Searle - Reply To D'andrade

Anthropological Theory Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) http://ant.sagepub.com Vol 6(1): 40–44 10.1177/1463499606061733

Culture and fusion Reply to D’Andrade John R. Searle University of California, Berkeley, USA

I want to begin by thanking Roy D’Andrade for organizing this special issue. In addition to his well-known intellectual distinction, he showed remarkable patience, sympathy and understanding in assembling all this material. I am personally especially grateful for his intellectual contribution and I feel that he has understood my work very well and taught me some important things about how it relates to the social sciences. Before turning to his article, I want to make a few general remarks about the entire project. I. PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE

Endeavors of this sort are usually thought of as ‘interdisciplinary’. I am suspicious of this label because I think that in a sense philosophy is by its very nature interdisciplinary, and because at the level at which I hope we can operate, disciplinary boundaries are not very important. At every stage of my working life I have been assured by at least some mainstream philosophers that my work at that stage was ‘not really philosophy’. Rather, it was linguistics, or psychology, or cognitive science, or sociology, or neurobiology and so on. I do not worry in the least about these characterizations because I think we should simply try to make intellectual advances and not worry about where the academic deans would categorize them. Having said that, however, I have to say that different traditional academic subjects, organized in traditional university departments, tend to have their own different intellectual styles and presuppositions, and sometimes these differences can impede understanding. I want to point out a couple examples of these before proceeding. Some years ago the sociobiologists, led by E.O. Wilson (1975), raised some interesting challenges to social science and philosophy. Specifically, there was a challenge to state what is special about human beings. Why should the social sciences treat human beings differently from the way ethologists treat other social animals? The implicit message of the sociobiologists was that humans are not different from other social animals and that the terms in which we need to understand human social behavior are essentially biological and above all evolutionary. I was sorry that the social scientists did not meet this challenge as much as I felt they should have; instead they tended to reject it out of hand. I think that it is an interesting challenge, and one way (not the only way, but one way) to see my work on social ontology is to see it as an effort to answer the challenge of 40

SEARLE Culture and fusion. Reply to D’Andrade

sociobiology. There are important differences between humans and other social animals, even including the primates. Traditionally, philosophers have specified these differences by saying that humans have a language in a way that other animals do not. This is true as far as it goes, but it is essential then to go further and characterize exactly what it is to have a language. And traditionally, we tended to think of language as a means of communication, and again, that is okay as far as it goes. But it does not tell us what is special about human communication. My own work on speech acts has led me to the conclusion that not only is language characterized by communication, and not only do we communicate representations when we communicate with other members of our species in a language, but of equal importance, in the performance of human speech acts we undertake commitments. We do this because of the peculiar double level of institutional speech acts marked by the formula of the constitutive rule ‘X counts as Y in context C’. Making such and such noises under certain conditions counts as making a statement, or counts as making a promise and so on. This idea provided me with the beginning of the theory of speech acts, but also with the entering wedge into an analysis of society, and it provided it in two ways. First, it turns out that the form of the constitutive rule applies generally to institutional phenomena, and second, it turns out that the undertaking of commitments, in the form of linguistic representations, is one of the constitutive features of institutional phenomena. There is nothing in the animal world that I know of that is remotely like this. In some sense, for example, the bees have a language with which they can communicate certain simple facts, but neither they nor any other animal, as far as I know, have anything like the structure of deontology provided by human languages, and, with that, the structure of deontology provided by human institutions. Not only does language describe human society, it is also partly constitutive of human institutional reality in ways that I have tried to make explicit. Two misunderstandings in the articles in this issue are so important that they require special mention. First, when I say human society has a logical structure, I am not using ‘logical’ as opposed to ‘illogical’. Rather, I am pointing out that human society has a structure which contains propositional contents with logical relations. I am not saying that human beings are logical as opposed to illogical, rational as opposed to irrational. We know perfectly well that we humans are capable of all sorts of illogical and irrational behavior. But rather, illogicality and irrationality can only operate within a domain of logical structures, and part of our task in stating the foundations of social reality is to lay bare the logical structures. The second important misunderstanding is that when I say that language is partly constitutive of social reality, I do not mean that one of the elements in social reality is language. That is too obvious. Everybody agrees that language is a social phenomenon. I am making a much more ambitious claim. All institutional reality, without exception, requires a linguistic or symbolic component. Language is not a component of social reality, so to speak, on all fours with money, property, marriage, or government. But rather, you cannot have money, property, marriage, or government without a linguistic component. This is an important point that I will come back to in my reply to Gross. In what follows I will try to respond to each of the four commentators. I will not respond to every single point, but will concentrate on those areas that seem to me most important, and especially those where I believe there is substantial disagreement or misunderstanding. 41

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 6(1)

II. FUSIONS

The general theme of D’Andrade’s article (in this issue) concerns the relationships between institutions and culture. He asks, ‘What, in simple words, is the relation between culture and institutions?’ As he makes clear, there are so many different conceptions and definitions of culture that it is hard to make use of the notion as an analytical tool. To me, one of the most suggestive things about his article is his attempt to clarify the notion of culture by situating it in relation to institutions in particular and society in general, along with individual personalities, what he calls ‘psyche’. But at the end, I am not at all sure that the notion of ‘culture’ is a useful analytical tool. Sometimes the concept that names the subject matter of a discipline is not itself an explanatory concept within the discipline. Biologists, for example, study life but do not use the concept of life to explain biological phenomena, nor do they need to worry about the definition of ‘life’. Similar remarks could be made about linguistics and ‘language’. Maybe that is the right attitude to have to the ‘culture’ in cultural anthropology. In my own work, I find that the notion of an institution admits of an articulated and fairly precise analysis, as do the notions of speech acts, intentionality and consciousness, but I would not know where to start with culture. I want to underline D’Andrade’s account of what he calls ‘fusions’. He says: An important fact about institutions is that they are constructed by a linked pair of fusions. The first is the fusion of the constitutive rule with collective commitment. The second is the fusion of an idea about how things should be with a collective commitment that they will be this way. This second kind of fusion is called here a norm. Norms are the collective shoulds of life, which Searle calls deontic powers. (p. 35) If I understand him correctly, I think he is right about this and it is an interesting way of putting the account that I have given of institutions: there has to be collective intentionality, but unlike more primitive forms of animal collective behavior, the collective intentionality in institutions involves essentially an idea, and the idea is that we will count something as having a certain status that it does not have intrinsically. And why do we do that? Why do we make that fusion? It is because of the second notion of fusion. We are going to create new power relationships by creating new norms, what I call deontic powers. So, to take an obvious example, we do collectively agree that George Bush is president, but that agreement is more than just animal cooperation; it involves, rather, the assignment of a special status, and this is the force behind D’Andrade’s notion of an idea. The point of doing this is to create a set of norms, and these norms, as D’Andrade sees, have enormous power in society. I also like his discussion of the role of value in the ontology of institutions. It is precisely at this point that the theory of social ontology comes in contact with traditional theories of ethics and social morality. My original analysis of institutions is ethically neutral. The Nazi state is as much a set of institutional structures as is the United States of America. But the similarity of the formal structure should not disguise from us the enormous moral difference between them. A next step in the investigation is to describe sets of procedures by which the validity of institutions can be assessed. In my opinion, the best work in this line is Rawls’s (1971) famous analysis of justice as it applies to institutions. 42

SEARLE Culture and fusion. Reply to D’Andrade

The whole discussion opens up questions of what I would like to call ‘institutional rationality’. Our traditional theories of rationality, according to which rationality is entirely a matter of selecting means to ends, of coordinating beliefs and desires, seems to me extremely impoverished. I have started to criticize it in Rationality in Action (2001), but much more work needs to be done, and we especially need a richer conception of social and institutional rationality. One of many questions is, what sorts of rational value assessments can we reasonably make of institutions, both our own and those of other cultures? III. CULTURE, SOCIETY AND PERSONALITY

The most provocative and suggestive part of D’Andrade’s article is the section called ‘The deconstruction of culture, society, and personality’ (p. 36), in which he tries to map certain systematic relationships between personality, culture, and social structure. The most profound idea in this section, I believe, is his point that we should not think so much of culture, psyche and society as separate kinds of things, but as different sorts of organizing processes. So construed, we can see how there is a heavy overlap between the contents of the notion of personality, the notion of culture and the notion of society and social structures at large, including the notions of institutions and practices. It is clear to me that he is not entirely satisfied with his current formulation since he puts a number of question marks in the overlapping elements of culture and society. I hope he has a chance to work this out in more detail because I found it the most profound and suggestive section of his article. IV. REIFICATION, OCKHAM’S RAZOR AND SUPERORDINATE REALITIES

The only substantive disagreement I have with his article, if it is indeed a disagreement, concerns his notion of a reality which he says is ‘superordinate’. He says, ‘This implies that there is a superordinate reality that has enormous causal power over individuals, as Durkheim argued’ (p. 34). I do not understand exactly what is meant by ‘superordinate’, but the reference to Durkheim makes me extremely nervous because it looks like D’Andrade is postulating a separate ontological level, the kind of dualism or tripartitism that one finds in Popper, Habermas and others. One of the main aims of The Construction of Social Reality (Searle, 1995) is to show that we can account for the reality and power of human institutions without postulating any such realm. These postulations violate Ockham’s razor, and are part of a long and confused philosophical tradition that I reject. We live in one world, it contains everything from quarks and muons to national elections and business cycles, and one of our intellectual tasks is to try to show how it all hangs together. There is only one reality and there are no superordinate realities. The point I am making here is that we do not need to postulate any separate or mysterious ontological levels in order to describe all of the facts. We can, even in our present state of neurobiology, accept that the mental level is entirely caused by and realized in neuronal structures, and in The Construction I argue that we can explain how the cultural and institutional levels are constituted by, and realized in, the collective intentionality of a large number of agents. To postulate extra ontologies, when it is not necessary to do so, is giving up on our job. 43

ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 6(1)

One of the reasons people feel the urge to make these unnecessary postulations (I am not saying that D’Andrade is guilty of this) is that they fear reductionism. They think that if we show that consciousness and intentionality are entirely caused by and realized in brain processes we will somehow be denying the reality and irreducibility of consciousness and intentionality. Analogously, they fear that if we show that institutional reality in particular and social reality in general is entirely in the heads of individual human agents (including their intentional relations to other human agents, to their histories, and to other elements of the environment), we will somehow be denying the existence of a social reality. But that is wrong. One can grant the reality of mind and society without postulating separate ontological realms. Acknowledgements

I am indebted for helpful comments on drafts of all of these replies to Romelia Drager and Dagmar Searle. References

Rawls, John (1971) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Searle, John R. (1995) The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press. Searle, John R. (2001) Rationality in Action. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wilson, E.O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

44