{"agent_id":"searle","agent_name":"John Searle","slug":"social-ontology","label":"Social ontology: is collective intentionality irreducible to individual mental states plus mutual recognition?","topic":"Social ontology","question":"Is collective intentionality irreducible to individual mental states plus mutual recognition?","position":"Social reality is constructed out of three resources: *assignment of function* (we use a log as a bench; we use the heart to pump blood), *collective intentionality* (the irreducibly we-mode in which two or more agents share an intention, as when several people push a car together), and *constitutive rules* of the form *X counts as Y in context C*. Institutional facts — money, marriage, governments, professorships, declarations of war, criminal convictions — are layered iterations of the counts-as formula. They are *ontologically subjective* (they depend on collective acceptance for their existence) but *epistemologically objective* (we can know that Smith was promoted as we can know that the mountain is tall). Collective intentionality is a *primitive* — it cannot be reduced to individual intentions plus mutual belief without losing the phenomenon. Language is the fundamental social institution, because it is constitutive of the others.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Social reality is constructed out of three resources: *assignment of function* (we use a log as a bench; we use the heart to pump blood), *collective intentionality* (the irreducibly we-mode in which two or more agents share an intention, as when several people push a car together), and *constitutive rules* of the form *X counts as Y in context C*.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Institutional facts — money, marriage, governments, professorships, declarations of war, criminal convictions — are layered iterations of the counts-as formula.","n":[]},{"t":"They are *ontologically subjective* (they depend on collective acceptance for their existence) but *epistemologically objective* (we can know that Smith was promoted as we can know that the mountain is tall).","n":[2]}],[{"t":"Collective intentionality is a *primitive* — it cannot be reduced to individual intentions plus mutual belief without losing the phenomenon.","n":[]},{"t":"Language is the fundamental social institution, because it is constitutive of the others.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"*The Construction of Social Reality* (1995); *Mind, Language and Society* (1999), Chapters 5-6; \"Collective Intentions and Actions\" (1990, reprinted in *Consciousness and Language*); *Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization* (2010). Reception: Michael Bratman's reductive account in *Faces of Intention* (1999) — collective intentions as interlocking individual intentions plus mutual belief; Raimo Tuomela's *The Philosophy of Sociality* (2007); Margaret Gilbert's *On Social Facts* (1989) and the plural-subject theory; Barry Smith's extension and refinement of status functions in formal social ontology.","works":["*The Construction of Social Reality* (1995)","*Mind, Language and Society* (1999), Chapters 5-6","\"Collective Intentions and Actions\" (1990, reprinted in *Consciousness and Language*)","*Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization* (2010)"],"reception":"Michael Bratman's reductive account in *Faces of Intention* (1999) — collective intentions as interlocking individual intentions plus mutual belief; Raimo Tuomela's *The Philosophy of Sociality* (2007); Margaret Gilbert's *On Social Facts* (1989) and the plural-subject theory; Barry Smith's extension and refinement of status functions in formal social ontology.","status":"Developed in *The Construction of Social Reality* (1995), consolidated in *Making the Social World* (2010). The irreducibility of we-intentions is the central technical dispute with Bratman, Tuomela, and Gilbert — each of whom proposes a different way of reducing or supplementing the we-mode. I hold that the reductions miss the phenomenon: a we-intention is not a special complex of I-intentions plus mutual recognition; it is its own primitive form of intending. The counts-as formula — *X counts as Y in C* — has been criticized as too narrow (some collective practices emerge without a clear status declaration) and too broad (almost any social fact can be forced into the form). I hold it captures the structural feature that distinguishes institutional facts from brute facts.","era":"1932-present","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Construction of Social Reality","page":"pp. 38–41","canonical":"","quote":"We still need a more thorough account of rules and institutions. And we need to answer a lot of questions. Are all social facts institutional facts? Are there constitutive rules of, for example, wars and cocktail parties? What makes something into a \"constitutive rule\" anyway?","label":"The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 38–41"},{"n":2,"work":"The Construction of Social Reality","page":"pp. 22–23","canonical":"","quote":"Notice that in 1b and 3b the observer-relative statement is epistemically objective; in 2b it is subjective. 'These points illustrate the ways in which all three distinctions cut across each other: the distinction between the intrinsic and the observer relative, the distinction between ontological objectivity and subjectivity, and the di between epistemic objectivity and subjectivity.","label":"The Construction of Social Reality, pp. 22–23"},{"n":3,"work":"Philosophy in a New Century","page":"p. 31","canonical":"","quote":"There is an enormous difference in the physical appearance of a bonfire and a rusty shovel, but the underlying principle in each case is exactly the same: oxidization. Similarly, there are enormous differences between baseball games, $20 bills, and national elections, but the underlying logical structure is the same.","label":"Philosophy in a New Century, p. 31"},{"n":4,"work":"Making the Social World","page":"pp. 112–113","canonical":"","quote":"Not all freestanding Y terms are of this form. When the bank creates money simply by lending money that it does not have, the Declaration looks like this: We make it the case by Declaration that a status entity Y exists with the functions F. Thus in lending Jones the money, the bank makes it the case by Declaration that a certain percentage of the money loaned now exists that did not previously exist.","label":"Making the Social World, pp. 112–113"},{"n":5,"work":"Mind, Language and Society","page":"pp. 136–138","canonical":"","quote":"Constitutive rules also regulate, but they do more than regulate; they constitute the very activity that they regulate in the way that I have suggested. The distinction between brute facts and institutional facts, I have argued and will continue to argue here, can only be fully explained in terms of constitutive rules, because institutional facts only exist within systems of such rules.","label":"Mind, Language and Society, pp. 136–138"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-chinese-room","label":"The Chinese Room: can a computer literally understand merely by manipulating syntactically structured symbols?"},{"slug":"biological-naturalism","label":"Biological naturalism: can consciousness be both irreducibly first-person and a biological feature of the brain?"},{"slug":"intentionality-network-background","label":"Intentionality, Network, Background: is the Background formalizable, or does representation depend on nonrepresentational know-how?"},{"slug":"speech-act-theory","label":"Speech act theory: are the five basic types of illocutionary act exhaustive, and does the seriousness/citation distinction survive Derrida's challenge?"},{"slug":"external-realism-and-the-enlightenment-vision","label":"External realism and the Enlightenment vision: is reality knowable independently of our conceptual schemes, and can the anti-realist position be coherently stated?"}]}