John Searle, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
External realism — the view that there is a way the world is that is logically independent of our representations of it — is not a thesis up for debate; it is the framework within which any thesis is intelligible.1234 The denial of external realism cannot be coherently stated, because the denial uses ordinary language whose intelligibility presupposes the realism it tries to deny.
The correspondence theory of truth — that a statement is true if and only if there is a fact in the world that corresponds to it — is correct as a disquotational claim about how truth works; it is not a theory of truth in some deeper metaphysical sense, but a reminder of the grammar of "true." The Kuhnian incommensurability thesis, the Rortyan dissolution of objective knowledge, the late Putnam's internal realism, and the deconstructionist refusal of stable meaning are each, in their own way, attempts to talk yourself out of a position you cannot actually occupy.
The Enlightenment vision — that the universe exists independently of our minds, that within the limits of our evolutionary endowments we can come to comprehend nature, and that our task is to be smarter and know more rather than to retreat into apocalyptic unintelligibility — is the only stable position.5
That is why it is wrong to represent external realism as the view that there are material objects in space and time, or that mountains and molecules, and so on, exist. Suppose there were no mountains and molecules, and no material objects in space and time. Then those would be facts about how the world is and thus would presuppose external realism.Mind, Language and Society, pp. 44–45
For the purposes of this discussion [ am stipulating that "external realism" and "realism" ('ER" for short) name the view sketched in the previous paragraph. I use the metaphor of "external" to mark the fact that the view in question holds that reality exists outside of, or external to, our system of representation. Before examining arguments fc to distinguish it from other views with which it is often identified.The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 153–154
But once ag implication. The view that the world exists independently of our representations of it does not imply that there is a privileged vocabulary for describing it. [tis consistent with ER to claim the thesis of conceptual relativity (proposition 4), that different and even incommensurable vocabularies can be constructed for describing different aspects of reality for our various different purposes.The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 154–155
Once this mistake is removed I believe much of the appearance of inconsistency between (1) and (2) is removed: (1) says that there is a real world, (2) says that we can only describe it (represent it, form a conception of it) within our limitations and relative to our concept forming apparatus. Where is the inconsistency? Without some further argument there is no reason to doubt that these are perfectly consistent.John Searle and His Critics, pp. 191–192
Among the mind-independent phenomena in the world are such things as hydrogen atoms, tectonic plates, viruses, trees, and galaxies. The reality of such phenomena is independent of us. The universe existed long before any human or other conscious agent appeared, and it will be there long after we have all passed from the scene. Not all of the phenomena in the world are mind-independent.Mind, Language and Society, pp. 27–28
Held throughout the corpus. The realist commitment is what makes the rest of the system possible: the philosophy of mind is realist about consciousness, the philosophy of language is realist about meaning, the social ontology is realist about institutional facts. The defense of realism is most explicit in The Construction of Social Reality and Mind, Language and Society; the position is articulated in opposition to Kuhn (whom I read narrowly and reject broadly), to Rorty (whose pragmatist anti-foundationalism collapses into relativism), to the late Putnam (whose internal realism is a wrong turn from the early Putnam I admired), and to the deconstructionists generally.