Scan barcode
arminmasala's review
reflective
medium-paced
3.25
A historically influetal piece of philosophy but ultimately sloppily argued.
weltenkreuzer's review
4.0
Der erste Teil zur Herleitung sozialer Wirklichkeit aus Funktionszuschreibungen und Sprechakten ist extrem spannend, ebenso seine Ausführungen zum Realismus. Im letzten Kapitel bin ich dann allerdings ausgestiegen.
franchenstein's review against another edition
4.0
Great framework, dumb conclusions
This books approaches ideas that I really liked from Harari's Sapiens with much more depth. Searle's classification of ontological and epistemogical subjectivity and objectivity is really useful, and the way it is applied to analyze institutional facts was fascinating.
But the text derails into discussions about external realism and the correspondence theory of truth that, although adjacent to the main point, felt more like long winded appendices of things better discussed in other texts.
I really disliked Searle's conclusion of "biology always winning." I would agree with a certain form of materialism and the precedence of material reality over ideas, but the way it was posed here was really crude and undermines the previous discussion. If that was the point he was trying to make, he wasted a great framework on something dumb.
This books approaches ideas that I really liked from Harari's Sapiens with much more depth. Searle's classification of ontological and epistemogical subjectivity and objectivity is really useful, and the way it is applied to analyze institutional facts was fascinating.
But the text derails into discussions about external realism and the correspondence theory of truth that, although adjacent to the main point, felt more like long winded appendices of things better discussed in other texts.
I really disliked Searle's conclusion of "biology always winning." I would agree with a certain form of materialism and the precedence of material reality over ideas, but the way it was posed here was really crude and undermines the previous discussion. If that was the point he was trying to make, he wasted a great framework on something dumb.
gavmor's review
4.0
Wow, was this text a slog. It took me almost a year — and that's with it sitting on my bedside table, every night! Why didn't I give up? Because the subject matter seemed so fundamental, so timelessly and universally applicable to human life.
We are cogs in these social machines. There is no way around it. To sit alone, in silence, is still to machinate social constructs for all but the most enlightened bodhisattva.
This text was a thorough, albeit labyrinthian, exploration of the simple machines comprising our inescapable social enterprise.
I cannot recommend it for fun. I did not hardly enjoy this effort. The fruits of my intellectual labors — a picnic compared to the labors of the author — were dry, but nutritious.
After having read this text, reflected on it, and tried to work it into conversations — a more difficult exercise than for most other books I've read — I do feel as though I can "see the matrix" in my daily life.
Just a bit.
Perhaps I need to re-read this, but I cannot bear the thought of juggling such terms as "regulative/constitutive rules", "brute/social/institutional facts", "agentive/nonagentive functions", or "ontologically/epistemologically objective/subjective facts".
By the end, we're crunching ostensibly whole schools of thought into radically dense terms like "disquotation" and "correspondence theory" — which Searle labels tautological predicates.
I don't know. It made me feel like an undergraduate philosophy student, and I struggled to incorporate it into my praxis.
I only rate it so highly because it does seem to be aimed directly at the core of society. If only that path were less grueling.
We are cogs in these social machines. There is no way around it. To sit alone, in silence, is still to machinate social constructs for all but the most enlightened bodhisattva.
This text was a thorough, albeit labyrinthian, exploration of the simple machines comprising our inescapable social enterprise.
I cannot recommend it for fun. I did not hardly enjoy this effort. The fruits of my intellectual labors — a picnic compared to the labors of the author — were dry, but nutritious.
After having read this text, reflected on it, and tried to work it into conversations — a more difficult exercise than for most other books I've read — I do feel as though I can "see the matrix" in my daily life.
Just a bit.
Perhaps I need to re-read this, but I cannot bear the thought of juggling such terms as "regulative/constitutive rules", "brute/social/institutional facts", "agentive/nonagentive functions", or "ontologically/epistemologically objective/subjective facts".
By the end, we're crunching ostensibly whole schools of thought into radically dense terms like "disquotation" and "correspondence theory" — which Searle labels tautological predicates.
I don't know. It made me feel like an undergraduate philosophy student, and I struggled to incorporate it into my praxis.
I only rate it so highly because it does seem to be aimed directly at the core of society. If only that path were less grueling.
iwb's review
3.0
In this book, Searle's project is to give an account of the existence of social phenomena in a one-world ontology; that is, an ontology that presupposes naturalism. His project is descriptive insofar as he attempts to explain how social fact (y) is derived from or constructed “on top” of brute facts (x’s). Facts about social institutions (such as money or marriage) are objectively true in a world constituted by atoms and fields of force for the following reason: Institutions and other conventions are constituted by collective beliefs that confer status and powers on objects and events. They are mind-dependent yet objective because locutions such as "Dollars are legal tender in the U.S." or "John and Dawn are married" are said to be "true" or "false."
Searle begins by making a number of conceptual distinctions, which will serve as the tools for constructing the required mechanisms that generate social ontology. One such distinction concerns features of the world. There are those that are intrinsic features of the world and those that are extrinsic or observer relative features of the world. Intrinsic features are agent independent. For instance, mountains and molecules are, according to Searle, things that exist independently of our representations of them. It is true of the object I’m sitting on that it has a certain mass and chemical composition; that it is made partly of wood, the cells of which are composed of cellulose fibers, and so forth. All such features are intrinsic, claims Searle. Observer relative features are agent dependent. For instance, it is true of a certain object, which consists of various intrinsic features, that it is also a screwdriver. To describe something as a screwdriver is to specify a feature of the object that is observer or agent relative. Screwdrivers are not things you find intrinsically in the world, even though there are objects that are screwdrivers. Searle makes a further distinction the objective and subjective, which are then further divided into those that are epistemic and those that are ontological. The epistemic concerns predicates of judgments. There are subjective epistemic judgments “ Rembrandt is a better artist than Reubens.” There also are objective epistemic judgments “Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam during the year 1632.” The ontological concerns predicates of entities. There are subjective ontological predicates such as pains, and there are objective ontological predicates such as mountains. All these distinctions serve as the basic toolkit that Searle uses to carve up what he takes to be social ontology.
One of the interesting arguments Searle employs is his function argument. Searle argues that, unlike causes, functions are intensional, not extensional; functions are observer relative and, hence, are not intrinsic features of the world. His argument against intrinsic functionality is analogous to the argument against the substitutivity of terms in referentially opaque contexts.
Consider Leibniz’s Law:
Fa
a=b
Therefore
Fb
The substitution of co-referential terms does not affect the truth-value of the sentence as a whole. Now consider the following invalid instantiation:
John believes that Hesperus is Hesperus;
Hesperus is Phosphorus;
Therefore:
John believes that Hesperus is Phosphorus.
The principle of substitutivity is applied illicitly here, and Searle thinks that substitutability in function contexts, likewise, yields invalidity. The following schema, therefore, is invalid:
A’s function is to X
X-ing = Y-ing
Therefore:
A’s function is to Y
Searle claims that arguments for intrinsic functionality fail to capture the ordinary notion of function. So, Searle's function argument serves as a premise for the overall argument that either one’s account fits with substitutivity and is, therefore, observer relative, or one must redefine the sense in which the term “function” is being used.
Among the notion of a function, Searle distinguishes the following kinds: Agentive and nonagentive. Agentive functions are those that are agent dependent; e.g., chairs, screwdrivers, paperweights. Nonagentive functions are those that are agent independent; e.g., pumping hearts.
Searle’s project also includes giving an account of collective intentionality, which involves cooperative behavior and shared intentional states. Searle spells out an interesting negative account of “we intentions” but leaves much to be desired if you are looking for a full treatment of this fascinating aspect of ontology.
Another aspect of his ontological toolkit is the notion of constitutive rules and regulative rules. Regulative rules are antecedent to the phenomena of which they regulate: “Drive on the right-hand side of the road.” Constitutive rules, however, determine the phenomena of which they govern: “Playing chess is constituted in part by acting in accord with the rules.” Constitutive rules have the form: “X counts as Y in context C.”
Searle's project is an interesting one, though not a novel one; and it is noteworthy that he does not much refer to those who have engaged in projects similar to his, such as Heidegger, Foucault, or Merleu Ponty; or for that matter his contemporaries such as Ian Hacking. Elgin, and Sally Haslanger.
There are a number of problems with Searle’s account. One of which is his vague use of ‘brute fact’. You get the sense that Searle knows that if he presses this concept for all it's worth, he’ll end up with something like a Kantian “thing-in-itself;” but Searle trys to avoid being committed to this (it doesn’t rub well with naïve realism). Further difficulties arise when Searle's notion of a ‘backround’ is fleshed out. Again, Searle seems to be committing himself to more than his toolkit allows for. His position on the way in which our concept use plays into the construction of various social entities, and how this concept use and construction is related to collective intentionality, is presented weakly.
Regarding collective intentionality, Searle claims that cooperative intention constrains one's individual intention. I think his argument for this (which I'm not giving here) has many problems, but as is the case with most philosophical arguments that don't quite succeed, it is interesting, and yields plenty of further argumentative fruit.
All in all the book is well worth reading, and I’ve hardly said anything that should dissuade anyone from reading it. It would have been nice, however, if Searle had dealt with some of the more interesting and difficult issues that arise from his project, which people like Hacking and Haslanger and Elgin have dealt with.
Searle begins by making a number of conceptual distinctions, which will serve as the tools for constructing the required mechanisms that generate social ontology. One such distinction concerns features of the world. There are those that are intrinsic features of the world and those that are extrinsic or observer relative features of the world. Intrinsic features are agent independent. For instance, mountains and molecules are, according to Searle, things that exist independently of our representations of them. It is true of the object I’m sitting on that it has a certain mass and chemical composition; that it is made partly of wood, the cells of which are composed of cellulose fibers, and so forth. All such features are intrinsic, claims Searle. Observer relative features are agent dependent. For instance, it is true of a certain object, which consists of various intrinsic features, that it is also a screwdriver. To describe something as a screwdriver is to specify a feature of the object that is observer or agent relative. Screwdrivers are not things you find intrinsically in the world, even though there are objects that are screwdrivers. Searle makes a further distinction the objective and subjective, which are then further divided into those that are epistemic and those that are ontological. The epistemic concerns predicates of judgments. There are subjective epistemic judgments “ Rembrandt is a better artist than Reubens.” There also are objective epistemic judgments “Rembrandt lived in Amsterdam during the year 1632.” The ontological concerns predicates of entities. There are subjective ontological predicates such as pains, and there are objective ontological predicates such as mountains. All these distinctions serve as the basic toolkit that Searle uses to carve up what he takes to be social ontology.
One of the interesting arguments Searle employs is his function argument. Searle argues that, unlike causes, functions are intensional, not extensional; functions are observer relative and, hence, are not intrinsic features of the world. His argument against intrinsic functionality is analogous to the argument against the substitutivity of terms in referentially opaque contexts.
Consider Leibniz’s Law:
Fa
a=b
Therefore
Fb
The substitution of co-referential terms does not affect the truth-value of the sentence as a whole. Now consider the following invalid instantiation:
John believes that Hesperus is Hesperus;
Hesperus is Phosphorus;
Therefore:
John believes that Hesperus is Phosphorus.
The principle of substitutivity is applied illicitly here, and Searle thinks that substitutability in function contexts, likewise, yields invalidity. The following schema, therefore, is invalid:
A’s function is to X
X-ing = Y-ing
Therefore:
A’s function is to Y
Searle claims that arguments for intrinsic functionality fail to capture the ordinary notion of function. So, Searle's function argument serves as a premise for the overall argument that either one’s account fits with substitutivity and is, therefore, observer relative, or one must redefine the sense in which the term “function” is being used.
Among the notion of a function, Searle distinguishes the following kinds: Agentive and nonagentive. Agentive functions are those that are agent dependent; e.g., chairs, screwdrivers, paperweights. Nonagentive functions are those that are agent independent; e.g., pumping hearts.
Searle’s project also includes giving an account of collective intentionality, which involves cooperative behavior and shared intentional states. Searle spells out an interesting negative account of “we intentions” but leaves much to be desired if you are looking for a full treatment of this fascinating aspect of ontology.
Another aspect of his ontological toolkit is the notion of constitutive rules and regulative rules. Regulative rules are antecedent to the phenomena of which they regulate: “Drive on the right-hand side of the road.” Constitutive rules, however, determine the phenomena of which they govern: “Playing chess is constituted in part by acting in accord with the rules.” Constitutive rules have the form: “X counts as Y in context C.”
Searle's project is an interesting one, though not a novel one; and it is noteworthy that he does not much refer to those who have engaged in projects similar to his, such as Heidegger, Foucault, or Merleu Ponty; or for that matter his contemporaries such as Ian Hacking. Elgin, and Sally Haslanger.
There are a number of problems with Searle’s account. One of which is his vague use of ‘brute fact’. You get the sense that Searle knows that if he presses this concept for all it's worth, he’ll end up with something like a Kantian “thing-in-itself;” but Searle trys to avoid being committed to this (it doesn’t rub well with naïve realism). Further difficulties arise when Searle's notion of a ‘backround’ is fleshed out. Again, Searle seems to be committing himself to more than his toolkit allows for. His position on the way in which our concept use plays into the construction of various social entities, and how this concept use and construction is related to collective intentionality, is presented weakly.
Regarding collective intentionality, Searle claims that cooperative intention constrains one's individual intention. I think his argument for this (which I'm not giving here) has many problems, but as is the case with most philosophical arguments that don't quite succeed, it is interesting, and yields plenty of further argumentative fruit.
All in all the book is well worth reading, and I’ve hardly said anything that should dissuade anyone from reading it. It would have been nice, however, if Searle had dealt with some of the more interesting and difficult issues that arise from his project, which people like Hacking and Haslanger and Elgin have dealt with.
awesomeallie's review against another edition
4.0
This is an incredibly accessible introduction to the topic of social constructivism. Easy to understand and fairly moderate. A good place to start.
More...