Abstract
How can people function appropriately and respond normatively in social contexts even if they are not aware of rules governing these contexts? John Searle has rightly criticized a popular way out of this problem by simply asserting that they follow them unconsciously. His alternative explanation is based on his notion of a preintentional, nonrepresentational background. In this chapter, I criticize this explanation and the underlying account of the background and suggest an alternative explanation of the normativity of elementary social practices and of the background itself. I propose to think of the background as being intentional, but nonconceptual, and of the basic normativity or proto-normativity as being instituted through common sensory-motor emotional schemata established in the joint interactions of groups. The chapter concludes with some reflections on what role this level of collective intentionality and the notion of the background can play in a layered account of the social mind and the ontology of the social world.
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Notes
- 1.
See Schmitz (2011) for more on this issue.
- 2.
For more discussion of this, see Schmitz (2012).
- 3.
He explicitly references Wittgenstein in a very similar context (1995: 140).
- 4.
I am prepared to go even further than Searle and to claim that all bodily action worthy of that name is connected with (and most likely even controlled by) a bodily experience of action (see Schmitz 2011).
- 5.
Compare Intentionality, Ch. 1. I also have some misgivings about the general view, but these are not germane to the topic of this chapter.
- 6.
Which is not to deny that such experiences may be refined or otherwise changed by building theories on their basis.
- 7.
See Hans Bernhard Schmid (2013) for extensive discussion of a particularly impressive (fictive) example for such a case and an argument that such resistance to bad experience may – appearances to the contrary – sometimes be rational.
- 8.
This mistake seems to be endemic to certain research methodologies in developmental psychology, namely, when conclusions about concepts and beliefs are inferred on the basis of data about habituation and dishabituation patterns (e.g., Baillargeon 2004).
- 9.
The notion of documentation has been championed by Ferraris (2007). It is important, but for reasons that will be obvious from what I say here, I believe Ferraris overstates his case when he claims that documentation is necessary for sociality.
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Acknowledgements
I acknowledge support for this research by a grant of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to the research group “Grenzen der Absichtlichkeit” at the University of Konstanz. I would also like to thank Werner Binder for discussion of an earlier draft and Melynda Moseley for improving my English.
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Schmitz, M. (2013). Social Rules and the Social Background. In: Schmitz, M., Kobow, B., Schmid, H. (eds) The Background of Social Reality. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5600-7_7
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