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Social Reality in John Searle: Do Institutional Facts have Physical Realization?

Bahari, Amin | 2018

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  1. Type of Document: M.Sc. Thesis
  2. Language: Farsi
  3. Document No: 51094 (44)
  4. University: Sharif University of Technology
  5. Department: Philosophy of Science
  6. Advisor(s): Taqavi, Mostafa
  7. Abstract:
  8. In the extension of his former developments of the theories of philosophy of mind and language, John Searle (1932- ) proceeded into the realm of social reality by his The Construction of Social Reality and Making the Social World, written in 1995 and 2010 respectively. With his naturalistic background, he placed his new theory on top of his former theories of mind and language already naturalized and fully worked out. As we will see, social reality comes with our three marvelous capacities, not coming together, to the extent we know, in animals other than us: collective intentionality, assignment of function, and language; all of them already being treated by Searle, in a naturalized manner, in his most famous publications. However, there are cases where it seems that his naturalized theory is not capable of explaining some social and specially institutional phenomena, which may even put his naturalism in danger. Although those cases are somewhat complex, they are very important ones any adequate account of social reality must be able to explain. These are cases where we find a social entity which does not coincide with any determinate part of physical reality , so that it seems that, in a sense, it does not have a physical realization. Searle’s theory of social reality is presented here with all its intermediate steps which helped him to build the bridge between his early 1969 theory of speech acts and his late 1995 theory of social reality. After that, his theory will be investigated to see whether all institutional facts, the facts which are dependent in being such facts on human institutions, have physical realization, so that Searle’s naturalism is established firmly one more time
  9. Keywords:
  10. Deontology ; Naturalism ; Constitutive Laws ; Institutional Reality ; Social Reality ; Institutional Facts ; Status Functions

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