On Social Facts

Searle* attempts to provide an account of the ontology of social and institutional facts: those facts concerning money, political office, legal persons, marriage, games and all manner of social states. He provides an account of the use of performative utterances in the creation of social facts and suggests that language is partially constitutive of them. His argument is relevant to the debate concerning the nature of concepts as so many of our concepts are social or functional concepts.

In saying that social facts are partially constituted by linguistic facts, Searle demonstrates how social facts can themselves be dependent upon other social facts, because language is itself a creature of convention. Thus, what it all comes down to is the priority of brute facts (physical facts for Searle) as the base of facts upon which all social and functional facts ultimately depend. Indeed, it turns out that social states of affairs are real if a critical mass of persons in a community are disposed to assent to the truth of propositions concerning those states of affairs explicitly or by their behaviour.

There is an obvious problem with Searle’s whole project of basing social facts on brute facts in this way. Consider the story of the emperor’s new clothes. Assuming such a conceivable scenario is possible, the common disposition of the whole kingdom to assent to and behave as though the emperor has clothes is not sufficient to clothe the emperor. It is clear, then, that brute facts cannot be grounded in the same way as social facts. This may appear obvious, but the point is a simple one: Searle has not given the basis for the truth of social facts, he has simply changed the subject and is equivocating in his new use of terms such as ‘true’ and ‘exists’. For those for whom the kind of existence demonstrated by brute states of affairs is the only kind of any significance, Searle is espousing social nihilism.

*Searle, J. R., ‘The Construction of Social Reality’ (1995) Penguins Books: London; New York