The Linguistic Nature of Institutional Facts

In the last post concerning Searle’s book The Social Construction of Social Reality I ended by noting that language plays an essential roles in the creation and maintenance of institutional facts. It is not simply that language provides the publicity necessary to established collective intentionality, but rather that “language is essentially constitutive of institutional reality.” It will be the intent of this post to unpack what Searle means by this.

Kuhn: An Introduction

What is science and how does it change over time? These are questions which are by no means easy to address with simply answers. In this post I will outline VERY briefly what some of the proposed answers to these questions have been as well as Thomas Kuhn’s own response to them.

Empiricism Reconsidered

In his book, Furnishing the Mind, Jesse Prinz attempts to defend a version of empiricism which attempts to incorporate certain aspects of Fodor’s atomistic theory. The aspect of conceptual atomism which he wants to incorporate into a modern empiricism is that of informational semantics which he considers to be the most (perhaps the only) promising account available for meeting the desideratum of intentional content. Prinz equates Fodor’s ‘detector’ mechanisms with our perceptual senses which are regarded as “systems that respond to particular classes of inputs” or “dedicated input systems.” (Prinz, 115)

Maximal and Minimal Accounts of Conepts

As I mentioned in the last post, the two main problems which I see with the classical theory of concepts lies in its reliance upon similarity and it account of necessary and sufficient features. In this post I would like to discuss an alternative to the first problem, that of similarity, and the alternative proposed by Jerry Fodor’s theory of informational semantics.

Similarity-Based Accounts of Concepts

In response to the manifest failures of the classical theory of concepts, other theories of concepts were offered which were geared at correcting such failures. The primary errors of the classical theory, by my lights, were its reliance on similarity and its theory of intentional content which suggests that a concept refers to an object if the object has a particular set of necessary and sufficient properties. The prototype and exemplar theories of concepts were aimed at correcting the later shortcoming in a manner which closely followed Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance in which the definition of a concept does not consist in necessary and sufficient features, but rather jointly sufficient features, none of which is itself necessary. In this post I will deal primarily with the prototype theory.

Explaining the Features of Social Reality

In an earlier post I briefly listed the six apparent features of social reality which were in need of explanation. In this post I will attempt to provide at least partial explanation for those six features.

“X counts as Y in C”

Last post we discussed the difference between mere social facts, even those which involve the collective imposition of function of physical objects, and institutional facts, instances where a status function is collectively imposed on physical objects. Status functions, we saw, unlike other functions need not be related to the physical properties of the object upon which they supervene. In this post we will discuss how status functions play an integral part to the form which the constitutive rules of institutional fact take.

From Social Facts to Institutional Facts

Last post I briefly discussed various features of institutional facts with the intent of merely introducing many of the features which distinguish institutional facts from mere brute facts. In this post I will present some of the differences which Searle sees between institutional facts and social facts as well as an account of how collective intentionality plays a part in the creation of each.

Features of Institutional Facts

In this post I will continue to discuss Searle’s book, The Construction of Social Reality. In the last post we saw that the social constructs have three main building blocks to them: assignment of functions to objects or systems of objects, collective intentionality from which an individual’s intentionality is derived in these cases and constitutive rules which are of the form ‘X counts as Y in conditions C.’ In this post we will point out various features of what Searle calls institutional facts, facts which are ontologically subjective but epistemically objective, as opposed to brute facts, which are epistemically objective as well as ontologically objective.

The 3 Ingredients to Hot Summer Fun…

In the last post concerning Searle’s account of The Construction of Social Reality, we considered the example of a screwdriver. We saw that the ontologically objective features of this object are merely the metal and plastic. We saw that without the functionality which is attributed to it by us, subjectively in an ontological sense, it would not even be a screwdriver, but merely a object made of plastic and metal. However, we do think of this object as being more than simply an object for screwing in things; the object is really a screwdriver even if we don’t recognize it as such. In this post we will consider the three basic building blocks which are necessary for turning a simple object into a screwdriver in an epistemically objective sense.