices. Such an approach, which in the course of this chapter will be denoted as the practice-based approach to social reality, is defended by my many contemporary as well as past authors in social sciences and is the approach I personally am sympathetic to.

After introducing the basic premises of such practice-based approach to social ontology, I want to provide a systematic critique of Searle´s mentalistic account with regards to the missing aspect of practices in his theory. This chapter will serve as the foundation for the final chapter, in which I will try to provide an alternative reading of Searle´s social ontology, one that is closed to such a practice-based approach, and that could also free him from some of the critical points introduced in this chapter.

3.1 Practice-based approach to social ontology

A practice-based approach to the social ontology can be easily characterized as one that conceives of ultimate constituents of the social world to be social practices i.e., established ways of proceedings whether concerning human interactions e.g., standing in the particular distance to each other when communicating, or concerning individual actions that are performed according to social consensus such

29 as the practice of using particular objects for exchange or practices of eating with particular material objects. To establish some explicit definition of the term social practice could be difficult since individual authors have offered a different interpretation of social practices differing, for example, in whether the term practice necessary implies the routinization (e.g., Reckwitz, 200231) of activities or rather "open- ended" organized activities that are themselves always subject to change (e.g., Schatzki, 1996; 2002 or 201532), in the extent to which practices are taken as normative concept, or in different emphasis put on the role of material arrangements in the definition of practice. What, however, binds these various definitions of practices, and what was clearly expressed by Theodore Schatzki, currently one of the most prominent figures in the field of practice-theory, is that social practices are conceived as organized actions (Schatzki, 2019, 52), and therefore both their necessary bound to and realization in actions of individuals and that their internal organization, which subsequently organize the actions of individuals is recognized: "Common to these and other social theoretical practice theories is the idea that practices are organized actions. According to these theories, practices (or practices-in-fields) have two dimensions: actions and organizations." (Schatzki, 2019, 52) Finally, to offer at least some explicit definition of social practice, the definition offered by Spaargaren et al. who tried to bring in line various perspectives on social practices could be stated:

"[S]ocial practices are shared, routinized, ordinary ways of doings and sayings, enacted by knowledgeable and capable human agents who – while interacting with the material elements that co- constitute the practice – know what to do next in a non-discursive, practical manner." (Spaargaren et al. 2016,8)

The authors writing in the tradition practice-based approach usually refer to the work of sociologist and Anthony Giddens as being foundational for the current practice-oriented thinking in social sciences, the continued interest in which and even its importance as being "steadily on the rise within the social sciences" (Spaargaren et al. 2016, 6) is documented among other by several volumes on practice theory published in recent years (Schatzki (ed.) 2001; Hui, Schatzki, Shove (eds) 2016; Buch, Schatzki (eds) 2018; or Spaargaren et al. (eds) 2016). The roots of practice thinking can be found already in the of , and his "habit ontology" (Testa, 2017), existential phenomenology of later adopted and extended by (Dreyfus [Wrathall ed.] 2014 for instance); or the later theory of Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Rouse, 2007, 501-504; Reckwitz, 2002, 244). As Schatzki interprets Wittgenstein's legacy, he provided an account of intelligibility and understanding that is not within discrete human minds but in the flow of praxis and articulated how intelligibility and understanding structure human action and the social realm. Such an account provides a basis for a theory of practices which recognizes that "both social order and individuality … result from practices" (Schatzki, 1996, 13). Contemporary authors writing in the practice-based tradition are Theodore Schatzki, Andreas Reckwitz, Elizabeth Shove, Joseph Rouse, or Robert Schmidt.

3.1.1 Practice-based approach and the constitution of social reality

The starting point, from which the practice theorists commence their investigation of social reality is a dismissal of on the one side individualist or subjectivist theories that conceive of the social world as entirely construed by mental states and actions of individuals and on the other side the structural or objectivist theories, from the perspective of which the individuals are entirely determined by the social structures and their positions within these structures. As Spaargaren et al. summarize this effort to overcome the established agency-structure, objectivist-subjectivist dichotomies,

31 "A practice is thus a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described, and the world is understood." (Reckwitz, 2002, 250) 32 “Practices are nexuses of human activity, open-ended sets of doings and sayings organized by understandings, rules, and teleoaffectivities." (Schatzki, 2015) 30

"practice theories seek to find the middle ground between voluntarist or subjectivist (society as the result of actions, values, and preferences of sovereign individuals) and structural or objectivist (society as made up by structures which 'govern' the grand totality behind the backs of human actors) accounts of the social." (Spaargaren et al. 2016, 6, Similarly also in Bourdieu, 1980,52, Schatzki 2015 or Rouse 2007, 505-506)

Such a middle ground opens the way to comprehend the fundamental substrate from which the social phenomena are built to be not the mental representations of the external reality in the agents' minds, or the explicit agreements among the participants about the social meanings of particular entities, nor on the reified structures of chains of signs, , discourse, or texts (Reckwitz, 2002, 248) that would exist above the individuals and be principally independent of them. Rather, all the phenomena that are responsible for social order such as agreements, understandings of meanings of social phenomena and social rules, and systems of language and communication, are established within the field of practices - "a field of embodied, materially interwoven practices centrally organized around shared practical understandings" (Schatzki, 2001, 12), and only as incorporated into these nexuses of practices can these order-forming elements such as agreements, negotiations, or mental representations help to create the social order. Another example provided by Schatzki of practice-based perspective view on the social world and social phenomena within it conceive the social reality as a three-dimensional cylinder built out of immensely many fibers of various colours and lengths that are interwoven in extremely intricate ways. Individual fibers represent various intertwined social practices. Thus, social phenomena consist "in a large or small, possibly irregular, convoluted, or discontinuous chunk of the cylinder: a particular interwoven mass of fibers." (Schatzki, 1996, 200) Such a characterization of social phenomena as built out entirely of interwoven practices prevailing in the given community also corresponds with Epstein's influential classification of various approaches to social ontology, in which he characterized the practice-based approach as one that views community's practice as the anchors for social phenomena, i.e. the elements that set up the social categories in a given community (Epstein, 2018) Thus, whereas as was mentioned in the previous chapter, for the mentalistic approach in the case of Searle´s theory it is collective mental attitudes that play the anchoring role for the constitutive rules to be in place, for the practice-based ontology it is regular ways of proceedings that could themselves play such role. As also Ann Swindler argues, "practice encodes the dominant schema—encodes it as a pattern of action that people not only read but enact—a schema that is never explicitly formulated as a rule" (Swidler, 2001,92)

3.1.2 Practice-based approach and the mind of the individual

To prevent the misunderstandings, that could appear with respect to what was said about the practice theory to the extent that it is only some kind of behaviourism or dispositional theory, in which the mind plays no role because the actions are pre-determined by practices, I want briefly to clarify the position of practice-based ontology towards the role of mind in the social ontolofy. Practice theorists do not ignore the role of mind for both the actions of individuals and for the creation of the social world. They, however, hold rather a different picture on mind than Searle's intentional theory of mental representations. The quintessential element in practice-based view on mind and its operation is that practice theorists hold that it is not possible to separate the mind of the individual from the social environment one is inhabiting, and therefore the mind itself is to a large extent shaped by this social environment and prevailing social practices. For example, Bourdieu characterizes his central concept – – which could be conceived of as the generative principle of actions of individuals depending on their position within the social field, as the "reason immanent to the practices" which has its origin in one's interactions with the social world and therefore cannot be apprehended independently from this social world. (Bourdieu, 1990, 85) On the other place Bourdieu talks about the habitus as being a "practical sense" enabling agents to be in a practical relation with the world, "through which the world imposes its presence, with its urgencies, its things to be done and said, things made to be said, which directly govern words and deeds without ever unfolding as a spectacle" (Bourdieu, 1990, 52)

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Here the parallel can be drawn with the term "practical consciousness" introduced by Anthony Giddens, another founding father of practice-based approach, the concept which he distinguishes from discursive i.e., conceptual consciousness, and treats it as a knowledge that "is skilfully applied in the enactment of courses of conduct," which agents cannot explicitly formulate since it is a "knowledge embodied in what actors' know how to do'" (Giddens, 1979, 57, 68)

Similar ideas on mind as a "practice phenomenon" (Schatzki, 2001, 14) that is established within social practices and also operates by implicitly giving people sense of what to do in given practices can be found in influential Andreas Reckwitz's essay, who directly in his definition of practices argues that practices do not encompass just the patterns of bodily activities, but also forms of mental activities or forms of understanding. Practice theorist is thus, according to him, focused on the exploration of "the embeddedness of the mental activities of understanding and knowing in a complex of doings" and how these in-practice-embedded mental activities are interconnected with behavioural routines and established ways of using material objects.33 Practice theorists thus conceive of mind as (1) being formed in the processes of the agents' involvement in the nexuses of the social practices34, (2) being necessarily linked to the human actions to the extent that mental states are themselves manifested in everyday human actions (Schatzki, 2001, 57 for instance), and (3) not operating, at least not all the time, on the basis of conscious mental representations giving rise to outer behaviour, but often on the basis of a particular situation within social practices implicitly disposing agents to certain forms of behaviour.35 In this sense, the practice-based approach pioneers more processual perspective on the nature of mind, which is no longer seen as some inner ontological entity that would be based on representations that give rise to behaviour. Mental states are rather seen as but as "episodes in an unfolding process" (Schatzki, 1996,26) or, in other words, certain aspects of one's life, which are formed upon agent's involvement in social practices and are directly manifested in one's behaviour.

A practice-based approach to social ontology thus views the social practices as the starting point in the socio-ontological study of society, the most elementary and the most pervasive forms of human coexistence that give rise to all other forms of all the other forms. The social world is thus not comprehended as large structure of mental representations, through which the social meanings are imposed on non-social brute physical facts, but as constantly changing and evolving structure of social practices, that precede and to a large extent constitute the individuals and their mentalities, but are at the same time being enacted, reproduced and transformed only by actions of these same individuals to the extent that "[p]ractices produce human agents as much as human agents produce practices" (2016, 11) The chief dynamo behind the construction of social reality is thus not the mind qua collective mental representations, but the actual interactions among individuals and their material surroundings that gradually give rise to the patterns of activities – social practices - from which the social phenomena emerge not as a result of anyone´s intention, but as a natural consequence of social practices.

33 As Reckwitz further adds, practices "necessarily imply certain routinized ways of understanding the world, of desiring something, of knowing how to do something. (Reckwitz, 2002, 251) A similar argument can be found in Schatzki, for whom one of the sub-claims by which he argues that practices are a locus of human sociality is that "Individuals are caught up in the tissues of practices that form their mentality and direct their actions" (Schatzki, 1996, 172) 34 As summarized by Schatzki, "[m]ind is thus constituted within and carried by practices, where […] people acquire the abilities and readiness to perform and to understand a range of bodily doings and sayings. As something essentially so expressed and articulated, mind is primarily instituted, and achieves any degree of complexity, only within social practices." (Schatzki, 1996, 24) 35 This point was accurately expressed by Bourdieu who claimed that “the most human actions have as a basis something quite different from intention, that is, acquired dispositions which make it so that an action can and should be interpreted as oriented toward one objective or another without being able to claim that objective was conscious design” (Bourdieu, 1998 [1994], 98)

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3.2 Criticism of Searle’s theory from the perspective of the practice-based approach

Based on the characterization of practice-based social ontology in the previous section, the following sections will concern various points of criticism of Searle’s theory, which could be included under the heading of the missing role of practice in Searle’s conception of social reality, and excessive orientation only on the mental aspect of social reality under the presumption to provide a naturalistic, logical structure of society. Even though many of the commentaries that will be presented do not come from the authors writing in the practice theory tradition, their contents can be conceived as an attack on Searle’s mentalism from the perspective of a more practice-oriented position.

3.2.1 Searle placing the mind of an individual outside the interactions and social practices

One of the starting points of criticism of Searle’s social ontology is the criticism of his account of collective intentionality. As we saw in the previous chapter, Searle conceives the collective intentionality as the biological capacity of individuals, and therefore, even though it takes plural “we” form, it exists entirely in the heads of individuals, or as Searle puts it: “We simply have to recognize that there are intentions whose form is: We intend that we perform act A; and such an intention can exist in the mind of each individual agent who is acting as part of collective” (Searle, 1990, 407) Moreover, to be consistent with his adherence to the internalism, according to which the contents of mental states are entirely determined within the head, Searle allows that one might be radically mistaken about the actual situation in the world, and may harbour the we-intentions even if “the apparent presence and cooperation of others is an illusion” (ibid.), or even if she is brain-in-vat entirely separated from the outside world.

Such individualist and internalist position on collective intentionality has been widely criticized in the commentaries of Fitzpatrick (2003), Meijers (2003), Viskovatoff (2002), Margolis (2012), Stahl (2013), Gebauer and William (2000) or Schweikard and Schmid 2013) According to these authors, the combination of individualism and internalism that Searle´s conception proposes with respect to collective intentionality cannot sufficiently account for the very emergence of collective mental states, and thus for the emergence of cooperation, which in Searle’s theory is basis for the social facts. Some authors even accused Searle’s account of being a kind of or Cartesian view on the mind, according to which mind is a substance that is utterly separate from the physical world. (Stahl, 2013, 138, Viskovatoff, 2002, 70, Margolis, 2012, 101) According to Dan Fitzpatrick, Searle’s internalistic perspective on collective intentionality “introduces an element of privacy into social facts that is utterly incompatible with the need for public accessibility of the conditions on the basis of which we take social facts to obtain “(Fitzpatrick, 2003) The fact that an individual may entertain a we-intention, but cannot be sure whether the others entertain similar intention, and thereby the possibility of being radically mistaken “rules out the possibility of ever establishing whether a particular social fact obtained or not.” (Fitzpatrick, 2003, 57) Similarly, in his influential critique of Searle’s collective intentionality, Anthony Meijers argues that collective intentionality in the way as it is elaborated by Searle fails to serve as one of the building blocks of the social reality. The reason for such a claim is that Searle cannot incorporate into his account the idea of normative relations that result from people sharing the intentional states, nor the idea of actual sharing of intentional states. (Meijers, 2003, 177). As he argues, “the existence of other agents is not incidental but is a condition for the possibility of collective intentional states. These states are relational states that have a foundation in the participating individuals[…] Certain conditions in the real world with respect to co-actors need to be fulfilled for collective intentionality to be possible” (ibid. 179- 180) Searle’s internalist approach should, therefore, be surpassed by “radical relational approach” that does not see collective intentional as states of separate individuals, but as the individuals related by the “social relations formed in their speaking and acting” (ibid. 181) This final statement can also be

33 coupled with the argument of John Hund’s, who in his commentary concludes that “interaction is a logical condition for collective intentionality” conclusion that cannot be account be Searle’ s “model of man as machine” separated from the outside the world (Hund, 1998, 129-130)

All these criticisms of Searle’s collective intentionality can be linked to the practice-based approach, which, as we could see in section 3.1., considers the mental phenomena as being formed on the basis of one’s involvement in social practices. Such an argument, or the alternatives thereof, is also deployed by many authors commenting on Searle. Gebauer and William when comparing Searle’s theory with the theory of practice of Pierre Bourdieu argue that only the latter, with his concept of Habitus as “a reason immanent to practices” (Bourdieu, 1980, 85) can account for the social constitution of intentionality: “In contrast to Searle, Bourdieu is attentive to the mute and simultaneously eloquent symbolizations and institutionalizations formed in social practice […] Through countless daily acts, the body gives itself (and preserves) its inner and outer posture, its characteristics and way of appearance, its unconscious reactions and intentional actions.” (Gebauer and William, 2000, 74) In this respect, the intentionality, even though it is located inside the body, is located in the person who intervenes in the social contexts and practices, and is therefore “the complex construction of society” (ibid. 73). Such a standpoint differs significantly with Searle’s mentalistic view, according to which it is the mind that constructs the society, or in other words “belief is the universal principle in the construction of society” (ibid, 70), and not the other way around.

In a similar manner, Stephan Zimmerman attacks Searle’s account of intentionality whether in individual or collective form when he argues that in both cases the intentionality is affected “directly and indirectly by our living with others and remain surrounded by a horizon of indefinite and mostly unnoticed conventions and practices which inevitably orient our acting and thinking.” (Zimmerman, 2014) In fact, even Tony Lawson who in part agrees with Searle that “collective intentionality, or something like it, seems to be an essential condition for the emergence of social reality” (Lawson, 2019, 65) argues that social practices play a role in the development of intentionality itself. As he contends, an individual develops her psychological tendencies and social capabilities according to where in space-time she is situated and as based on her experiences throughout life: “Like social systems, human beings are an organization in the process; and we have here a clear process of co-development of human individuals and society as each is continuously reproduced and transformed through the sum total of individual practices.” (ibid. 63)36

All above-presented ideas present a challenge to Searle’s account of intentionality as a biologically primitive phenomenon, which, although referring to intentional states of others, is essentially located and determined within heads of individuals and even allowing that one could be radically mistaken about the conditions in the world. An alternative is to see intentionality itself as being formed within the social practices one is enmeshed in and allow for the constitutive role of these practices on the development of one’s mental processes.

3.2.2 Criticism of the role of collective intentionality for the creation of institutional facts

3.2.2.1 Collective mental attitudes need to be supplemented by social practices

The next point of objections raised against the absence of practice in Searle´s social ontology argues that while collective intentionality is essential for the creation of institutional facts, what Searle’s ignores is that these mental states of collective must also be accompanied by collective practices that would

36 The idea of the development of individual intentionality within social practices can be found already in all authors generally conceived as predecessors of practice theory – Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. Wittgenstein, for example makes this point clear when arguing that “an intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions” (Wittgenstein, 1958 [1953], 337) 34 support and substantiate them. Such is an argument presented by Raimo Tuomela, an influential figure in contemporary social ontology, who claims that Searle’s account while assuming a collective acceptance of the created status functions “downplays the role of (non-linguistic) acceptance- supporting action.” (Tuomela, 2011, 708) According to Tuomela, the full understanding of social institutions requires understating not only what mental states give rise to these social institutions but also how these social institutions are realized in practice. This idea stands behind his statement that for the “notion of a social institution […] we must, in addition, require that there is a relevant actual social practice for realizing and carrying out the collective commitment” which stems from the collective acceptance of given institution. (Tuomela, 2003, 156)

A similar argument can be found in Brian Epstein’s comparison of Searle’s social ontology with the theory of convention introduced by and in the 20th century propagated by David Lewis as well as H.L.A Hart’s Theory of Law. As Epstein interprets Searle’s theory, it is based on the idea that the constitutive rules that set up the individual institutional facts are put in place entirely by the mental states of individuals. Contrary to Searle´s theory, the concept of convention as introduced by David Hume in the Treatise on Human Nature (1740), even though it conceives the conventions being in place partly because of the relevant collective attitudes, it is also the regularities in the social practices that bring conventions into existence. (Epstein, 2015, 54-5) Similarly, Epstein draws a parallel from Hume’s theory of conventions also to the Hart’s Theory of Law laid out in The Concept of Law (1961), which is based on the distinction between primary and secondary rules. Whereas the primary rule stipulates which kinds of behaviour counts as punishable and thus can be compared to Searle’s constitutive rules, the secondary rules “governs how primary rules themselves are put into place and enforced” (Epstein, 2015, 89) And while Searle’s theory counts that mental attitudes towards given constitutive rule are themselves sufficient for the existence of given constitutive rules, Hart’s notion of secondary rules argues that alongside the rule being widely accepted in the given community there must be “convergent set of practices of behaviour” that set up given rules (ibid. 90). In this respect, Epstein concludes that “Searle’s theory is particularly restrictive” in that it allows only mental attitudes towards constitutive rules – “not more general attitudes, not regularities, not practices, nor anything else”- to stand as a metaphysical reason for the existence of these constitutive rules. (ibid. 104)

3.2.2.2 Individual intentionality and behavioural regularities are sufficient for the creation of institutional facts

Another group of authors look at the role of the collective intentionality in the creation of institutional facts from the other side and proclaim that the collective intentionality is redundant or superfluous since all that is needed for the emergence of institutional facts that would possess relevant normativity are individual intentions oriented towards behavioural regularities that are prevailing in a given society, and which are the products of gradual evolutionary development.

Such an argument is proposed by Stephan Turner who on the basis of the historical account of the emergence of money before and after the coinage argues that what is needed for the money to emerge are only individual intentions in making the exchanges according to customs of exchange prevailing in the group, and therefore no individual has to take the we-perspective from the point of view of the group. As he argues, in his story of how the institutional facts emerge “there is a role for accustoming, a role for explicit individual beliefs and intentions, no role at all for collective intentions, and no role for collective beliefs in Searle’s strict sense of being in all the individual minds of the collectivity.” (Turner, 1999, 225) Rather than the existence of money and its status function being dependent on the occurrence of collective intentions to count such and such entities as money, it is, according to Turner, primarily “behavioural regularities” and individual intentions to follow them on which the status function of money relies. (ibid.) The conclusion that Turner draws from such story about the emergence of money is an appeal on Searle “to argue that explicit [individual] beliefs (and individual intentions) together

35 with the habitual ways of acting […] are not sufficient to account for the institution of money, or if not money, some other institution.” (Turner, 1999, 126, edited by author ) A similar argument is also provided by McGinn, who, in response to Searle’s account, claims that “[t]here are cases in our experience in which shared and coordinated ‘I- intentions’ will do the job”. If I intend to treat certain pieces of paper as money and so do you and so does everybody else, then we shall have an institution of money […] [I]t does not seem logically required for the assignment of status function that such (collective) intentions are present” (McGinn 1995: 195).

The idea that the institutional phenomena are not results of the collective mental representations, but emerge out of conventions as coordinating devices, and thus need for their existence only individual intentionality towards these conventions is firmly advocated by Ruth Garrett Millikan. In her essay Deflating Socially Constructed Objects: What Thoughts Do to the World Millikan expounded her view on the social constitution, which for her means simply that the patterns of behaviour – social practices- have certain “causal social history” (Millikan, 2014, 33) i.e., history of their application by the members of a given community, and that this history is required for further application of these patterns: “Copying certain patterns on purpose and giving names to these patterns and some of their parts – that is all that has occurred” (ibid.) Such a perspective on social ontology with the focus on social conventions and practices means that Millikan declines to talk about some special kind of intentionality that produces social phenomena. Instead, the social phenomena are simply specific outcomes of patterns of behaviour that demand from the agents only to have individual intentions to follow the rules (implicit or explicit) that define given convention. And the convention itself is for Millikan just a result of coordination problem that occurs when people individually are aiming for the same goal, for example, exchange of products: “Like other higher animals, people repeat behaviors that have been successful in achieving wanted results. Unlike most other animals, they tend also to copy the successful behaviors of others. Behaviors that constitute solutions to coordination problems achieve results desired by all parties to the coordination; hence, these behaviors will tend to be reproduced when similar results are desired. No thoughts of other people’s thoughts are required” (ibid. 34)

In my view, even though that Millikan is not regarded as the explicit proponent of practice-based approach, such perspective on how the social phenomena emerge out of social conventions is close to the practice-based approach, which holds that the substrate out of which the social phenomena are constituted are patterns of behaviour – social practices – through which certain entities or people obtain their functions, and that need not be necessarily underpinned by some collective mental representations in the heads of agents.

3.2.3 Searle as providing too static picture of social reality

Another argument, closely linked to the practice-based approach, that is used against Searle´s mentalistic picture of social reality, is his neglect of the processes that lead to the emergence of relevant collective mental attitudes towards institutional facts that bring them to the existence, and the analysis of the change or cessation of these representations once the institutional facts are created. As interpreted by authors proposing this kind of objection, Searle’s account only says that as soon as some collective mental representation emerges, the represented institutional fact start to exist, and when some such collective mental representation suddenly vanishes the related institutional facts vanishes too. As could be read in the interpretation of John Wettersten, Searle’s theory amounts to the view that “so long as people think something is an institutional fact, it is. This is nearly all there is to Searle’s theory of the maintenance of institutional facts.” (Wettersten, 1998) Such a theory, Wettersten further argues, does not explain how relevant we-intentions emerge, are maintained or changed: “[Searle] has no theory of the building, change, or rejection of we intentions. Instead of developing an explanation within the framework he is constructing, he postulates a state of nature, a brute fact-the self-interest of individuals- to explain the stability of institutional facts.” (ibid.)

36

A similar point in Searle’s theory is also criticized by Italo Testa, who argues that Searle’s theory merely describes the structure of already existing social and institutional entities without analyzing of how the social change within such theory is possible or what is the dynamics of new social entities coming to existence. For this reasons, “Searle’s social ontology is fundamentally a sort of social static because it is concentrated on the static properties of social reality” (Testa, 2015, 283) Concerning the analysis of the change or cessation of collective mental representations Testa on the other place accuses Searle’s theory for a posing a “deus-ex machina” (2017,56) i.e. unexpected power an event that suddenly and abruptly disrupts the wide collective acceptance of institutional fact. As he argues, Searle in the exposition of the maintenance and transformation of collective acceptance “simply appeals to an ungrounded event, which has no reasons in the dynamics of the status constitution, and that ad hoc interrupts the continuity of acceptance” (Testa, 2017, 56) Such static picture on social reality, which according to Tony Lawson could be clearly seen also by “almost total absence of categories of ‘reproduction’ or ‘transformation’ or ‘process’” in Searle’s terminology (Lawson, 2019, 63), stands in contrast with the practice-based approach, which by conceiving the social practices as a principal dynamo of social reality sees the potential for change every time the social practices are deployed in the actions of individuals. As was this dynamic character of social reality clearly expressed by Anthony Giddens, “social systems are chronically produced and reproduced by their constituent participants. Change, or its potentiality, is thus inherent in all moments of social reproduction.” (Giddens, 1979, 114).

3.2.4 Searle’s narrow view on the social reality

The third point of objections against Searle’s mentalistic theory that could be linked to the practice- based approach concerns the limited area of application of his constitutive rule schema of institutional facts. As exposed in the previous chapter, for Searle the institutional facts are only those that are the results of collective imposition and acceptance of status function, and that involves a certain set of deontic powers (rights, obligations, etc.), which even if not always explicitly codified could in principle be codified (Searle, 1995, 88) As he argues, “institutional power is ubiquitous and essential. Institutional power – massive, pervasive, and typically invisible – permeates every nook and cranny of our social lives […]” (ibid. 94) Two objections could be raised against the narrowness of such delineation of institutional reality that I want to outline in following sections, objectives that are associated with the looking at the social reality from more practice-oriented perspective that could reveal that many of the social phenomena are not associated with particular constitutive rules and clearly assigned deontic powers.

3.2.4.1 Institutionalized practices

The first sort of social phenomena that Searle’s mentalistic approach does not capture are so-called institutionalized practices regulated by social norms of the appropriateness of behaviour, which, however, are not underpinned by some explicit constitutive rules stipulating exactly delineated set of rights and obligations on the part of individuals. Joshua Rust in his monograph on Searle’s social ontology argues that there are many institutional phenomena that “resist articulation under the status-function” paradigm. (Rust, 2006, 154) As he argues, “Searle requires that all institutions could be so codified” and thereby “over-articulates and legalizes the nature of that normative requirement when he maintains that we be able, at least in principle, to describe that normative component in terms of “explicit laws.” (Rust, 2009, 134-135) Rust further argues that even though Searle’s conception is apt and very valuable for certain parts of social reality, there is still another large chunk of our daily human life not captured by rights and obligations, but rather by something as “Aristotelian virtue”37 and social competence i.e., kind of

37 Rust adopts the notion of two kinds of normativity – one based on the prohibitions, rights, and obligations, while the other based on virtues, “skills—qualities of mind or character—that bring about a shared end, most generally characterized as the good” (Rust, 168) – from the Alasdair Maclntyre’s book After Virtue (1984), in which he explicates the Aristotelian concept 37 normativity entailed in established ways of conduct that implicitly stipulates the appropriateness of behaviour. Such an alternative kind of normativity, characteristic for the experienced participant in given institutional setting, is demonstrated in the activities within the institutional structures that are not subject to any explicit rules, but in which still exist the awareness of right and wrong ways of doing them. As Rust argues, “The flexibility, spontaneity, and informality manifest by participants in many institutional practices is a much more telling indication of the presence of a genuine institutional fact than the possibility of their being able to talk or even think about the activity in terms of rules and obligations” (Rust, 2006,163) Such a model of normativity based on the sense of appropriateness of behaviour which is established directly within practices is for Rust useful in the characterization of those social phenomena that Searle considers as most of the time being uncodified, but which in principle could be codified such as friendship, dates, or cocktail parties. (Searle, 1995, 88) Instead of conceiving these examples as cases where there are some explicit rights and obligations, Rust argues that it would be more apt to characterize the normativity in these cases of uncodified institutions as kind of the social competence that comes from participation in social practices and is only realized within these practices. The moral of Rust’s inquiry into Searle’s social ontology is thus that we should conceive Searle’s schema of institutional facts as an ideal-type that “uncovers and obscures certain features of the infinite multiplicity which is institutional reality.”, which, however, has its limitations, and therefore cannot characterize all there is to institutional reality and its normativity (Rust, 2006, 180)

In similar manner Raimo Tuomela argues that Searle, by neglecting those kinds of institutional phenomena based on expectation based social norms -“proper social norms”- leaves out an important class of social institutions. (Tuomela, 2003, 149) As he claims, the central problem of Searle’s theory is that “for Searle, institutional facts exist only within systems of constitutive rules, whereas in my account also ‘proper social norms’ including normative conventions are capable of normatively characterizing social institutions.” (ibid. 152) The examples of such proper social norms that Tuomela provides include cases of the Finish rural tradition of going to the sauna on Sunday and behaving in a particular ways or the informal consensus that could emerge in the collective about who counts as the leader of that collective. (ibid. 154-155) In these cases there are no genuine constitutive rules that would stipulate conditions for what counts as what and what are the rights and obligations of individuals. Rather, the appropriate forms of behaviour emerge in the spontaneous ways from human activities and practices, and based on mutual expectations, the proper social norms can exist even though the relevant status is nowhere codified, or even without participants having the mental representations of how the statuses emerged. As Tuomela interprets Searle, “[his] view seems to be that in the case of proper social norms […] no new deontic statuses and accompanying functions can be created”. (ibid. 155) Such a dismissal of proper social norms in Searle´s theory present, according to Tuomela, a “charge of there being a large lacuna in his theory” (ibid. 155) since as he claims the proper social norms even though not always introducing deontic powers in terms of explicit rights, obligations, etc., create new conceptual and social statuses and establish the norms of behaviour that are taken as appropriate.

Tuomela’s argument is close to one presented by Hubert Dreyfus. Similarly to Tuomela, phenomenological account of Dreyfus argues for the existence of social norms based on the sense of appropriateness and learned in the processes of one’s socialization into social practices. Such phenomena for him do not have the basis in nature, nor are they created by collectively imposing status functions on the brute facts, and therefore forms a lacuna in Searle’s theory: “[S]ocial norms need not be constituted as are institutional facts […] For example, in the case of distance standing, the agent need not be sensitive to a class of physical distances in a type of situation that is constituted as the appropriate distance; the need only be skillfully moving to […] what makes a certain practice appropriate is often so situationally determined that it may be impossible to specify a set of physical

of virtue. The normativity of virtues is characteristic for what calls Phronimos – an expert that has “the skill to both discriminate and respond appropriately to a variety of unique situations” (ibid, 168). 38 features that define the X term and to specify the general way the specific status and function of the Y term.” (Dreyfus, 1999, 15-17). Dreyfus even argues that such uncodified social norms are more fundamental than the deontic powers of institutional facts and, in fact, provide groundings for these deontic powers: [T]he social skills that produce and sustain social norms underlie and make possible social institutions […] Our sense of what is appropriate sets up the power relations that, in turn, give institutions the powers codified as rights and obligations.” (Dreyfus, 1999, 18)

3.2.4.2 Non-intentional systematic social realities

Another class of social entities that contribute to the general fabric of social reality, which are, however, not the product of anyone’s intentions are those that Jonathan Friedman calls as “non-intentional systematic realities” (Friedman, 2006, 75) These social phenomena, whose main characteristic is that they are not results of anyone´s intention are also subject of the criticism of Amie Thomasson who calls them as “epistemically and conceptually opaque entities” meaning that they are capable of existing even if no one believes that any phenomena of this kind exist and no one has any beliefs regarding these kinds of things whatsoever.38 (Thomasson, 2003, 275). The examples of these social phenomena are economic recessions and business cycles, various cultural systems, and other large-scale generalization over properties of social life. Thomasson, for example, mentions the example of racism, a social phenomenon present in many societies that, despite depending on some beliefs and attitudes of people towards the others, does not depend on the attitudes towards the concept of racism itself. Searle’s requirement that all the social facts need to be mentally represented to exist and thereby excluding all the social phenomena emerging as by-products of beliefs, actions, and practices of individuals, thus according to her “severely limits the role the social sciences can play in expanding human knowledge” and provides “far too narrow to account for either the full range of objects studied by the social sciences or the full potential of the social sciences to engage in the process of discovery” (Thomasson, 2003, 275, 278; similarly in Friedman, 2006, 7539)

Searle might try to answer on these objections, as he did in Making the Social World, that these phenomena are simply “systematic fallouts, or consequences, of ground-floor institutional facts” (Searle, 2010, 116) that do not on their own possess any recognized statuses entailing deontic powers and therefore do not pose any difficulty for his general theory. As he claims in response to Friedman and Thomasson, such a systematic fallout from institutional facts do not need collective acceptance for their existence, they “just happen once the rules come into play” (Searle, 2006b, 85) However, as both Friedman and Thomasson argue, these phenomena are often of the central interest for social scientists and dominates much of social life on the macro level. (Thomasson, 2003, 606; Friedman, 2006, 73, also in Tuomela, 2011, 713) Given Searle’s overall aim to analyse “creation and maintenance of the distinctive features of human society and therefore, of human civilization” (Searle, 2010) it seems at least questionable why he leaves such significant determinants of the development of human civilization that could have a large impact on the creation of particular institutional facts and the overall framework of social reality almost untouched.40

3.2.5 Embeddedness of brute physical facts in social practices

38 “Call a kind F of social entities “epistemically opaque” if kinds of that kind are capable of existing even if no one believes that anything of kind F exists, and “conceptually opaque” if things of that kind are capable of existing even if no one has any F-regarding beliefs whatsoever” (Thomason, 2003, 275) 39 “The systemic processes within which all our institutional meddling occurs are serious phenomena. They are surely observer- independent in the most complete sense that our intentions have little to do with them, not unless we can muster collective intentions to do something else.” (Friedman, 2006) 40 To see how such macro-social phenomena are accounted for within practice-based framework see Schatzki´s essay: Space of Practices and Large Social Phenomena (2015) or Jeff Coulter´s Human Practices and observability of ´macro-social´ (2001) 39

The last point of criticism of Searle’s socio-ontological theory I want to present centers around the issue whether the constitutive formula “X counts as Y in C” could aptly capture the move from brute physical facts to institutional facts as Searle affirmatively asserts (Searle, 1995, 45, for instance). The claim of practice-based approach that the brute physical facts are always already embedded in social practices and only on the basis of this embeddedness do they obtain their institutional status poses a contra- argument, which, if proven to be more plausible, would cause Searle’s alleged strategy of revealing the move from brute physical reality to the reality of institutional fact just based on mental representations to fail.

The argument of embeddedness of brute physical facts in social practice has been in different ways expounded by many authors. Terrone and Tagliafico (2014) and similarly Bätge et al. (2013) argue that the context C in the constitutive formula should be conceived as a background of social practices only in virtue of which can the constitutive move function. In this respect, Terrone and Tagliafico argue that “social entity is no longer a mere placeholder for an abstract status function, but a historical outcome that constitutes and embodies a status function in virtue of its belonging to a context––in virtue of its being embedded in the normative practices” (Terrone and Tagliafico, 2014, 84) The context C should therefore not be seen only as playing some secondary role accidentally mediating the relationship between the X and Y element in the constitutive rule. Rather, the context consisting of implicit background practices should be seen as an essential and indispensable condition in virtue of which some X counts as Y. Terrone and Tagliafico, therefore, suggest a reformulation of Searle’s formula to the form “X-in-C counts as Y”: “Here, the context C is not a mere backdrop of the relation between the concrete entity X and the status function Y. Rather, C is what makes X count as Y” (ibid. 70)

Such a reformulation of constitutive rule formula to the form “X-in-C counts as Y” is suggested also by David Hillel-Ruben in his critique of Searle´s concept of constitutive rule. Such a move would according to him accentuate that the move from brute physical facts to institutional facts is always made on the backdrop of some other institutional facts. As he argues, Searle in The Construction of Social Reality has not provided any single example of the constitutive rules operating entirely on the basis of some detached brute facts being transformed into institutional facts. Therefore, he concludes “that certain brute facts ‘add up’ to an institutional fact only when conjoined with a further institutional-conditions clause (like the one that specifies that the piece of paper is money only when issued by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing). In both cases, the need for the added clauses show us the impossibility of comprehending one set of facts wholly in terms of another” (Hillel-Ruben, 1997,446) The impossibility of detaching the X brute fact from social practices in which it is used is also supported by the commentary of Stephan Zimmerman. In his paper, Zimmerman demonstrates on the example of the institutional fact of money that the piece of paper, on which the status function is imposed has “already one or more functional roles in the social practice where it is produced, used in one way or another and talked about, and now just one more is added” (Zimmerman, 2014) The brute fact is therefore never pure fact of nature, on which the human intentionality would impose special social functions, but “has always been entangled with our normative social practices” (ibid.). For this reason, and also for his adherence to the argument from section 3.2.1 that human intentionality is formed within social practices, Zimmerman concludes that one cannot reduce the social world only to the contents of intentional states since “the influence of society seems to go much further and seems to determine a human being more profoundly” as Searle is willing to admit. “All our orientedness” is, therefore, according to Zimmerman “melted into the whole of our being-with with others and in the continuous flow of sense that characterizes our existence: even when we are actually without others.” (ibid.)

The common point of all presented arguments in this section concerns the separation Searle made regarding his constitutive formula from the whole nexus of practices. Authors argue that such separation is mistaken, preventing Searle from conceiving the embeddedness of brute physical facts in social practices. As Gebauer and William summarise this point and also draw the practice-based view on the nature of brute physical facts which are turned into social facts, “The brute facts that are dealt with in

40 social actions are always socially interpreted. From this perspective, social facts are not produced from brute facts, but from institutionalized contexts of social practice” (Gebauer and William, 2000, 74)

3.3 Summary

The main goal of this chapter was not to dismiss the whole Searle’s ontological account of the construction of social reality, but rather to point towards some of its deficiencies from the standpoint of practice-based approach to social ontology introduced in the first part of the chapter. The practice-based approach, in contrast to mentalistic approach, does not primarily focus on how the social or institutional phenomena are encoded in human minds, but on how are they realized in human daily actions and interactions. Specifically, the practice-based approach considers the fundamental substance out of which the social world and phenomena within it are constituted to be social practices i.e., organized nexuses actions into which the individuals are socialized and which are being drawn upon by them in their actual human actions and interactions. In the words of Anthony Giddens, the fundamental premise of the practice-based approach is that “the basic domain of study of the social sciences […] is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of social totality, but social practices ordered across space and time. (Giddens, 1984, 2) Looking at the social reality from such practice- based perspective, which also holds the different perspective of the mind as not being some inner mental phenomena separated from the outside world but a practice phenomenon formed in and directly linked to one’s living in the social environment, many critical points in Searle’s mentalistic approach could be revealed. The objective of this chapter was to identify some of these critical points raised from such practice- based approach which, as was shown, could target many parts of Searle’s theory, from his account of collective intentionality as an innate biological phenomenon detached from the agent’s relations to the outside environment (section 3.2.1), through the role of collective intentionality in the creation, reproduction, and transformation of institutional facts (section 3.2.2; 3.2.3), up to the specific concepts of Searle’s social ontology such as his conception of constitutive rules or the deontic powers associated with institutional facts. (sections 3.2.4; 3.2.5)

The list of the arguments presented indeed does not exhaust all the objections that have been raised against Searle’s theory, even not all that are somehow related to the practice-based perspective. There are, for example, many other criticisms of the concept of constitutive rules and its to regulative rules, criticisms of Searle’s insistence on language as the constitutive for all the other institutional facts, or of Searle’s idea that the deontic power is always emerging merely out of collective acceptance. However, I aimed at presenting some of the convincing and easily comprehensible arguments targeting Searle’s mentalistic account with the common denominator of the indispensable role of social practices for the emergence of both human intentionality and the social and institutional phenomena. Based on the arguments presented in this chapter, I want to take on the task in the final chapter, to look again at Searle’s theory and find linkages that would, despite all the arguments presented in this chapter, bring his theory closer to the practice-based perspective on the nature of the social world.

4 SEARLE’S SOCIAL ONTOLOGY AND PRACTICE-BASED APPROACH: POSSIBLE INTERSECTIONS

The second chapter introduced Searle’s social ontology as exemplary of the approach that considers individuals' minds in the intersubjective mode of collective intentionality as a primary domain of the social reality and as playing a quintessential role for the creation and tg reproduction of social phenomena. The nouns Construction and Making in the names of Searle’s two monographs on social ontology can, according to this perspective, be conceived as referring to collective mental construction/making of the social and institutional reality.

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The third chapter presented various objections against Searle’s mentalistic account of social ontology from the perspective of an alternative approach to a social ontology that prioritizes social practices – the organized patterns of behaviour settled down in given community - and thus conceives the constitution of the social world as being primarily a matter of the agents’ practical engagement with the others in daily social interactions shaped by these social practices. Based on arguments presented in the previous chapter, the aim of this chapter is to look again at Searle’s social ontology through the lens of such a practice-based approach and search for some points of intersection between Searle’s ideas expounded in his socio-ontological inquiries and more practically oriented approach to social reality. The findings of some of these intersections while conceiving Searle’s theory from a different angle than it is commonly viewed could on the one side provide a response to some of the objections raised against his mentalistic theory, and on the other side, offer an unconventional, less mind-oriented reading of Searle’s theory that is in line with practice-based approach introduced in section 3.1. Despite being mostly regarded as a proponent of intentionality-dependent account of social reality, the reading of Searle’s theory can, I think, offer several insights indicating that his account of social reality does not stand entirely on agents’ mental representations, but the important role is given also to social practices and one´s socialization into them through his daily engagements with the social surrounding.

4.1. The emergence of some institutional facts as being a matter of social practices

The first argument one can find in Searle´s inquiry that motivates the practice-based reading of his theory is Searle’s perspective on the emergence of some institutional facts as being a matter of gradual development out of social practices of handling certain physical objects, or treating persons in particular ways. In the chapter devoted to the general theory of institutional facts (Searle, 1995, Chapter 5) Searle refers to the process of natural evolution from common practices as being one of the ways through which the impositions of status functions come about: “The process of the creation of institutional facts may proceed without participants being conscious that it is happing according to this form [..] money gradually evolves in ways we are not aware of. One way to impose a function on an object is just to start using the object to perform that function.” (Searle, 1995, 126). Such a statement, which highlights the using the objects in a particular manner in daily practices over the conscious representations of the status functions these objects possess, goes in line with the practice-based perspective that sees the field of social practices as the mechanism through which the social phenomena emerge.

On the other place, Searle endorses similar idea and explicitly claims that practices are an indispensable element for the existence and the emergence of institutional facts: “[T]he practices of using pieces of paper as dollar bills creates a class of entities that cannot exist without the practice.” (Searle, 1995,76) In the following statement, however, Searle returns to the mentalistic approach arguing that even the practices that bring to existence institutional facts need for their existence that the agents being able to represent the constitutive rule, for example, in the case of money, they have to think the thought “This piece of paper is a dollar bill.” (ibid.)41 Thus, it seems that even if Searle admits that practices are necessary for the creation of institutional facts, these same practices need for their existence the mental representations of the phenomena they create. In this sense, rather than disregarding either the role of the mind or the role of practices, Searle acknowledges the role of both practices and mental representations, and conceives of the creation of institutional facts as involving both agents possessing certain collective mental representations and behavioural expressions that are performed according to some social practices. Seeing from this perspective, Searle can, I think, handle the objections raised by Tuomela or Epstein (Section 3.2.2.1) that he ignores the role of practices supporting the mental representations and holds that construction of social phenomena runs solely on the basis of mental representations

41 “For all cases of agentive function, someone must be capable of understanding what the thing is for, or the function could never be assigned. At least some of the participants in the system of exchange must understand, consciously or unconsciously, that money is to buy things with, screwdrivers are for driving screws, and so forth” (Searle, 1995, 22) 42

Another point that Searle makes in the Construction of the Social Reality that indicates that practices regulated solely by regulative rules, which do not yet have an institutional status imposed by collective intentionality precede the creation of institutional facts is made when Searle analyses the criminal law. Searle claims that in the case of certain crimes the institutional statuses of these crimes and the related punishments attached to these statuses are imposed only on the already established norms regulated by regulative rules: “Thus the regulative ‘Thou shalt not kill’ generates the appropriate constitutive ‘Killing, under certain circumstances, counts as murder, and murder counts as a crime punishable by death or imprisonment’” (Searle, 1995,50) In other words, there are many forms of behaviour that are in community regarded as inappropriate, which gradually emerge and are subsequently followed by individuals without them mentally representing that some status function is thereby created. The point of criminal law is constitutive in that way that it makes these types of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour codified as being against the law and punishable by sanctions, thereby creating the status functions with associated rights and obligations. However, the foundations for such codified criminal law are implicit social norms prevailing in a given community that are drawn upon in the actions of individuals. Such a view corresponds with the argument presented in section 3.2.4.1 proposed by Rust, Tuomela, and Dreyfus that considers the norms of appropriate behaviour regulated by implicit regulative rules as having primacy over explicitly codified status functions with delineated deontic powers. As Dreyfus claims, “Our sense of what is appropriate sets up the power relations that, in turn, give institutions the powers codified as rights and obligations” (Dreyfus, 1999, 18)

The argument for the evolutionary process of coming to the existence of institutional facts out of prevailing practices can also be found in Making the Social World. As indicated by Searle’s example of a line of stones acquiring the status of boundary as part of process through which some established dispositional ways of conduct are turned into collectively recognized status of the boundary (Searle,2010, 94-95), social practices could in many cases be the grounds for the mental representations of given institutional facts as well as bring these institutional facts in existence. Searle makes similar statement also in the interview with Gallotti and Michael where he applies the gradual process of creation of status function on the example of private property: “I assume, for example, that private property evolved simply out of the practice that people had of possessing and hanging onto certain things[…]People can inadvertently create someone as the leader of the tribe just by treating that person with more deference, respect, etc.” (Gallotti, Michael, 2014, 24)

4.2 Continued maintenance of institutional facts as a matter of practice

The recourse to the practice-based approach can also be found in Searle’s remarks on how the institutional facts are maintained in their existence. Searle on the various places argues that people are not usually aware of what exactly is going on in their continued acceptance of institutional facts and/or can mentally represent the status functions in a completely different ways as what are their actual status function. They can, for example, represent some status function as being assigned by God or being a part of natural order, not as something that is created by the collective intentionality. As Searle claims, “[E]ven in the cases where the function is assigned in collective acts of intentional imposition, the subsequent use of the entities in question need not contain the intentionality of the original imposition” and people living in a given culture “simply take it for granted that these are certain types of [institutional phenomena]” (Searle, 1995, 126) In the Josef Moural’s interpretation of this Searle’s claim, the whole structure of status functions might according to this Searle´s idea become invisible, and could smoothly function without participants having relevant mental representations of the status functions: “Once imposed, the functions are - so to speak - invisible, and we simply operate within a world full of ready-made expectation-and-fulfilment patterns” (Moural, 2002, 276) Similarly, in Making the Social World Searle argues that often the maintenance of institutional facts rests in people not knowing of what is going on and in their social practices simply take the institutional facts as given (Searle, 2010, 107). Therefore, people do not need to mentally represent that it is only in 43 virtue of them collectively accepting such and such status functions that these status functions exist. I think, such a perspective on how the institutional facts are sustained may imply two points. First, (1) it can indicate some tension in Searle’s theory where he at one place insists that “it is essential to the functioning [of the status] that there be continued acceptance of the status” (Searle, 2010, 117) and, on the other place argues that people usually do not hold explicit mental representations of status functions. The possible explanation of this tension could be that Searle means by the term collective acceptance also that individuals simply continue to engage in practices that sustain given status that could also be supported by Searle’s definition of self-referentiality of social objects by which he understands not only that the objects are believed to be given objects, but also that they are “used as” the objects that satisfy their definition. (Searle, 1995, 32) Similarly in the article What is an Institution? Searle notes the collective acceptance “marks a continuum that goes from grudgingly going along with some social practice to the enthusiastic endorsement of [institutional facts]” (Searle,2005, 10) If so, it could I think, diminish the importance that is given to mental representations in interpretations of Searle’s social ontology, and induce more practice-oriented reading of Searle. Second, (2) such a view on the maintenance of institutional facts could provide a response to some of the criticism raised against his theory by authors who interpret his theory as demanding that people continually need to impose the meaning on the meaningless object to maintain their existence. As, for example Hubert Dreyfus conceives of Searle´s theory, Searle´s claim that the intentionality causally induce the meaning on meaningless entities requires that “value (meaning) must be at least explicitly continually be imposed on brute stuff by individual minds” (Dreyfus, 2001, 191) In response to such Dreyfus’s view Searle again argues that Dreyfus misrepresents his theory since he “thinks that because I must represent the X as having the Y status, I must somehow represent it in the very terms of the constitutive rule, according to which the Y status is assigned […]As I point out, they can be assigning a status to an object without being aware that that is what is happening” (Searle, 2001b, 280)

The main point of the arguments provided in this section could be summarized in Searle´s words who on one places proposes an argument that is close to what I meant by practice-based approach, namely that people “simply by treating an object in a certain way, [they] automatically can accord it a certain status even though its having that status is not part of [anyone’s] intentional content, consciously or unconsciously” (Searle, 2001b, 280) And as will be shown in section 4.4 such a treatment of objects in certain ways might not even always been grounded in intentional mental states, but might become of the dispositional Background structure, in which case Searle’s theory is freed “from the problems of showing that there is something in the minds and brains of all of the members of the relevant collectivities that corresponds to the institutions” (Turner, 1999, 222)

4.3 Primacy of institutional acts over institutional objects

The third point of intersection between Searle’s account and practice-based approach is the emphasis put on the ongoing activities with regards to social objects as having the primacy over the object themselves. As he declares, we do not impose functions on the material objects for the sake of the functions themselves, but to use them in our everyday activities and practices. In this sense, “[w]hat we think of as social objects, such as governments, money, and universities, are in fact just placeholders for patterns of activities” (Searle, 1995, 57) One of the implications of this statement is that the functions of institutional facts are only manifested in actual actions, and therefore that the more institutional phenomena are deployed in actual human actions, the more resilient they become in society. The argument about the priority of acts over objects is employed even in the stronger sense earlier in the book when Searle says not only that the social phenomena are only created for the sake of being utilized in the actions, but also that social actions constitute social objects: “Social objects are always, in some sense, […] constituted by social acts; and in a sense, the object is just the continuous possibility of the activity” (ibid. 36)

Such a position of the constitution of institutional phenomena in action is further used also when Searle’s answers the question of why the self-referentiality does not result in circularity, i.e., why when the part 44 of the definition of some institutional fact is being believed to be that institutional fact, do not we have to believe that we believe that the institutional facts exist and so infinitely. Searle resolves this issue by claiming that the social phenomena have their most basic underpinnings in the daily practices of individuals, where they also obtain their primary meanings: “The word ‘money’ marks one mode in a whole network of practices, the practices of buying, owning, selling, earing, paying from services, paying off the debts, etc. As long as the object is regarded as having that role in the practices, we do not actually word ‘money’ in the definition of money, so there is no circularity or infinite regress.” (Searle, 1995, 52)

These passages reveal some noteworthy implications. First, the characterization of institutional concepts such as money as representing only one mode in a network of practices supports the point already mentioned in the previous section that the conceptual representations of particular social phenomena could be possibly made only after these phenomena are being realized in some social practices. In Stephan Turner’s interpretation of this passage, it shows that the and accounting for various institutions’ concepts begin in the same place – the network of practices (Turner, 1999, 231). Second, the idea that the social objects are constituted by social acts stands in opposition to the characterization of Searle’s account from the beginning of this chapter when the word constitution was referred to as a mental constitution. Searle, for example, earlier in the book with reference to the money as the type of institutional phenomena argues that “the belief that the type is a type of money is constitutive of its being money,” and with other institutional facts, the belief is constitutive even of every token of a given type. (Searle, 1995,33) It can still be argued that the social acts themselves are underpinned by mental attitudes towards given objects utilized in these social acts. However, in every case, the role of actions and network of practices seems to be indispensable. Third, the conception of institutional phenomena as marking one mode in the social practices seems to correspond with the argument from section 3.2.4 of embeddedness of objects on which the meanings is imposed in the whole array of practices, thereby reformulating the constitutive formula into the form “X-in-C counts as Y.” As the example of money shows and as Searle later acknowledges, we need other institutional concepts such as “buying,” “selling,” and “owing” for the definition of money: “We are not trying to reduce the concept ‘money’ to noninstitutional concepts” (Searle, 1995, 53)

Searle’s recognition of the acts as having priority over objects and processes over products that is mentioned also in his novel book42 is appraised by several authors commenting on him. As pointed out by Barry Barnes in his commentary on Searle’s theory with an indicative name Searle on Social Reality: Process is Prior to Product (Barnes, 2002), the switch from objects to actions as was made by Searle is vital for Searle’s project and for the understanding the nature of social reality: “A switch of focus from objects to activities is indeed crucial to a project of this kind.” (Barnes, 2002, 250) The simplified approach initially adopted, in which Searle primarily focused on the “world of stable institutional facts […]ought now to give way to one that explicitly and constantly recognizes the priority of processes […] In rightly insisting on the priority of process over product Searle points the way to a greater understanding of what he initially characterizes as the facts and objects of social reality” (Barnes, 2002, 250) As he further points out, the attention to activities instead of just mental representations of certain objects makes the analysis of social reality more “transparent and readily intelligible” (ibid. 252) by enabling us to that the objects are once given status are then often boxed merely in human activities, that can be based on the vast amount of different intentions, mental attitudes and knowledge possessed by individuals. Thus the activities of individuals that gradually form a patterns and through which the social phenomena are realized “may not only constitute the status but also themselves serve as the continuing physical signs and signals that the thing enclosed by them possesses it.” (ibid. 252)

Italo Testa, in his comparison of Searle’s social ontology with the pragmatic account of the social reality of John Dewey, argues that Searle’s above-mentioned statement that ‘the object is only the continuous

42 “Human social reality is not just about people and objects; it is about people’s activities and about power relations that not only govern but constitute those activities” (Searle, 2010, 106) 45 possibility of the activity’ makes his account closer to Dewey’s pragmatic account of the social reality, which is one of the inspirations for practice-theorist, and which is centered around the notion of habit as being the basic socio-ontological operator, and at the same time as to a large extent structuring the minds of individuals (section 3.2.1). As Testa claims, “the notion of habit is implicitly presupposed by notions of Searle’s social ontology.” (Testa, 2017, 56) Searle´s alleged idea of the primacy of social acts over objects, and processes over products, is what makes his social ontology parallel to Dewey’s notion of habitual dispositions. From this point of view Testa concludes that Searle’s assertion of the primacy of acts over objects could be reformulated into the form that “the object is only the habitual character of the activity” (ibid). And once such a habitual position on social objects is acknowledged, it is not so far to endorse Deweyan practice-oriented position on social statuses, according to which statuses “default positions enjoyed by some actors or objects in an established pattern of habitual interaction, that is, in customs that incorporate an implicit acceptance/recognition of those statuses.” (ibid. 48)

4.4 The Background of social reality

The phenomenon of the Background43 represents the final point that could indicate Searle’s partial departure from the mentalistic account towards the theory that is more in line with a practice-based approach. At the beginning of the analysis I want to note that the Background as such does not primarily refer to the theory of how institutional phenomena are brought to the existence, but rather how once present, they can relate to the mind and the conduct of individual other than on the basis of her or his mental representations of status functions. As will be pointed out in the following sections, at least two links between Background and practice-based perspective could be delineated. First, Background dispositions and capacities are developed in the processes of one’s socialization into social practices, and therefore the practices could be viewed as having priority over mental representations in one’s socialization into the structure of social reality. Secondly, Searle’s characterization of the Background and its non-intentional, dispositional operation in governing one’s conduct could be linked to the practice-based perspective on the mind as practice phenomenon, and more specifically to the Bourdieu’s concept of practical sense, or Giddens’s practical consciousness introduced in section 3.1.2. After the introduction of the concept, I want to outline its role in both of Searle’s books, and subsequently draw some interpretations of it that would point towards the link between Searle’s social ontology and the practice-based view on the mind and its operation within the social world. Although the concept of Background has also been for various reasons such as its characterization by Searle as neurophysiological structure or its introduction only after the exposition of the mind-oriented perspective, there are many indications that the by introducing the concept Searle departs from his mind or intentionality-dependent picture of social reality towards perspective, which allows for the role of agents’ practical engagement with social reality as being the factor that contributes to the existence of institutional facts.

4.4.1 The definition of the Background

Despite not being the most central part of any, the phenomenon of the Background is present in all three areas that Searle studies – philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social ontology. The importance of the Background for Searle’s theory could be deduced already from its definition, which goes as follows: “Background is a set of nonrepresentational mental capacities that enables all representing to take place. Intentional states only have the conditions of satisfaction that they do, and thus only are the states that they are against a Background of abilities that are not themselves intentional states.” (Searle, 1983, 143)44

43 In the course of the following sections, I will use the word Background with capital letters since that is the way Searle uses the term. 44 Searle, in The Construction of Social Reality, assigns to the Background, alongside its role in the formation of intentional states and understanding the meanings of the words in sentences in different contexts also other functions. Background for him also plays a role in perceptual interpretation of outside objects; in the structuring of conscious experiences according to the 46

In other words, Background can be understood as a set of capacities, skills, know-how that are so deeply taken for granted that they do not rise to the level of conscious, intentional representations, but rather form a precondition for creating any intentional state and at the same time be able to satisfy its conditions of satisfaction (see section 2.1.2 for introduction into intentionality). And since the notion of intentional states or mental representations is central to all three Searle’s areas of investigation whether it is with regards to representing the meaning of words and sentences, conditions of satisfaction of intentional states, or the status function of institutional facts, it is clear that the Background plays the substantial role in Searle´s theory. For the purposes of the thesis, I will focus only on the role of the Background with respect social reality.

4.4.2 Background and social reality: The Construction of Social Reality

Searle’s two monographs on social reality both entail the part devoted to the phenomenon of Background and its role for social reality. The perspectives on its role, however, differ between its earlier and later deployment. And since both of these perspectives provide remarkable insights that depart from Searle’s mentalistic approach and could provide responses to some of the arguments raised in the last chapter, I want to outline both perspectives. In The Construction of Social Reality Searle invokes the Background alongside the status function, constitutive rule, and collective intentionality as the fourth building block of his account of social reality (Searle, 1995, 13), and argues even more strongly that “some, though not all, of the intentionalistic apparatus can be explained in terms of, and ultimately in favor of […] the Background of capacities, abilities, tendencies, and dispositions” (ibid. 5)

The Background from this perspective is therefore directly linked to the main type of social phenomena that Searle analyses – institutional facts. In chapter six devoted to the analysis of the Background Searle aims to answer the question of how is it possible that people that are participating in institutional structures and are acting according to constitutive rules of institutions can do so without being consciously aware of the rules of institutions and keeping in their minds the relevant mental representations of the status functions. In this sense, Searle extends the argument from section 4.2. of the continued maintenance of institutional facts as not being a matter of constantly held mental representations and aims at providing an answer of what it is that secures the continued existence of these facts. The answer that Searle proposes is that the person who is participating in the institutional structures gradually develops the Background neurophysiological structure that is “causally sensitive to the specific forms of the constitutive rules of the institutions,” and which subsequently disposes her to the kinds of behaviour that are in line with the rules of institutions. (Searle, 1995, 141) The Background is thus characterized as some kind of mechanism (ibid, 146) that explains the behaviour of individuals, and that itself could be explained by the system of constitutive rules of institutions. Such a mechanism consequently enables an individual to behave in the ways consistent with the rules of institutions without consciously following them. As Searle exemplifies the functioning of the Background with reúsect ot constitutive rules of institutions, “We don’t stop and think, consciously or unconsciously, ‘Ah ha! Money is a case of the imposition of function through collective intentionality according to a rule of the form X counts as Y in C and requires collective agreement. Rather, we develop skills that are responsive to that particular institutional structure.” (Searle, 1995, 143)

The important point about such a dispositional view on the Background that brings it close to the practice-based approach is how an individual develops such dispositional structure. Searle on the various places recognizes that it is through one’s participation in the social practices, that one’s Background mechanism is developed. In his earlier remarks on the Background, Searle claims that “[p]ractice makes perfect not because practice results in perfect memorization of the rules, but because repeated practice enables the body to take over and the rules to recede into the Background. (Searle 1983, 150)

aspects of familiarity; the comprehension of extended sequences of experiences as linked together with some type of narrative shape; or facilitating some kind of readiness for things that can be part of the specific situation but not for other. (Searle, 1995, 132-137) 47

Similarly, with respect to the rules of social institutions, Searle holds that it is through one’s coping with the social reality that the structure of Background dispositions could be developed. The child from Searle’s example (Searle, 1995, 145) does not acquire the rules of promising and other social institutions by looking into some rule-book, memorizing the rules written for a particular situation, and then consciously applying these rules in relevant situations. Rather, the relevant rules of institutions and the possibilities of their application are learnt directly in one’s practical participation in the social practices.45 Seeing from this perspective, it could be inferred that it is the social practices that provide the individual with the contact with social reality by both stimulating the emergence of the Background non-intentional dispositions corresponding with the institutional rules and enabling consequently to form the beliefs and other mental representations of given social phenomena. As Searle demarcate the relation between the Background, practices, and mental representations: “[w]e do not first have the belief and on that basis engage in the activity. Rather, we have the ability to do so. And we just engage in the activity […] [We] can if we wish to form the belief, but the belief derives from [our] capacity for the action and not conversely […] The belief about the Background practices derive from the practices rather than forming justification for the practices” (Searle, 2011b, 126-128)

4.4.3 Background and social reality: Making the Social World

Whereas in The Construction of Social Reality, the Background is linked directly to the institutional facts, the Making the Social World provides a different perspective, from which the Background is associated with the concept of Background power (Searle, 2010, 155-160). The concept of the Background power, distinct from the deontic powers of institutional facts, is deployed by Searle to account for all those social norms and conventional forms of behaviour that results not from the explicit impositions of status functions, but from the Background practices, or dispositions that prevail in particular communities: “The basic concept of Background power is that there is a set of Background presuppositions, attitudes, dispositions, capacities, and practices of any community that set normative constraints on the members of that community” (Searle, 2010, 160). For example, in the case of the dressing practices, Background power could be conceived as associated with the norms that stipulate what kind of clothes are appropriate for particular people in particular situations. (Searle,2010, 157) And since as Searle claims that “the Background practices and presuppositions can constitute sets of power relations” (ibid. 156) and the power relations are the demarcating element of the institutional facts, it could be argued that in the case of the Background power, it is Background of practices that can create institutional facts.46 In this sense, the notion of norms that stems from the Background practices and assumptions prevailing in the community could serve as Searle’s argument against the argument from the section 3.2.4.1, where authors such as Joshua Rust, Raimo Tuomela or Herbert Dreyfus argued against Searle’s conception of social reality on the grounds that Searle ignores a large part of normative social phenomena that are results of institutionalized practices and proper social norms implicitly delineating appropriate forms of behaviour

4.4.4 Background and Practice-based approach: Interpretations

The concept of Background is undoubtedly one of the most widely discussed topics in Searle’s theory. Among many interpretations and criticisms of the concept, there are arguments that it is an element in Searle’s theory through which Searle approaches the practice-oriented approach in his otherwise intentionalistic ontology of social reality. Terrone and Tagliafico building on the Searle’s elaboration of

45 In Titus Stahl’s interpretation of the way how the Background capacities are learnt, it is through the individual “evolutionary mechanism,” i.e., through his or her gradually acquiring the Background in the interactions with the social world, that the dispositions and capacities can be causally related to the rules of social institutions. (Stahl, 2013,131) 46 Such an argument that the Background practices themselves can create institutional facts is also deployed by Terrone and Tagliafico: “Searle now claims that the Background can constitute power relations and norms of behavior, and since power relations and norms of behavior are what status functions are made of, it follows that the Background can create social facts on its own.” (Terrone and Tagliafico, 2014, 74) 48 the Background argue that the introduction of the Background is the way how Searle wants to explain how the social practices in the world can bear upon one’s intentionality: “[The Background] is the ‘Trojan horse’ of social practices in the domain of intentionality” (Terronne and Tagliafico, 73) Searle’s insistence on the neurophysiological character of the Background while acknowledging that the Background dispositions are constituted on the grounds of participation in social practices offers in their view an interpretation of the Background, which is based on the distinction between internal and external Background: “The ´internal Background´ is the way in which our brain implements the ´external Background´ constituted by social practices. Speaking of the Background as internal to the head, as Searle does, seems to be just shorthand for the Background as a system of social practices.” (ibid. 73) In other word, practices prevailing in the society offers the basis, on which grounds an individual builds the internal dispositions that allow him or her to effortlessly engage, without reflecting in the practices of society. Similarly, Alex Viskovatoff, despite criticizing Searle’s internalistic conception of mind as reminiscent of a Cartesian picture of mind and thus preventing Searle from embracing more pragmatist approach to formation of mental states (see section 3.2.1) argues that it is by the introduction of the Background that Searle tries to bring the idea of social practices and agent’s practical engagement with the world outside his mind: “[Searle] introduces the notion because intentionality cannot produce itself, but is made possible by non-intentional rule-following, so he needs a concept like that of practices […] The concept is a device to graft the idea of social practices – which one would normally think of as implying holism, that is, the doctrine that mental phenomena cannot be understood solely in individualist terms – into an individualist, internalist theory of intentionality.” (Viskovatoff, 2002, 70-71)

Other indication that the Background might be associated with the practice-based approach and its understanding of the mind as the practice phenomenon can be drawn from the comparison of the concept with Pierre Bourdieu theory of habitus, which account for the practical sense comprising the socially ingrained dispositions that influence the way the individuals perceive the social phenomena surrounding them and the ways they react to them. Bourdieu himself variously characterizes the habitus, for example as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as a principle of the generation and structuring of practices and representations” (Bourdieu; 1977; 72), or as a “reason immanent to practices” (Bourdieu, 1990 [1980] 85) Searle himself links the concept of the Background to the Bourdieu’s habitus when he writes that the habitus “is about the same sort of phenomena that I call the Background” (Searle, 1995,132) The elucidation of the relationship between the Background and habitus has been subject of two articles. In Gebauer and William’s interpretation, the exposition of the Background by Searle and its association with habitus could be “valuable for making habitus concept more precise” (Gebauer and William, 2000, 78) Searle’s elaboration on the casual and functional level of the Background - the casual impact of the Background dispositions on the conduct of an individual, and the functional equivalence of the dispositions with the rules of the institutions (Searle, 1995, 144) - could be applied to the analysis of habitus and provide insights about (1) the development of habitus by agent reacting sensitively to the institutional structures; (2) the equivalence with respect to the function of habitus and structure of social rules, i.e., the fact that the habitus urges actions that are congruent with the rules of institutions; and (3) the effect of habitus on the behaviour of an individual, by which he means the causal effect of dispositions on the conduct. (Gebauer and William, 2000, 78)

Iordanis Marcoulatos, on the other side, rather than uniting two concepts, sees the disparity between them and argues for the primacy of Bourdieu’s account of habitus. The main critique turns around Searle’s conception of the Background as the neurophysiological structure that only enables the emergence of conscious intentionality but is not then present on the level of actual human actions and engagements in the social practices. In contrast with Searle’s account, he proposes an alternative perspective on the Background, one that is in line with Bourdieu’s dynamic and operational conception of habitus that “is not a mere physiological facilitator of intentionality, but rather an actual aspect of a form of life” (Marcoulatos, 2003, 73), which would also include those elements of the Background that “rise up to the level of behavioural actuality and constitute elements of a presence, which may not be

49 conscious in the sense of being explicitly representational, but are reflexively sensed as part of one’s lived experience.” (ibid. 82) From this alternative perspective, the Background would not only be the facilitator of intentionality and the cause of the behaviour, which is, however, in principle ontologically distinct from actual behavioural performances and present on the level of some distinct neurophysiological structure, but rather would form the manner in which the individual is actually present in given social context, and actually participate in social practices. As he concludes, “if Background analysis is to be anything but amateur neurophysiology, it should focus on the behaviorally actual, aspectual parts of the Background” (ibid. 83)

4.4.5 Conclusion: Background as offering a new perspective on looking at the individual and social reality

The theory of the Background is one of Searle’s most puzzling concepts, which, if nothing else, provides an affirmation of the proposition that in Searle´s theory not all of the human presence in the reality of social phenomena is a matter of mental representations and conscious following of the societal rules. Some of the authors interpreting the concept even go so far to claim that the Background poses a tension or paradox in Searle’s theory. Josef Moural, for example, claims that Searle, by the invocation of the Background and its role for social reality “outright denies” his earlier claims, that the mental representations are necessary for the existence of institutional facts. (Moural, 2002, 278, similar argument was also proposed by Mariam Thalos (Thalos, 2003, 110)) Even though such arguments might threat Searle’s social ontology with the issue of possible inconsistency, it also opens the possibility for the alternative reading of his theory, one that is not based entirely on agents having a mental representation of the institutional facts which themselves constitute these facts, but which foregrounds the agents’ actual practical immersion in his or her social setting, which at the same time can also by virtue of acquired dispositions facilitate the continual existence of the social structures. As Searle himself recognizes, even though he, in the most of the chapters, uses a “first person intentionalistic vocabulary to try to lay bare certain elementary features of social ontology,” such an apparatus, or at least a part of it, can be at the end “explained in terms of, and ultimately eliminated in favour of” the capacities and dispositions of the Background, which are acquired in social practices. (Searle, 1995,5)

4.5 Summary

The previous pages provided arguments for the possibility of the alternative reading of Searle’s theory that departs from the conventional interpretation of his theory, according to which the social phenomena are always created by collective mental representations and could exist only when humans have relevant mental attitudes towards them. Arguments presented in this chapter demonstrated that Searle’s theory could also be perceived from the different perspective that foregrounds social practices, the organized actions in which individuals are immersed in their daily lives. The practice-based reading of Searle’s theory offers arguments for conceiving social practices as (1) the mechanisms through which the institutional facts could emerge (section 4.1); (2) the facilitators of the continued existence of these facts (section 4.2) and in the consequence (3)the field in which the social phenomena are realized (section 4.3) These three arguments, when also supported by Searle’s conception of the Background, the dispositional structure, formed in the processes of man’s participation in social practices and enabling him to operate in society without having adequate mental representations of status functions (section 4.4), could bring Searle’s theory closer to practice-based approach to social ontology outlined in chapter 3. The advantages of looking at the Searle’s theory through the lens of such alternative, practice-based approach comprise among others (1) the possibility of dealing with the arguments presented in chapter 3 by showing that many of them become inadequate once the alternative perspective on Searle’s theory is recognized, as well as (2) the prospects of capturing more aptly the dynamic nature of social reality that is created, reproduced, and transformed only in actual human actions, the position which is for me more congenial than the idea that the whole structure of society can be found in the minds of individuals.

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CONCLUSION

The work of John Rogers Searle, is undeniably one of the most influential philosophical endeavours of recent decades, encompassing most of the areas that the focuses on. What is more, and what also my sparked my interest in his work, is that Searle for the most of his work has expressed his ideas in the comprehensible way deploying the common language and real-life examples rather than some abstract and highly sophisticated vocabulary, but still been able to come up with valuable insights that continue to raise interest in philosophical discussions. The bachelor thesis presented the inquiry into Searle´s account of social ontology, an account whose aim is to demarcate the nature of social reality in a way consistent with Searle´s adherence to Scientific Naturalism, and built on the insights from the philosophy of language and mind. More specifically, the thesis was centred around two approaches to the social ontology and their applicability for Searle´s theory. Following the standard interpretation of Searle´s social ontology, in the first part, I concentrated on the first, mentalistic approach to the social reality that considers the mind and its capacity to being oriented towards the outside world, intentionality, as the principal domain of social reality, i.e., the domain that gives rise to social phenomena and enables their continued existence. On the basis of most parts of his socio-ontological inquiries such a mentalistic approach most aptly characterizes Searle´s account of social reality. However, as pointed out in the fourth chapter, such an approach has been subject to many objections, many of which come from the position of the second, practice-based approach to social reality. Instead of seeing the mind and intentionality as the foundational ordering element and a building block of social reality, the practice-based approach is more concentrated on the realm of social practices, established organized ways of conduct which individuals reproduce and transform in their actual actions, and see these social practices as the ultimate building block and the realm of realization of social phenomena.

Despite all the criticism that Searle´s theory neglects the role social practices have for the construction of the society, the closer look at his theory can reveal several indications of the importance Searle assigns to the social practices. Foregrounding of these arguments could enable an alternative, practice-based interpretation of his theory. The final chapter thus, outlined such an alternative interpretation of Searle´s theory, one that considers social phenomena as gradually emerging and being reproduced in social practices, and that sees the socialization into social practices as resulting in individuals acquiring the Background dispositional structure that enables them to operate within the social world without the need of mentally representing the relevant social phenomena.

In my opinion, rather than being some separate perspective irreconcilable with Searle´s mentalistic approach, the practice-based perspective on Searle´s theory can be conceived as supplementing Searle´s mentalistic theory with many insights that are not discernible when the theory is too much focused on the role of the mind in the creation of the society. In this way, it could broaden the scope of application of Searle´s general project in social ontology as well as respond to many objections raised against it. The initial idea that all there is to the construction of society is that individuals have the mental representations of the social phenomena and in this way facilitate their existence might, when supplemented with the practice-based insights, open up the potential for a more complex and dynamic picture of social reality that recognizes among others, that (1) the social practices play the indispensable role for the emergence of social phenomena; (2) that in many cases the reproduction of social phenomena is a matter of people behaving in certain ways rather than having certain mental representations of the concerned phenomena; and (3) that the social reality is in the constant process of change as the new forms of conduct emerges and the old ones cease to exist or are gradually transformed. In this way, rather than giving a preference to one of the views, my personal view is that both the mind qua mental representations of social phenomena and the realm of social practices are essential for the full-fledged understanding of the ontology of society. 51

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