The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of
social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments,
nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle
explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution,
and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts
that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President
of the United States, the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar
bill, I got married in London, etc.
And yet these facts only
exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have
factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective
opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an
account of ourselves, with our peculiar humantraits DS mind, reason,
freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of
mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and
mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this
question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental
and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There
is just one reality: Searle shows how the human reality fits into that
one reality.
Mind, language, and civilization are natural
products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics,
chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and
maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions.
Theseinstitutions serve to create and distribute power relations that
are pervasive and often invisible.
These power relations
motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human
civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human
rationality, free will, politicalpower, and human rights. Our social
world is a world created and maintained by language.
Making the Social World : The Structure of Human Civilization - John Searle
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