Search

Searle's philosophical construction of social reality has three basic 'building blocks': collective intentionality, constitutive rules, and the imposition of functions. This article will focus on the first of these, collective intentionality, which is taken to be the central span on the bridge from physics to society. Searle analyzes this notion in terms of his own internalist theory of intentionality. In his view, we could have all the collective intentionality we have even if we were a brain in a vat, i.e., even if we were radically mistaken about the outside world. It will be argued that such an internalist view of collective intentionality cannot capture normative aspects of social phenomena. Social reality requires a radical relational approach.

In his The Construction of Social Reality, Searle presents an account of rights, responsibilities, obligations, duties, and similar entities in terms of the formula X counts as Y in context C, where 'X' refers in the simplest case to some physical object or event and 'Y' to the result of imposing upon X some deontic power or function. Smith attempts to show the limitations of this formula, focusing especially on the examples of contested property rights (where C is not uniquely defined), and of money in bank accounts and other phenomena (where no physical X-term is available). Searle responds to these criticisms, above all by pointing to the fact that some of the problems Smith raises are to be addressed not by an ontological analysis of social reality but rather through legal or political means.

One aim of this paper is to make visible the connection between Searle's views on social reality and his general ontology, and at the same time to show that some peculiar features of his analysis of social reality are a natural outcome of his general ontology. The paper contains five sections. In the first Searle's naturalism is philosophically situated and its differentia specifica explained. Then, Searle's view that intentional states exist only in brains is presented. One might say that, according to Searle, each mind is, although caused by a material brain, a Leibnizian monad. This view is related to an important, but neglected, distinction that Searle himself has made between requirement conditions of satisfaction and required conditions of satisfaction. In the third section, it is pointed out that, necessarily, sometimes there has to exist some kind of relation of satisfaction between the two kinds of conditions of satisfaction. Searle, however, has never really discussed what this satisfactio n relation may look like. The upshot of all the remarks is that, fourth, Searle's general ontology automatically implies an ontology of social reality according to which a social fact can only exist as a scattered aggregate whose items exist in the brains of the people who constitute it. Finally and fifth, I try to think with Searle against Searle. His monadological view of social reality cannot, Searle notwithstanding, be regarded as being close to the direct realism of common sense. Searle's realism is an indirect realism. However, if Searle's view that intentional states exist only in brains is rejected, then the rest of his ontology has features that may take us closer to a direct realism. Such a move, which in one respect takes us closer to common sense, takes us in another respect away from common sense. The title of the last section is 'Social Reality and the Impossibility of Common Sense.'

Searle used to analyze institutional facts in terms of the constitutive rule. In his more elaborate account in The Construction of Social Reality he introduces the notion of a status function. The 'counts as' locution is central to both the constitutive rule and the status function. The main question I ask is what role is left for the constitutive rule after the introduction of the status function. In order to answer this question, I start by analyzing the notion of a status function. An examination of the relation between status functions and the function of representation reveals that the former is a species of the latter. An exploration of the relation between status functions and collective acceptance reveals that Searle does not provide an argument as to why collective acceptance is required for institutional facts. Searle's new account goes beyond his old analysis of institutional facts in terms of the constitutive rule. Rather than declaring the notion to be redundant, Searle assigns the cons titutive rule a new role: it is to account for the fact that there can be counterfeit instances of a subclass of institutions, including, for example, that of money. This subclass consists of institutions that are codified.

The effort to categorize nature dates at least to Aristotle and is still ongoing. The study of categories is termed 'ontology' - a field whose use in the philosophy of social science has most recently been revived. Last April 1998, the State University of New York at Buffalo hosted a conference on 'Applied Ontology: A Marvin Farber Conference on Law and Institutions in Society.' The following papers were selected from the group of papers presented at the conference.

The ontology of marketing, particularly the question of what products and brands are, is still largely unexplored. The ontological status of brands hinges on their relationship with products. Idealists about brands see perceptual or cognitive acts of consumers grouped under the heading 'brand awareness' or 'brand image' as constitutive for the existence of brands so that, in their view, tools of the marketing mix can influence relevant mental dispositions and attitudes. Brand realists, on the other hand, reject the view of brands as mere marks or names and interpret them as emergent products with properties that afford branding in the sense of Gibson's ecological psychology. Brand strength is a function of the degree to which brands occupy defensible niches in product space. Branding as a process involves changing external or internal boundaries of products. Several arguments are proposed in favor of brand realism. The fragments of an ontology of marketing are developed in a broadly Aristotelian framework. Brand realism has significant implications for a new understanding of issues ranging from the effects of advertising to financial brand valuation, the nature of trademarks, and marketing strategy in general. It permits one to treat brand equity as a real phenomenon not dependent on associations, attitudinal states such as brand loyalty, or spurious constructs such as brand character or personality.

Any study in ontology is faced with the difficulty that, if the investigation is to be successful, the ontological status of the subject under investigation must be determined prior to selecting the method of analysis. This paper argues that Reinach's methodology, which depends upon insights into intelligible structures or essences, cannot be successfully applied to an investigation of television, because television lacks the essential unity necessary for even the possibility of such an insight.

The paper presents a framework for the formulation and testing of ontological theories embodied in human cognition, concentrating primarily on the domain of geographic categories. Evidence for and against alternative theories of cognitive categories, for example on the part of E. Rosch and her associates, has been hitherto based primarily on studies of categorization of entities of table-top space (pets, tools, fruits). We hypothesize that the structure of our categories does not remain constant as we move from categories of objects at manipulable scales to geographic categories such as nation, mountain, river. More precisely: Geographic objects are not merely located in space, they are tied intrinsically to space in such a way that they inherit from space many of its structural (mereological, topological, geometrical) properties. Categorization in the geographic world is often size- or scale-dependent (consider: pond, lake, sea, ocean), and to a much greater extent than in the world of table-top space, the realization that a thing or type of thing exists at all in the geographic world may have individual or cultural variability. Geographic objects are in very many cases the products of delineation within a continuum, and the boundaries of such objects are themselves highly salient phenomena for purposes of categorization. A battery of experiments is described to test these hypotheses and to serve as a basis for more detailed ontological theorizing.

This article deals with the ontological and modal status of the things we watch on television. I apply Adolf Reinach's distinction between what he calls 'simple objects' and 'states of affairs' to the wider problem of distinguishing between 'seeing as perception' and 'seeing as comprehension.' These considerations lead me to conclude that those who produce and edit together a television story commit to a communicative act and there is no escape from this fact about television viewing. Television provides us with objects that have been actively created by other people.

Many world views and complicated laws within a society have evolved from simpler forms. In general, this process works well. However, on occasion the original basis, no matter how well it worked at inception, does not work well in later, more complex, or different societies. One such case is that of the current law of intellectual property, which does not seem to adapt well to the introduction of new technologies. This paper explores this problem and its causes, and then proposes some possible changes that might, with minimal disruption, minimize many of these difficulties in the future.

Economic reality is constituted by economic objects such as goods, commodities, money, value, price, and exchange which together give rise to the complex entity known as the market. Each of these categories is governed by exact laws that provide the conditions for settling objectively whether individuals' views about an instance of any category indeed correspond to that category. This paper describes these laws as an ontological application of Carl Menger's 1871 contribution. This paper employs Carl Menger's framework from his 1871 contribution as the basis for advancing such conditions for each category of economic objects. The aim of this paper is to lay the groundwork for an ontological description of economic reality. This paper, then, can be conceived as a project in social ontology of the sort defended by John Searle.