John R. Searle (1932–2025)

Searle at his crankiest. It tells you something about book that he starts off by trash talking centuries of philosophical work on epistemology and perception by diagnosing its preoccupation with reflective analysis of perception and representation as indicative of "The Bad Argument." According to Searle, The Bad Argument is the mistaken belief that when we examine how we look at the world that we can never look past our representative perceptions and, further, that our perceptions are show more themselves accessible for study as objects. He finds the whole enterprise of suggesting that we can perceive ourselves perceiving and take the perception of the perceiving itself as an object of study.

Searle's alternative is a refreshingly simple one: we perceive the world as we do because that is how it is. He is careful to maintain a strict division between the ontologically objective world (and its various states of affairs) that exist whether we are perceiving it or not and the ontologically subjective world of experiences that exists independently of the objective world. The clever thing about Searle's argument is that he says that our perception of the world is always aspective (i.e., seen from a particular vantage point) and intentional (i.e., our perception asserts an understanding). The objects in the world, if they are capable of doing so, will confirm intentions by meeting their conditions of satisfaction. To borrow one of Searle's examples, if I look outside with the intention of awareness (i.e., it is raining) or belief (i.e., I believe it is raining) and the conditions of satisfaction are present (i.e., rain falls from the sky) and can be understood as causal to my experience then that is real. No messing around with a layer of perception between us and reality. Even hallucinations fail the test because a hallucination is just a subjective intention with no object to satisfy the conditions. There are some interesting "brain in a vat" arguments that offer some resistance, but not much.

I find the argument compelling because it is highly pragmatic, but to me Searle's argument really works best when examining the base perceptual experiences at which more complex perceptual experiences "bottom out." I understand why he does this; it's a central point in his other work as well, that there must be a world of objects out there to which all other perceptions and intentions belong.

The parts of argument that I think are more problematic in Searle's formulation are:
1. Complex forms of intentionality. Belief, awareness, and desire are fine but what about more complex forms of perception like hypothesizing or perception with the intention of action. Is he proposing an additive form of perception where base intentional experiences come together? I think so because he mentions that perceptions are hierarchically organized, but I never found his treatment of this as full or rich or satisfying.

2. Where do our intentions come from? I get those that may be based in the body and our qualitative experiences, but we are social beings and it seems unlikely that our perception intentions are not connected in some way to our identities and interpersonal, political, and professional affiliations. If I'm a climate scientist or a flat earther or a free mason are my intentions wholly my own or are they coming from elsewhere? Maybe the base perceptions are but then we are back at my previous complaint.

3. How strict do conditions of satisfaction need to be? Searle seems to present them as zero/sum (with the nod to aspective ways of seeing them) and when conditions of satisfaction fail to obtain, the experience ... does what? Goes away? Fails? Changes? And are conditions of satisfaction ever ambiguous? Is our awareness of the objective visual field from which we find these conditions of satisfaction ever prejudiced, biased, or in some way partial to finding the evidence that we seek?

But this is what I love about such books. There are open questions here that I will continue to think about.

As for the writing, it's solid and clear and engaging in Searle's typical manner. However, I can see how it would be tough for someone who had not read Searle's other work to start here. show less

This book builds on and refines the argument that Searle started in The Construction of Social Reality. In many places, Making the Social World reads as if Searle is responding to criticism of his earlier work toward what he sees as a "Philosophy of Society," and there is some of that. One of the implicit criticisms is about how individuals organize themselves into "society" that is mediated by institutional facts, which are created through the formulation "X counts as Y in C," where X is show more the named thing, Y is the function or power given to X, and C is the condition or circumstance in which X has the capacity or ability given by Y.

Despite the detailed argument and logic-based articulation of social construction, I'm left with the relatively simple-sounding observation that social reality exists … because we say that it does. Of course, if social reality really were as tenuous as this statement makes it seem, then reality would be written and rewritten continuously. But it is, just at different speeds and to different degrees.

So how can a social reality that flows and changes at different rates be made of the same "speech" stuff? Searle starts his argument with speech acts or the idea that we do things with words -- things like making claims (assertives), commanding people to do things (directives), obligating ourselves to do other things (commissives), expressing our inner states (expressives) and declaring things to exist (declaratives). It is this last category of speech acts, the declaratives, through which individuals act on their individual intentions and assign meaning to them that then acts on and shapes the world (e.g., I intend to move my arm. I assign the function of voting to my arm movement. I vote by moving my arm. My vote brings about the passage of another declaration that orders the world further by combining with other speech acts). We act on our own intentions but also use speech acts to build up and act on collective intentions. As these effects become routine and recognized as serving some desirable end, we can assign those declarative functions to gestures, technologies, people, and objects under certain conditions (i.e., the formulation "X counts as Y in C"). They become institutional facts or "standing speech acts" that we no longer have to declare, assert, promise, or express but instead enact through the various actors or institutions that stand in for those acts: offices, roles, positions, states, rights, etc. The more that we act through speech and invoke standing speech acts in the guise of institutional facts, the richer and more interconnected the "network" of speech acts becomes and the more real it seems like a condition of existence and reality.

At least that's how I read it. show less

In this short book, Searle stakes out possibly the weirdest and (I think) least tenable ground available in the philosophy of mind. I'll start from the point where he ends. Searle ultimately concludes that free will is an illusion, and that our actions are determined by the mechanistic/probabilistic laws of physics. This is an eminently sensible conclusion, but I can't figure out how he squares it with his earlier theses: namely, (a) that strong-AI is in principle impossible (Chapter 2), and show more (b) that there is a radical discontinuity between the objects of the hard sciences and the objects of the social sciences (Chapter 5).

If the universe is mechanistic, then we are indistinguishable from machines. Isn't that proof that machines may have the capacity for consciousness and subjectivity? And doesn't that lead us to the strong-AI position?

Likewise, if the the objects of social science are radically discontinuous from the objects of natural science, what is the nature of that discontinuity, if it isn't free will? If there is no free will, then a reduction of social science to physical science is possible in principle, though computationally intractable.

I want answers to these objections, and Searle doesn't provide them. show less

John Searle's 'The Construction of Social Reality' (1995) is that rare thing - a work of fairly detailed analytical philosophy that is (mostly) accessible to the intelligent general reader. This is because Searle can write well when he is not 'analysing' and his subject is about how we make sense of things.

I write 'mostly' because it is also engaged in a polemic with his profession and so significant tracts of the book are really only for professionals in philosophy. The section on the show more 'Slingshot Argument' for example can be skimmed and either not understood or cared about by mere mortals.

The argument that matters is neatly summarised by Searle in a page and a half at the very end and really, really lazy readers can just go to that. On the other hand, really, really lazy readers are missing the point of philosophy if they do so.

The core is that, just as mind and body cannot be separated as in the Cartesian fantasy, so our species-biology and our emergent culture cannot be separated. There is an underlying biological structure to culture much as there is an underlying brain structure to the mind.

This meets a socio-political prejudice of mine that humanity is a paradox - a 'hive' species constructing its reality through species-conformity up to a point but with individuals within it having sufficiently independent minds to adapt it creatively to new needs through struggle or persuasion.

Individual consciousness (my view not necessarily Searle's) is genetically adaptive to different degrees in different humans. Creative tension between this individuality and the instinct for social conformity within our many 'hives' (cultures and societies) makes us evolutionarily adaptive.

Without being overly 'Darwinian' (because consciousness has enabled us to move beyond simple genetic competition), individual and social competition in real time creates the thing - humanity - that has become impossible to model or fully control especially by itself.

Searle argues that there is no ontological break between biological and social reality and that consciousness and 'intentionality' are the bridges between them. He puts forward the existence of a collective intentionality that creates social facts that are 'bigger' than their physical baselines.

Examples might be money, religious architecture, sports or nation states. These involve things (such as bits of paper or built things) that have a meaning as a social fact within the collective. It requires the collective to accept them (believe in them) as facts.

Are they facts in the way that the atoms that define the periodic table are facts? No, but Searle argues that they are still facts because they make up a shared social reality that operates as the background to social functionality. The rules of a game are necessary to a game in order for it to be a game.

Here I am more cautious because of the contingency of these facts although Searle argues his case (as you would expect) extremely well and logically. It keeps nagging at me that more of social reality is contingent and liable to collapse than he or we might think or even hope.

Searle recognises that philosophical choices have something to do with personality. For all the sharp logic within its professional framework, there is the American pragmatic liberal wanting social cohesion lurking underneath the analytical scholasticism.

The truth values apparently aligned to the social - shared belief systems - certainly look a lot more contingent in the third decade of the twenty first century than they did to the liberal community of the penultimate decade of the twentieth century.

Searle is protecting something but while his assault on post-modernist philosophical destruction of truth is well-timed and definitely works on its own terms, perhaps he failed to see that the destruction of social truth and so of a shared social reality would emerge from below.

He cannot be blamed for this. The book seems to be partly a rearguard action against philosophy as a out-rider for what was to come. Certainly 'continental philosophy' contributed to the process by which the 'Left' sought to manipulate social reality for political and cultural ends.

It would have been interesting to have his views today on one bio-cultural conflict that might be highly relevant to the 'construction of social reality' - the idea that a human can change gender by an act of conscious will regardless of biological 'facts' previously accepted as absolute.

In fact, the post-modern-cultural Left struggle to change social reality is only part of the picture. The resistance to it also appears to have 'decided' on its own account in a hive-like manner to construct itself around the invention of 'facts' that are mere instruments of political struggle.

As we write, we are reaching perhaps the most interesting stage where geo-political struggle is conducted as 'narrative war' where the combatants not only challenge each other in material terms (physical war) but in terms of culture wars so that telling half-truths and non-truths is normal.

The changes in mass media since the 1990s have unravelled socially shared assumptions imposed by the worker bees of the hive on the drones at the orders of the Queen Bee and have created a new type of drone war where winning is more important at every stage than 'truth'.

Of course, everyone has always lied in war, struggle or competition but the lies are told and repeated despite being known widely to be lies in a completely new way. 'My' lie has become a truth because it strikes at the lies and truth of the opponent. It simply works as expression of sentiment.

This is not a moral complaint at all. The narratives of the Queen Bees were generally fairly shaky as truths in any case. They merely represented the pragmatic consensus that we could call social reality but they worked for cohesion as well as promoting sclerosis and protecting elites.

We are into a new age where it is hard to see where there can be a bridge between Searle's undoubtedly philosophically persuasive account of how social reality is constructed and the fact that the social reality of which he is writing is collapsing around us.

Are we seeing an equivalent in terms of 'meaning' to the feared collapse of physical reality in some form of 'vacuum bubble'? Things are not that bad simply because Searle's point about the biological structures underpinning social reality stand regardless and may be the saving of the system.

The probability is that 'hives' (evolved into new forms) will re-emerge from the current struggle. War regrettably may be the crucible. However, people today might not recognise the world to come any more than Puritan divines or Roman orators would recognise our world.

The central issue for Searle and for us becomes consciousness - that is, the mental states that emerge out of our being human (which is nothing to do with other philosophical concerns like relations with Being or God). He emphasises the symbolism inherent in our institutional structures.

So, perhaps this is where we have to look hardest for clues to both survival and the future , especially of institutions, many of which are going to crash and burn or have to adapt in ways that would may be unthinkable today. After all, a female Archbishop of Canterbury would certainly surprise Victorians.

Searle puts the construction of our social reality down to a biological capacity to engage in symbolisation as the underpinning of language and institutional reality. The university Left's war on 'normal' or common sense use of language is a form of reverse engineering in this respect.

By capturing institutions and language, the hope and intent is to control symbolisation and so make biology irrelevant. To the radical Enlightenment, biology is embarrassing and restrictive, the source of inherent injustice and inequity. It must be overcome.

It is interesting here that, as an unintended consequence of this attempt to reconstruct social reality, the New Right (or at least the 'Tech' elements) have sought to subvert this by enhancing biology through transhumanist lines in order to promote inequity as a sort of Nietzschean elite.

Searle (as an analytical philosopher) is particularly concerned with language as an institutional structure that imposes "a special kind of function on brute physical entities that have no natural relation to that function".

All the normal functions of society - marital states, property relations, ownership and transactions, administration and institutions - require agreement on linguistic terms relating to some shared position on social truth. This shared position is ultimately relating to our biological being.

Again, we see a struggle over language to have become central to the apparent collapse of cultural cohesion and as weapon in struggle between interests and nations although (we might be pleased or alarmed according to our politics) institutional structures still remain fairly solid regardless.

The 'hive(s)' are in ferment but they are still hives. Searle's book is worth reading three decades on as an analytical framework for critiquing the collapse of 'truth'. There may be no truth in an absolute sense but our hives depend on their having an (admittedly flexible) shared truth of some kind. show less