Review Symposium on Searle : II. Searle's The Construction of Social Reality

Abstract

The Construction of Social Reality can be read at different levels, and this makes it hard to assess. At one level, it is a stunningly clear, comprehensive, and extremely simple introduction to the foundations of the social sciences. At another level, it is an idiosyncratic and interesting statement by a philoso pher of note who writes in a field with which he is barely acquainted. And at yet another level, it is a philosophical treatment of certain philosophical problems that Searle's independent reflections on the nature and possibility of social reality have disclosed. Different readers will find different things in Searle's book. What I found is an original contribution to a theory of institu tional facts and to a certain kind of restricted idealism that Anscombe (1976) called "linguistic idealism."

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References

Anscombe, G.E.M. 1976. The question of linguistic idealism. Acta Philosophica Fennica 28:188-215.

Durkheim, E. 1915. The elementary forms of religious life. London: Allen and Unwin.

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Mead, G.H. 1934. Mind, self and society. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

Schlick, M. 1910. Das Wesen Wahrheit nach der modernen Logik. Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie und Soziologie 34:386-477. Translated by and excerpted from Martin Kusch, Psychologism (Routledge, 1995), 79.

Searle, John R. 1995. The construction of social reality. New York: Free Press.