John Searle, Making The Social World (2010)

The substance of John Searle's most recent book, Making the Social World, is largely covered by the last chapter of his 2008 selection of essays, Philosophy in a New Century entitled "Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles" (see January 21, 2011 post).  I refer the reader back to this earlier post for Searle's discussion of status functions, deontic powers, and desire-independent reasons for action.  This is a discussion of the language-enabled creation of obligations, permissions, rights, responsibilities, duties, obligations and the like (what Searle calls deontic powers) that Searle tells us are the glue of the human social world and collective action.  I wish to cover two topics in this posting:  first, the importance of language in making a social world, and second, the significance of human imagination in Searle's model of the social world. 

Language is the foundation of all social institutions, says Searle. "We will not understand an essential feature of language if we do not see that it necessarily involves social commitments, and that the necessity of these social commitments derives from the social character of the communication situation, the conventional character of the devices, used, and the intentionality of speaker meaning.  It is this feature that enables language to form the foundation of human society in general."  Language, adds Searle, introduces deontology into social relations and how it creates an institutional reality with a deontic power.  The foundation of Searle's thesis is this:  "If a speaker intentionally conveys information to a hearer using socially accepted conventions for the purpose of producing belief in the hearer about a state of affairs in the world, then the speaker is committed to the truth of his utterance."  There is no way, Searle comments, that if I say to someone publicly, intentionally, explicitly, "There is an animal coming toward us," without being committed to the truth of the propositional content that there is an animal coming toward us.  Both the belief and the statement involve commitments, but the commitment of the statement is much stronger, for if the commitment of the privately held belief turns out to be false, I am free to revise it.  In the case of the statement, however, I am committed to not only to revision in the case of falsehood, but I am also committed to providing reasons for the original statement, I am committed to sincerity in making it, and I am publicly responsible if it turns out to be false.  A speech act is more than just an expression of belief; a speech act is a public performance.

To appreciate the significance that Searle attaches to language in humans, it is important to understand what Searle believes language added to our prelinguistic capabilities and therefore ask:  what are the features that prelinguistic human mentality and language have in common (and therefore what did language contribute over and above our prelinguistic mentality)?  The common features, according to Searle, are these:

• Perception.  These are our sensory capabilities.  Perception and the object perceived are causally self-referential, says Searle:  we experience an object only if the presence of the object caused our sensory experience of the object.
• Beliefs, desires, intending, and emotions such as hopes, fears and the like. These are the capabilities of the mind by which it is directed at or about objects and states of affairs in the world.  This is referred to as intentionality (a concept not limited to "intending"). Beliefs, etc. are not causally self-referential.
• Intentional action. This capacity is embraces a causal sequence (intention and action are causally self-referential), assuming that action actually occurs.  There can be a prior intent to act; it can be an intention that is coincident to acting.  All actions require intentions-in-acting, but not all actions require prior intent.
• (At least) short-term memory.  Like intentional action, memory is causally self-referential: we recall something only if we experienced the thing that triggers our present memory of that thing.

Thus, in the cases of perception, memory, and intentional action, there is a match between the mind and the world.  Beliefs, desires, and the like are not necessarily tethered to the world, although they are derivative of perception, memory and intentional action, which are.  Because they are not tethered to the world in the same way, beliefs, desires etc are much more "flexible" in relating to reality.

While denying that he is engaging in speculative evolutionary biology, Searle asks us to imagine hominids with the full range of prelinguistic capabilities just noted, but not having language.  Evolutionary biology has, in fact, established that this scenario likely existed more than 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.  (See January 31, 2013 post) depending on when we determine that language emerged in humans.  What we are capable of achieving with language, says Searle, that we cannot achieve with our prelinguistic consciousness is the ability to manipulate the syntactical elements.  Language consists of sentences composed of syntactical elements that can be manipulated; prelinguistic intentional states are not:  "the dog might think that someone is approaching the door but the dog cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone."  [This may or may not be true for a dog, but I am skeptical that it is necessarily true for the prelinguistic human --- to be discussed below when I touch on imagination.]  Importantly, speech acts come in five categories:  (i) assertives (representing how things are); (ii) directives (orders, commands); (iii) commissives (promises, pledges); (iv) expressives (apologies, thanks); and (v) declarations.  The first four speech acts have their analogs in intentional states (corresponding to beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions such as fear, hope and the like) and are not causally self-referential.  Declarations are different.  In the case of a declaration, "we make something the fact by declaring it to be the case."   Declarations, on the other hand, have no prelinguistic analog and they are causally self-referential:  the prelinguistic intentional states "cannot create facts in the world by representing those facts as already existing.  This remarkable feat requires language."  This has enormous significance for the construction of a social reality (derived from perception, intentional action, and/or memory).  But through a declaration we have the ability to declare things to be the case that were not necessarily the case prior to the declaration: that I am the shaman of this tribe, I am the leader of this tribe, these five persons comprise our governing council, this piece of paper shall be legal tender for all debts and obligations public or private.  Equally, if not more important for Searle, language creates speaker meaning for those prelinguistic intentional states, and, as noted in the opening paragraph of this post, with respect to those causally self-referential intentional states, language necessarily involves social commitments by declaring what we perceive, intend, or recall to the be the case. And so once we have language, we have a deontology --- the ability to establish duties, obligations, rights and the like that are desire-independent.  With collective acceptance of these duties, obligations, rights and the like, we can have collective intentionality. 

Not everyone concurs with Professor Searle's view on the importance of language.  Frank Hindriks, for example, surmises that collective acceptance and collective intentionality can arise through gesture (including sanctions):

"Consider  Searle’s example of a wall that decays and turns from a physical structure into an institutional boundary (94--‐96).  It is not obvious that any linguistic communication is required in the process.  People can observe each other’s behavior including sanctioning behavior such as frowning when someone crosses the boundary.  At some point it is true that the stones that are left form a boundary, and this fact involves the obligation not to cross it.  The stones form a boundary because the relevant people recognize it as such.  These people believe that it is a boundary, and recognize the deontic powers that come with being a boundary.  In light of this, it seems fair to say that the collective intentional states  that are involved in the constitution of the boundary have the double direction of fit.  Language needs not enter, neither to account for the double direction of fit [causal self-reference] nor to explain the normative nature of this institutional fact.  I am not sure what Searle has in mind when he mentions conventionally encoded commitments, but see no reason to believe that I have left anything out of the picture that essentially involves linguistic conventions.  So it seems that Searle overestimates the role language plays in institutions when he claims language is constitutive of institutions."

As a matter of anthropology and evolutionary biology, Hindriks may be closer to the mark as Chris Boehm's Moral Origins indicates. (See November 21, 2012 post).  Searle admits that cooperation among hominids is a characteristic of pre-linguistic humans.  But Boehm's thesis is that forms of human organization (egalitarian in nature) emerged as early as 150,000 to 200,000 years ago (if not earlier in other homo species), primarily through sanctioning behavior (subtle or lethal), well before language emerged 50,000 to 100,000 years ago.  It may very well be true that the kind of social institutions created by humans for the first time 10,000-35,000 years ago could not have occurred without language, but if Hindriks is correct, as some evidence suggests, then it means that humans were capable of non-linguistic declarations and that "hearer meaning" and collective acceptance in the pre-linguistic world was secured through a punch in the face.  And perhaps by virtue of mirror neurons.  (See October 25, 2011 and September 18, 2009 posts). 

This brings me to the more disappointing accounting in Searle's account of the creation of a social reality, although admittedly he does not ignore the subject.  Professor Searle is certainly correct when he says that what typically gets communicated in speech acts  are intentional states representing the world.  A previous post noted the research that truth telling is the default position of the human brain (see February 4, 2012 post) and this seems to make common sense as well.  But the human capacity to engage in both deception and self-deception cannot be overlooked.  (See February 4, 2012 and June 12, 2011 and May 22, 2011 posts).  This is missing from Searle's analysis, although he expressly acknowledges that the "one faculty that is left out of [his listing of intentional states], because it does not have a direction of fit, is imagination. . . unlike belief, which has the downward direction of fit, or desire, which has the upward direction of fit, my imagining something commits me neither to believing that what I imagine is the case, nor to the wanting it to be the case.  Sometimes one fantasizes what one would like to occur, but it is not an essential feature of fantasy or imagination that they are forms of desire.  One can fantasize what one fears or hates, as well as what one believes might happen, and indeed what one believes could not possibly happen.  There is no responsibility for fitting with imagination.  Another feature peculiar to imaging is that it is, or can be, free voluntary action. . . Imagination will have a role in our account of social ontology, because the creation of a reality that exists only because we think it exists requires a certain level of imagination."  The mistake here, it seems to me, is  a virtual assumption that the truth-telling default position of the human brain is the only position.  We know that is not the case.  We lie and deceive more frequently than we care to admit, and, importantly for this discussion, we do occasionally engage in acts of deception and make our imagination fit the world by declaring it to be the case even though that is inconsistent with the objective facts.  The Catholic Church's denial of the Copernican System is an obvious example.  (See  December 17, 2012 and December 5, 2012 post). 

This is why, in discussing Searle's example of the dog who "cannot think the false thought that door is approaching someone" I questioned whether this was necessarily true for prelinguistic humans.  If a prelinguistic human believed that the earth circles the sun, it is equally possible that the prelinguistic human could have held the false thought that the sun circles the earth.  There is no apparent reason why prelinguistic human mental states are not capable of manipulation on account of imagination. Human social reality can be constructed on the basis of false beliefs and by declaring that to be the case, and Searle admits that this can be the case as when "a community believes that someone has divine powers," where the belief goes beyond the fact.  He admits that "a whole system of status functions may be based on false beliefs," but he says that from the perspective of institutional analysis, it does not matter whether the beliefs are true or false; it only matters whether the people do in fact collectively recognize or accept the system of status functions.  OK.  So we create a "social" reality that is not made of the same the brute physical facts made of "mindless, meaningless, physical particles."  I can accept that, but it seems to contradict the purpose of this book which is "not to allow ourselves to postulate two worlds or three worlds or anything of the sort.  Our task is to give an account of how we live in exactly one world, and how all these different phenomena, from quarks and gravitational attraction to cocktail parties and governments are part of that one world."

John Searle, Philosophy in a New Century: Selected Essays (2008)

For the second consecutive post, I connect with issues I first encountered nearly forty years ago in college. I took two undergraduate philosophy classes with Professor Searle in the early 1970s: ethics and logic. He was an engaging lecturer, someone you wanted to listen to. Surprisingly the assigned texts for ethics were not authored by the usual sages from Greek antiquity or the Enlightenment; instead novels by John Barth --- The Floating Opera and The End of the Road --- and Searle's own Speech Acts, which includes his argument on deriving "ought" from "is."

This compilation of selected essays assembles several articles that Searle has written since the 1990s with some updating. This is not the first time I have mentioned Professor Searle in this blog (see September 27, 2009 and August 17, 2009 post) where I mentioned his willingness to recognize that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, which seems "remarkable" coming from an esteemed member of the philosophical community, "where for millenia its leading lights have been debating and struggling with non-biological metaphysical ideas about what form reality takes and how we know reality." I mention this again because I want to focus on the title article from the selected essays, Philosophy in a New Century.

Searle's article, first published at the end of 1999, begins, "A number of important overall changes in the subject [of philosophy] have occurred in my lifetime and I want to discuss their significance and the possibilities they raise for the future [of philosophy . . . The central intellectual fact of the present era is that knowledge grows. It grows daily and cumulatively. We know more than our grandparents did; our children will know more than we do. We now have a huge accumulation of knowledge, which is certain, objective, and universal . . . This growth of knowledge is quietly producing a transformation of philosophy." There are two ways one can approach this acknowledgment: as a struggle, in the sense of Henry Adams who, in his autobiography just a century earlier, felt that the accelerating accumulation of knowledge was always just beyond his grasp, or, in the case of Searle, with a sense of optimism that mysteries are on the verge of being solved while some new mysteries will be discovered.

The "modern era of philosophy" that began with the Enlightenment was based on a premise that the "existence of knowledge was in question" and the main task of the philosopher "was to cope with the problem of skepticism." This premise, says Searle, is on the verge of becoming obsolete. At the core of philosophy in the modern era was epistemology: how do we know what we know and how do we know what is real? Can there truly be objective knowledge? The era of skepticism is over, Searle says, "because the sheer growth of certain, objective, universal knowledge." And we should not conclude otherwise, just because science has not solved every mystery, or what we know today is capable of being corrected or revised tomorrow, and new mysteries are discovered regularly. Nor should we think that knowledge is not objective just because "all knowledge of reality is, from a point of view, from a perspective."

"A very curious thing has happened in the past two or three decades -- the philosophy of mind has moved to the center of philosophy. Several other important branches of philosophy, such as epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of action, and even the philosophy of language must be treated as dependent upon, and in some cases, even as branches of the philosophy of mind. Whereas fifty years ago [when Searle first began teaching] the philosophy of language was considered "first philosophy," now it is the philosophy of mind." John Searle moved with this trend. Nearly forty years ago, when I had the opportunity to attend his lectures, he was one of the premier teachers on the philosophy of language. In more recent years, as I came to reacquaint myself with his work, such as The Mystery of Consciousness, Mind: A Brief Introduction, and Mind Language and Society, it was clear that Searle had a new focus: the mind and the social construction of reality.

The "mind-body problem" that was an obsession of philosophers for centuries --- the relation between consciousness and the brain, is "a straight neurobiological problem," says Searle. Philosophers need to forget about Cartesian dualism "and just remind ourselves that mental phenomena are ordinary biological phenomena in the same sense as digestion and photosynthesis." Searle believes that the scientific inquiry into consciousness is not to ask 'How does the brain produce the conscious experience of red?' but 'How does the brain produce the unified, subjective conscious field.?' Recall what I quoted earlier, "[A]ll knowledge of reality, is from a point of view, from a perspective." In Searle's view, "We should think of perception, not as creating consciousness, but as modifying a preexisting conscious field." This is an important point, because it treats physically objective facts as existing reality that we present ourselves to rather than skeptically questioning whether that reality actually exists.

The philosophy of mind, Searle asserts, is now at the center of philosophy, and he believes cognitive science will be the most fruitful contributor to this branch of philosophy. "The basic subject matter of cognitive science is intentionality in all its forms." Too much time, Searle asserts, has been wasted on pursuing the thought that the brain is a digital computer and the mind is a computer program. Minds contain more than symbolic or syntactic components, they contain actual mental states with semantic content in the form of thoughts, feelings and the like, which are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain. He concludes that neuroscience is moving away from a computational approach to the brain, and this is likely to introduce new philosophical questions including a shift in our concept of memory. While I believe Searle is correct in questioning the purely computational approach to the brain, I note my comment in the August 17, 2009 post that Searle should reconsider the extent that information is physical and that information contained in energy is exchanged in a computational manner. This has to have some significance for neuronal electro-chemical activity.

The philosophy of language, a branch of philosophy to which Searle devoted a significant part of his intellectual life, is going nowhere, he concludes. Searle does believe that in the 21st century, the profession needs to develop a philosophy of society. And in a nod to Amartya Sen (see previous post dated January 11, 2011) he believes that an "expanded social philosophy would give us the tools for analyzing social institutions as they exist in real societies in ways that would enable us to make comparative judgments between different countries and larger societies without rising to the level of abstraction that we cannot make specific value judgments about specific institutional structures." This is a tall order, and I would like to know who Searle has in mind to serve as the 'impartial spectator.' Also with an implicit nod to Sen, Searle encourages ethics to steer from its obsession with epistemic objectivity, and approach ethics as a problem of "practical reason and rationality." But I will say here, as I did in the previous post, human evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and cognitive science can inform this subject as well. Finally, the philosophy of science in the 21st century needs to get in touch with the questions that physicists are trying to solve about the nature of the reality and causation.

Each of the remaining nine articles in this volume addresses these subjects in one way or another, and I want to specifically call out only one, titled Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles. In this article, Searle explains there are phenomena that are social facts (the piece of paper I have in my hand is a ten dollar bill), social objects (money), and social processes (the determination of rates of exchange). How is it, he asks, that we create a "social reality" --- of social facts, social objects, and social processes --- that exist only by virtue of collective acceptance and acknowledgement of them? Searle proposes that we need to distinguish between features of reality that are observer-independent and those that are observer-relative (dependent). Physical features such as gravity is observer-independent, for example; the United States of America is observer-dependent. The existence of an observer-relative fact depends upon the existence of a conscious agent agent for its existence. Social facts, social objects, and social processes are observer-relative. The important point that Searle wants to make is that "observer-relativity implies ontological subjectivity, but ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity." In other words, just because something is known subjectively does not deny its objective existence. This is his response to the skeptic and why he believes modern philosophy has reached the post-skeptical era. His example: the fact that Barack Obama is the current president of the United States, and the fact that a piece of paper in my hand is a $20 bill are epistemically objective facts even though observer-dependent "human attitudes" are part of their mode of existence. We should not let subjectivity or apparent dualism getting in the way of saying these facts are certain, objective, and universal.

Second, humans (and some animals), Searle asserts, have the ability to assign functions to certain objects. The assigned function is not intrinsic to its physical character, but the function exists only because of a collective assignment (e.g., the function of money as a means of exchange) --- they are observer-relative. "Function" has a normative component --- they are causes that serve a purpose. Functionality that exists as a result of a collective assignment is deemed, by Searle, to be a "status function." Human institutions --- government, marriage, religion, and the like --- are status functions. "Status functions are vehicles of power in a society." They are deontic powers because they deal with obligations, permissions, rights and responsibilities, duties, entitlements, and the like. Within society, we have a set of deontic power relations, which gives rise to reasons for action: to recognize something as an obligations, a right, duty or requirement is to recognize a reasons for action that are essential in human society. The deontic relations that evolve make possible observer-independent reasons for action. Thus, if others recognize the fact that the $20 bill in my hand belongs to me, they have desire-independent reasons for not stealing the $20 bill from me. What makes this possible, Searle believes, is language, a faculty that distinguishes humans from other animals.

Status functions, deontic powers, and desire-independent reasons for acting give rise to specific human forms of socialization. What makes this possible in humans is their ability to represent observer-relative institutional facts to be the case, and representation depends on language. So we have a language that relates to obligations, commitments, rights, duties and the like that other species do not. "All status functions and thus all human institutional reality, are created by a single type of linguistic operation, the Status Function Declaration. These create and maintain a reality in existence by representing that reality as existing." Here we see what Searle means when he says that the philosophy of language is a branch of the philosophy of the mind and how it all may become a branch of the philosophy of society.

The final note I want to make in this post is to acknowledge what I think drives Searle: "there is exactly one overriding question in contemporary philosophy: given that we must rule out Cartesian or any other type of dualism, how do we give an account of ourselves as conscious, intentionalistic, rational, speech-act performing, ethical, free-will possessing, political and social animals in a world that consists entirely [his emphasis] of mindless, meaningless, brute physical particles?" How can there be an ethical right or wrong in a world of meaningless physical particles? How can unconscious bits of matter in the skull [the brain] create consciousness? The answer lies in the fact that neurobiological systems are the foundation of our mental life, and language that enables human to create a social reality. Many of the posts in this blog from books that come off the bookshelf touch on some aspect of Searle's questions and the answers to those questions.

I was going to turn next to some fiction, but I changed my mind. I want to explore next the work of a skeptic, David Hume, which I have had on the bookshelf for some time, and then the recent work of a neurobiologist and see if I can discern the trends of which Professor Searle writes.