Collectives and Intentionality

Philosophers have been curiously unpuzzled by the existence of human institutions, and by what John Searle calls the 'metaphysics of ordinary social relations'. Searle induces in his readers a strong sense of the complexity, the precariousness, and the objectivity of the social world. He addresses neglected, deep, important questions with his usual panache and lucidity. Searle's answers to these questions are situated within a framework developed in earlier work, in philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. His aim is to 'assimilate social reality to our basic ontology of physics, chemistry, and biology' (p. 41). Earlier work has shown what it is, in Searle's view, for conscious, intentional biological beings to be present in reality. The main burden of The Construction of Social Reality is to show how culture could be brought into existence by such biological beings. The 'Real World', which is independent of any biological beings, and which has been assumed, is defended in the last three Chapters. In this discussion, I shall start from a question about one of Searle's building blocks, and proceed by making suggestions about why Searle's answer to it might matter within his overall project. The question concerns collective intentionality, which is a basic, pervasive and crucial notion in his book.