9 - Social reality

Summary

Introduction

Searle has a penchant for asking and answering certain kinds of questions. His favourites are “How does it work?” and “What is its structure?” Others have a penchant for asking what they consider to be deeper or prior philosophical questions such as “Does it exist?” or “Is it real?” as in “Do mental events (or the world, ethics, etc.) exist?” In order to answer his own questions Searle is willing to assume, at least at the outset, that he knows the answers to these deeper questions. “Yes of course I have a mind, so do you; and that is not a bunch of sense data of a car out there, but a real car.” Beyond that, he thinks that answering the deeper questions at the outset is likely to lead to philosophical disaster in the form of scepticism or solipcism (Baggini 1999: 38). So when Searle turns his attention to the social sphere in his next major work (Construction of Social Reality (1995a)) it is not surprising to see him asking his kind of questions first. What sorts of structure do we find in this sphere? How do social concepts work? We know they are there and we know they work, but how can they work given that we live in a world we know is made up of atomic particles?