Part I - Basic Problems of Sociality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Part I of this book starts with John Searle's chapter on “Language and Social Ontology.” This aims to work out the role of language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality and to answer the question, “What are the ontological implications of the very capacity to categorize linguistically?” The upshot of Searle's discussion is that all social reality and all social institutions presuppose language. Searle defends the view that the logical form of the creation of the institutional fact is always a Declaration and elaborates on how the theory of speech acts can be applied to institutional analysis. He extends the account he presented in The Construction of Social Reality, including a “power creation operator” in the conceptual analysis to do justice to the phenomenon of power, which is inimical to all institutions. In his comment, Mark Turner focuses on the implications of taking language for granted, as Searle indicates a number of authors do. Taking language for granted implies taking political ontology for granted, taking intentionality for granted, taking personal identity for granted, and taking counterfactuality and a number of other things for granted. Turner shows that theorizing about this impressive list of entities, mechanisms, and processes that are taken for granted when approaching the social world can be productively done with the help of the tools of modern cognitive science.
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- Philosophy of the Social SciencesPhilosophical Theory and Scientific Practice, pp. 5 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009