Abstract
The ontology of society built by John Searle consists of two parts. The first concerns the definition of a social fact as the establishment of a status function by means of collective intentionality and declarative speech acts. The second concerns “the Background,” that is, a set of capacities supporting the whole apparatus of status functions, intentionality, and speech acts. Yet in Searle’s discourse, the Background comes after the fact, when the social reality is already constructed. By contrast, this chapter argues that in order to explain what a social fact is, the Background should take part in the formula that summarizes the establishment of the status function. The Background is to be characterized in terms of social practices establishing implicit norms that precede and ground the explicit rules instituted by intentionality and language. Therefore, the original formula for the constitution of social facts, namely, “X counts as Y in C,” should be rephrased as “‛X-in-C counts as Y”—and C should be related to the Background. Finally, this chapter argues that this formulation can address the problematic case of “freestanding Y terms,” that is, status functions lacking physical bearers. The solution lies in conceiving of X no longer as a mere object but as a causal-historical process that embodies a status function Y in virtue of its being sustained by the Background within a context of social practices.
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Notes
- 1.
Searle uses the symbol “Y” to indicate both the status function and its bearer (cf. 1995, p. 46). In this sense, one could equally say “X-in-C counts as Y = the leader” or “X-in-C counts as bearer of Y = leadership.” Instead, if one intends Y as strictly referring to the status function, then the general formula should be more explicitly rephrased: “X-in-C counts as bearer of Y.”
- 2.
“There is a socially created normative component in the institutional structure, and this is accounted for only by the fact that the institutional structure is a structure of rules” (Searle 1995: 146, our emphasis). Schmitz summarizes Searle’s point as “the assumption that normativity could not be socially created except by creating an institutional rule structure” (2013: 115).
- 3.
In developing this paradox, Kripke argues that it threatens the whole apparatus of rules, meanings, concepts, functions, and so forth, since there is no way to solve “the problem of how our finite minds can give rules that are supposed to apply to an infinity of cases” (1982: 54), nor can we appeal to more fundamental rules, because “the skeptical move can be repeated at the more ‘basic’ level also” (1982: 17).
- 4.
In his analysis of Searle’s social ontology, Runde points out this connection by observing that “the Background is shaped, in some cases decisively so, by the particular context and culture in which we grow up” (2002: 17). According to Viskovatoff, Searle introduces the notion of a Background “because intentionality cannot produce itself, but is made possible by non-intentional rule-following, so he needs a concept like that of practices” (2002: 70); in this sense, the Background works as “a device to graft the idea of social practices […] into an individualist, internalist theory of intentionality” (2003: 71).
- 5.
In Brandom’s terms, “the conclusion of the regress argument is that there is a need for a pragmatist conception of norms––a notion of primitive correctnesses of performance implicit in practice that precede and are presupposed by their explicit formulation in rules and principles” (1984: 21).
- 6.
A similar point is made by Stahl: “Someone who fails to follow a rule does not just deviate from a descriptive regularity which we supposed her behaviour to exhibit, but we can also say that she acts incorrectly (Searle 1995: 146). This normative aspect of action cannot be integrated into a story of mere causation” (2013: 129–130).
- 7.
As Gebauer puts it, “in illocutionary speech acts, the self acts as a person who is socially created and institutionally anchored in a social context” (2000: 74).
- 8.
As pointed out by Tomasello and his collaborators, a psychological skill like “joint attention” with its underlying neurophysiological “infrastructure” can play a key role in rule following. But joint attention in turn needs some contextual normative support: “Suppose that an adult points to an opaque bucket for the infant. If he does this out of the blue, the infant cannot know whether he is pointing to direct her attention to the container’s color, its material, its contents, or any other of myriad possibilities. However, if they are playing a hiding-finding game together, and in this context the adult points to the bucket, the infant will very likely infer that he is pointing to inform her of the location of the hidden object. Fourteen month-old infants make just such an inference in this situation […], but chimpanzees and other apes do not” (Tomasello and Carpenter 2007: 122, our emphasis).
- 9.
A similar point is made by Schmitz: “This is a basic kind of normativity and it does not depend on the presence of rules. It is not essential that adults who know the rules give the feedback as in Searle’s baseball example. It is sufficient that players react normatively to one another. Their emotional reactions are primitive forms of directives and evaluations. In this way, common (shared, collective) background dispositions, common skills, habits, and tendencies are established.” (2013: 117–118).
- 10.
“Some (not all) of the Background practices and presuppositions can constitute sets of power relations […] The Background and Network, as I have defined them, contain, among other things, a set of norms of behavior” (Searle 2010: 156).
- 11.
“The concept of power is logically tied to the concept of the intentional exercise of power […] No intentionality, no exercise of power. […] Let us call this ‘the intentionality constraint’” (Searle 2010: 151).
- 12.
In Searle’s words: “the Network is that part of the Background that we describe in terms of its capacity to cause conscious intentionality” (1992: 188). As Marcoulatos points out, starting from The Rediscovery of the Mind “the idea of unconscious intentionality […] is abandoned […] Consequently, the Network is largely absorbed into the Background, which is defined, as before, in neurophysiological terms” (2003: 69).
- 13.
Despite their apparent abstractness and explicitness, even the constitutive rules of chess, in order to acquire meaning, need to be grounded in a context of competitive game playing, that is, a normative practice embodying the notions of victory and defeat. As explained by Roversi, “the concept of checkmate is connected to those of attack and of king, and the concept of king is in turn connected to that of castling; but apart from noticing these connections, someone observing the system from a close-up view will not be able to appreciate how these connections established by constitutive rules can create meaning. This can be understood only when institutional elements are viewed in the context of an already meaningful practice” (2010: 233, our emphasis).
- 14.
As Zaibert and Smith put it: “there are provinces in the kingdom of normativity that have nothing to do with conventional rules. Surely some of these provinces affect the structure of social ontology” (2007: 174).
- 15.
Wittgenstein calls this basic layer “the bedrock”: “‘How am I able to obey a rule?’––if this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my following the rule in the way I do. If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached the bedrock, and my spade is turned, then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (Wittgenstein 1953: §217). Searle’s Background in some sense replicates Wittgenstein’s bedrock. Yet “Wittgenstein’s problem is to steer a course between a Scylla and a Charybdis” (McDowell 1984: 342), that is, between explicit rules and brute causal laws. Instead, Searle’s account of the Background––as we have shown––is often stuck between the Scylla of intentionality and the Charybdis of biology. Only if we conceive of the Background basically in terms of practices we can try to steer such a course.
- 16.
Searle claims that, in the case of institutional entities, “codification specifies the features a token must have in order to be an instance of the type” (1995: 53). Yet, prior to any attempt to explicitly codify the features that are normative for the tokens, the status function as a type is historically constituted by the tokens themselves, which hold and possibly proliferate with the support of normative practices. Millikan (2004) stresses the importance of having a certain history in order to be a certain social fact. This history involves the iteration of a given pattern of behavior that individuates the social fact. Yet our account differs from Millikan’s (just as from Sperber’s) with regard to the role that normativity plays in such a historical process. We do not believe that normativity can be simply explained in terms of basic biological purposes of achieving the wanted results (cf. also Millikan 1990). There is something more in normativity: a social constraint that is irreducible to individual adaptive purposes and that gives us, in Searle’s words, “desire-independent reasons for action.”
- 17.
In this sense, we can vindicate the claim that a document can truly constitute a social entity (cf. Ferraris 2012), rather than simply representing it. The document can constitute a social entity by inaugurating the causal-historical chain that composes the process X from which the status function Y emerges.
- 18.
Thomasson takes into account what we have called X-normativity by distinguishing three kinds of rules allowing for the creation of social entities: “Singular Rules: 1. (Of a) We collectively accept: Sa (where “S” names a social feature) […] Universal Rules: 2. For all x, we collectively accept that (if x meets all conditions in C, then Sx) […] Existential Rules: 3. We collectively accept that (if all conditions C obtain, then there is some x such that Sx)” (2003: 280–283). In principle, Thomasson conceives of rules in a sharply pragmatic way: “Although the ‘rules’ of the game (Walton’s ‘principles of generation’ and Searle’s ‘constitutive rules’) must be at least implicitly understood and accepted in order to do their work, they may or may not be explicitly stipulated. They may simply be embodied in background knowledge and practices––as we, say, become competent players of children’s games, appreciators of art, or members of society––and need not be something the participants explicitly have in mind or can verbally articulate” (2003: 279). Yet in formulating her three basic rules for social ontology, Thomasson overlooks such an original proposal. She tries, indeed, to reduce the context in Searle’s formula (“X counts as Y in C”) to a set of conditions C that should guarantee the link between the object X and the function Y. But those conditions work in turn as explicit rules, so as we are led back to Wittgenstein’s skeptical paradox, that is, to the problem of rules that need to be supported by other rules, with the consequent infinite regress. In order to stop the regress, we need to reintroduce the context and conceive of it no longer in terms of explicit conditions but rather in terms of implicit practices. That is why we need a context also in the case of Singular Rules, although Thomasson does not consider this possibility.
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We are especially grateful to Francesco Guala, Diego Marconi, the editors, and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
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Terrone, E., Tagliafico, D. (2014). Normativity of the Background: A Contextualist Account of Social Facts. In: Gallotti, M., Michael, J. (eds) Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9147-2_6
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