© Roger M Tagg 2010-2011
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
Searle is a highly regarded philosophy professor at U Cal Berkeley. He studied under Austin at Oxford. He is well known (among other things) for his work on Speech Acts. This book is where he attempts to include "Institutional Reality" on a par (or nearly so) with more material forms of Reality. To me, this is a vital issue for any study of group work and information systems.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 | "Two features of our conception of reality are not up for grabs ... for us as citizens .. of the early twenty-first century. It is a condition of your being an educated person that you are appraised of ... the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology." |
| 7 | "Not all consciousness is intentional, and not all intentionality is conscious." | |
| 7* | "Intending ... is just one kind of intentionality among others." | |
| 8 | Objective-subjective distinctions can vary between epistemic (a matter of judgment) and ontological ("independent of any perceiver or any mental state"). | |
| 9 | Features of the world can be intrinsic (to nature) or "relative to the intentionality of observers, users, etc". | |
| 11 | A good way of getting at this distinction is to ask "Could the feature exist if there had never been any human beings or other sorts of sentient beings?". | |
| 13 | "Assignment (or Imposition) of Function" - the function is never intrinsic to the thing it is assigned to - it is always user-relative. | |
| 16 | Since Darwin, there is no intrinsic teleology of living things. | |
| 18 | What is the function of colds? To spread cold germs? | |
| 18* | Intensionality-with-an-'s' is not the same as Intentionality-with-a-'t', but usually implies the latter. For more see this article. | |
| 20 | "Agentive" and non-agentive functions - the former relate to some immediate purpose; the latter contribute to explanations only. | |
| 21 | Some agentive functions are there to represent, stand for, symbolize, mean something | |
| 22 | Collective intentionality - something that man and many species of animals can do, not reducible to a set of individual intentionalities, even though individuals do need to play their part. It's the "we" element. | |
| 27a | Brute facts (independent of any human institutions) versus Institutional facts. Language is an example of an Institution. | |
| 27b | Regulative rules "regulate antecedently existing activities" (e.g. road rules regulate driving a car); Constitutive rules "also create the very possibility of certain activities". | |
| 28a | Constitutive rules follow the pattern "X counts as Y in context C" - this is intensional-with-an-s. | |
| 28b | "Bills issued by the Bureau ... (X) count as money (Y) in the US (C)" and "Money is the root of all evil" do not imply "Bills issued by the Bureau ... count as the root of all evil in the US" - that's called "referentially opaque". | |
| 2 | 32 | Many social concepts are self-referential, e.g. something is money because it is widely regarded as money. Also elections, private property, wars, buying and selling, promises, marriages, political offices, cocktail parties (the last maybe instance by instance). |
| 34a | Many institutional facts are created by performative utterances, e.g. "I do", "I bequeath", "I promise" - or some (paper) form. | |
| 34b | Brute facts have priority over institutional facts, e.g. money is coins, paper notes, electronic bits. (RT thought - oral statements or thoughts might not be persistent enough if one needs evidence, therefore need signed forms). | |
| 35 | There are often relationships between institutional facts, e.g. marriages depend on promises; games and elections depend on rights and responsibilities. | |
| 36 | Social objects are always constituted by social acts; the object is "just the continuous possibility of an activity". "Process is prior to product". | |
| 37 | Only beings that have a more or less language like system of representation can create institutional facts. | |
| 39a | Collective intentionality can generate agentive functions. | |
| 39b | The tribal boundary analogy: a strong wall might physically separate the tribes, but it might still be effective if the tribes regard the remains (or just marker stones) as the boundary. | |
| 40a | Japanese macaques - one of them used salt water to clean and flavour potatoes - now they all do. | |
| 40b | Humans can go further - we can endow status (authority, rights and responsibilities? RT) when we assign a function to something that does not have that function by virtue of its physical characteristics. | |
| 41 | Collective intentionality is the central span on the bridge from physics to society. | |
| 42 | There is an evolution from commodity money - the thing itself is valuable (e.g. gold); contract money - the bit of paper carries a promise to pay the bearer something valuable; fiat money - declared by an authority to be a medium of exchange, e.g. valuable for settling debts. | |
| 47 | The creation of institutional facts may happen without the participants being conscious of it - it can just emerge. | |
| 48 | When imposition of a status function becomes a matter of general policy, it becomes a constitutive rule - hence there is the possibility of rule breaking (e.g. counterfeit money, unqualified knights). | |
| 50 | Criminal law is regulative (not constitutive) - it exists to forbid some activity that is antecedent. However the regime of penalties is constitutive. | |
| 51 | Language is needed, e.g. to name an institutional concept like money, marriage. | |
| 55 | Declaration does not apply to all institutional facts - you cannot make a touchdown just by saying you made it. | |
| 57 | Cars and shirts wear out through use, but institutions like marriage, property and universities are strengthened or renewed through use. | |
| 3 | 61a | Language is needed to make an institutional fact publicly understandable. |
| 61b | Language-independent (versus dependent) facts - "take away all language and Mt Everest still has snow and ice at the summit". | |
| 62a | Language-independent thoughts - e.g. feeling hungry, thirsty, fear, rage. | |
| 62b | For a fact to be language dependent, mental representations must be partly constitutive of the fact, AND those representations must be language dependent. | |
| 66 | Symbols (where used instead of words, e.g. points in a game) must symbolize something beyond themselves, by convention and are public. Example is to win the game, feel happy about doing well etc. | |
| 69 | To assign a role to the X term is precisely to assign it a symbolizing or linguistic status. | |
| 70 | Assigned status is deontic (powers, rights, obligations, duties, restrictions). | |
| 75 | In physical situations, the object a symbol refers to is separate from the symbol, but for institutional facts the symbol creates the ontological category. | |
| 77 | For institutional facts, 1) language is epistemically indispensable; 2) the facts in question, being inherently social, must be communicable; 3) the phenomena in question are extremely complex, which requires language; 4) the facts in question persist in time, and must outlast the urges and inclinations of the participants. | |
| 4 | 80a | The structure "X counts as Y in context C" can be iterated - the X term at a higher level can be a Y term from an earlier level. |
| 80on | There can be interlocking systems of such iterated structures operating through time. These evolve into more and more complex structures. | |
| 83 | In the institutional fact of language, statuses are imposed on types of sounds and marks. At a higher level, status is assigned to sets of speech acts (as e.g. in a marriage ceremony). | |
| 84 | For immovable property (that I don't carry around) maintenance of possession needs status indicators, e.g. title deeds, receipts. For movable property, some also need it (e.g. registration papers for car, brand for cattle). (RT thought - not usually for shirts, unless in a boarding school or if sent to a laundry). | |
| 85 | For some property transfers, I can just say "it's yours". | |
| 88 | There is a gradual transition between social facts in general (more informal, declaration will suffice) and the subclass of institutional facts. E.g. "let's go for a walk" | |
| 89 | Marginal cases - appointing a leader, or one just emerging; drifting into undeclared war. | |
| 91 | The system of acceptance may need to be backed up by credible force - doesn't happen in mass revolts. | |
| 93 | The strange case of "Human Rights" - and the fact that there is often no ability to enforce them. | |
| 96-7 | Not all institutional facts involve power, e.g. honorifics, medals, reprimands. | |
| 97 | The Y status can be imposed on different ontological categories: people (including groups), objects (including language sentences), events (e.g. declaring a "natural disaster") | |
| 98 | External observers may see institutional facts in a different light (e.g. a bishop sees marriage as glorifying God and producing social stability). | |
| 99a | Four broad categories of institutional facts: Symbolic, Deontic, Honorific, Procedural. | |
| 99b | Symbolic - e.g. dictionary definitions in a language, meaning of map symbols | |
| 100 | Deontic - all are matters of conventional power; positive (can do, is authorized to do, must do) and negative (must not do). | |
| 101 | Honour - status for its own sake, e.g. victory or defeat in games. | |
| 102 | Procedural steps on the way to power and honour. | |
| 104 | Power status can be expressed as "we accept that {S [individual or group] {has power | is enabled | is required} such that (S does Action A)}. A discussion using deontic and other forms of logic follows. | |
| 109 | Maybe all status turns out to be deontic. | |
| 5 | 116 | To create the more important institutional facts, we expect specific speech acts according to strict rules. |
| 117a | Acceptance of large institutional structures is often being eroded away in today's world, sometimes by ethnic tribalism (including language, religion), e.g. Bosnia. | |
| 117b | Often, power from the barrel of a gun isn't enough any more - it needs troops willing to open fire (e.g. East Germany); a bureaucrat probably wields more power. | |
| 118 | When an institution is looking frail, it may resort to a lot of pomp and ceremony to keep up the image, e.g. De Gaulle in WW2, armies, courtrooms, universities. Or, if it doesn't legally exist, bluff one's way to create it and hope the legal authorities won't or can't undo it (e.g. US Declaration of Independence). | |
| 119 | Status Indicators, e.g. passports, driving licences, wedding rings, uniforms - such additional documentation is not always needed | |
| 121 | Taxonomy of Fact types: see this diagram. 'Non-intentional' means, for example, "how I feel". 'Non-agentive' means "not for any intended purpose". 'Status Functions' are Institutional Facts that impose a status function. | |
| 126 | Sometimes the function is not imposed consciously - it has become part of the background culture. | |
| 6 | 129 | Searle defines The Background as "the set of non-intentional or pre-intentional capacities that enable intentional states of function; it's a "certain category of neurophysiological causation, describable only at a high level. (RT - like "know-how?) |
| 130 | The literal meaning of any sentence can only determine its truth or satisfaction conditions against a background of capacities, dispositions, know-how etc. | |
| 131 | "She gave him the key and he opened the door" - we fill in the gaps. | |
| 132 | The Background enables linguistic interpretation. | |
| 133a | The Background enables perceptual interpretation to take place (in non-linguistic situations, recognizing shapes, patterns - "perceiving as". | |
| 133b | The Background structures consciousness (non-conscious interpretation). | |
| 134 | The Background enables us to recognize "dramatic" categories from sequences of experiences - i.e. we can recognize patterns over time, based (unconsciously) on our prior life experiences. | |
| 135 | Our (Background) motivational dispositions will condition the structure of our experiences | |
| 136a | The Background facilitates certain kinds of readiness, i.e. we expect certain things in certain contexts but not others (e.g. skier coming into the lecture room). | |
| 136b | The Background disposes me to certain sorts of behaviour, e.g. which jokes I laugh at. | |
| 137 | We don't think consciously about following the rules of an institution - we absorb them into our Background and then use that. | |
| 138 | Sometimes we do use mental causation, sometimes just the Background. | |
| 139 | Is Background causation like intentional (conscious) or "billiard ball" (unconscious)? | |
| 144 | Darwinian analogy - with a Background we don't need to know the rules - we are disposed to behave in a certain way that is sensitive to the rule structure of the institution (RT - otherwise we would keep getting picked up for bad behaviour). | |
| 145 | Works with children learning anything - we evolve our Background and cope with the institutions (family, language, school etc). | |
| 146 | Our mechanism evolves precisely so that it will be sensitive to the rules. | |
| 7 | 150+ | Six views about the "Real World" - does it exist independently of our representations of it? |
| 153 | If we had never existed, most of the world would still be there (from a geological/evolutionary time point of view, certainly). | |
| 163 | The real world does not care how we describe it. | |
| 170 | Against Verificationism - it is not the visual (or other) verifying experience that is being perceived - it's the real thing. Nor is it the experience. | |
| 172 | Even if I am being fooled (e.g. brain in a vat), it's about the real thing too. | |
| 175a | (Against Ding an Sich) - it does not follow from the fact that all cognition is within a cognitive system that no cognition is ever directly of a reality that exists independently of all cognition. | |
| 175b | It's an old urge to think that truth and reality should coincide - though there is a relationship between them. | |
| 8 | 178 | One can't prove that external realism is true - it's a Background presupposition - we do best if that's what we assume. |
| 179 | Convergence of people with different views (RT = my consensus?) isn't enough - we're already assuming realism. | |
| 181 | We need to distinguish "truth conditions" from "conditions on intelligibility of discourse. | |
| 182 | "Carefully stated, external realism is the thesis that there is a way that things are that is independent of all representations of how things are". | |
| 183 | Arguments against phenomenalist idealism and social constructionism. | |
| 184 | Mostly when we communicate to achieve "normal understanding" we presuppose external realism. | |
| 187 | It's about conditions of intelligibility, not conditions of knowledge. | |
| 190 | But socially constructed reality does NOT exist independently of all representations. Maybe there is an external reality somewhere down in the structure though. | |
| 191 | In iterations of the structure "X counts as Y in C", the iterations must bottom out in an X element that is not itself an institutional construction. | |
| 194 | Summarizing,1) we can't demonstrate that external realism is true; 2) solipsism is an alternative that isn't refuted | |
| 195 | 3) we don't all have a conscious belief in realism - it's in the Background; 4) the argument is independent of questions of knowledge and truth; 5) the arguments only apply to utterances where there is a normal understanding; 6) there is nothing self-guaranteeing about normal understanding - it may have to be revise (e.g. what is colour?). | |
| 196a | Even when facing critics asking us to prove the existence of the real world, we presuppose it when we discuss it. | |
| 196b | The anti-realist still takes his car to the garage to get it fixed. | |
| 197 | This is important stuff in the face of post-modernist attacks. | |
| 9 | 201 | Correspondence theory of truth: a statement is true iff it corresponds to the facts; sometimes amounts to disquotation, i.e. just removing the quotation marks (see also this page). |
| 204 | Strawson's objection - truth being described as a relationship is a misrepresentation. It seems to depend on the assumption that facts are linguistic entities (RT - so it's similar to the argument about realism?). | |
| 208 | In current literature, truth is used mainly about the word (or mind)-to-world direction of fit. Shouldn't it be 2-way? | |
| 210 | "True" comes from the same root as "trust" - and "tree". The "fact" is the thing done (or fait accompli). | |
| 211 | Facts are not necessarily linguistic (of course there are some linguistic facts). | |
| 214a | Strawson was right about false picture, but correspondence theory is not to blame - it's failing to look at the actual use of the expressions involved. | |
| 214b | Disquotation generates a false picture for the same reason. | |
| 217 | The criterion of success of the speech act in achieving fit , in a newly designed language, would be stated differently for word-to-world and world-to-word directions. | |
| 220 | Facts are not the same as true statements. | |
| 221 | The slingshot argument against the correspondence theory of truth - it relies on being able to substitute "logically equivalent sentences" - seems crazy to me! | |
| Conc | 227 | There ought to be a continuous story from an ontology of biology to an ontology that includes cultural and institutional forms, without a radical break (RT - not like in Bunge). |
| 228 | Institutional structures have a special feature - symbolism. |
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 13th January 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .