John Searle - The Normative Structure of Human Civilization

Dear John Searle and Neiman Marcus Camby ladies and gentlemen Friends of Caitlin burger and her willingness to lenders who have declaration power to have created the Center for Advanced Study law s culture as an institutional fact you see how infectious serves way is to think the world as one and undivided but in a social ontology conceived as completely created by men through declaration acts it is difficult to read his work without being forced by the pure meaning of the words to give a commitment perhaps later on there might be some critics however why does it work with with him and not with all the other philosophers social scientists etc a first objection to his theory by the way would be the singularity of this effect but let me go step by step John Arthur is a celebrity in the scientific world as a sociologist I'm asking myself what made the difference when Einstein arrived at New York and the whole city became crazy and the Beatles in comparison would be nothing than a boyband and Weber on the other side arriving at st. Louis for the World Fair in 1904 when nobody recognized him but we are not inviting just celebrities but we are interested in their contribution to deliver a better understanding and explanation of our world generations of philosophers and sociologists have been influenced by his theory of speech acts and later on by his part in the constructivism debate that the social reality is a created structure is a concept he shares with some sociological approaches however his unyielding insistence that which is necessary for an understanding of the world based on vocally kites with some shaft signs of reality if that is a translation at all and sociologically enhanced realism intended as epistemology makes him a privileged dialogue partner in the movement of new realism where the presence of Mauricio Faris who is not here if I see right but he will come on Laura tomorrow so but all the greetings to him of course is not a local but a global hero that yourself by the way Marco so in this respect we are following up on the topic of the conference new realism which attracted a great deal of attention in the academic world and in the reviews sections the ritual act of presenting a scientist and that's what I'm doing at the moment at the moment and by way of speech acts would be incomplete if a left if I left the honorary degrees and awards completely aside so only a selective view on that University of large University of us the University of Belgrade University of Lugano University of and so forth honorary professor of Beijing of let me see of born if I see right of East China Normal University University of Helsinki Sweden poof and off metal and so forth unfortunately you know the Linguistics don't deliver what we would need in this case the nobel prize of course it is a little bit of a false construction of Swedish society let me also quote some of the comments that have been done about his work I quote in his fascinating provocative account eminent philosopher John Searle shows how our everyday actions and cultural knowledge are of metaphysical complexity that is truly staggering Colleen Megan reviewing the construction of social reality with regard to the same book a statement by Jeffrey Hawthorne in the London Review of Books he sang a brisk bold and extremely extremely clear book this is philosophy in the best modern American manner both statements might serve as explaining the specific interest of the Center for Advanced Study Louis culture to spend a whole week in the atmosphere of his fault let me just for the sake of reducing complexity name three major questions we want to discuss with him first what is the possible utilitarian outcome of using his theorizing for purposes of the social sciences the sociologists question second that's the speech act founded conception of the social world as an ontological region taken this world as a real one though constructed world need the social sciences on the other hand in any kind of respect to make arguments more precise to profit from institutional knowledge like corporations an important case in your last book bureaucracy imputation processes and so forth and finally are there new answers to our general question that is the following one the question the problematic of this Center how can a normative commitment be created under the conditions of globalization and the rediscovery of religions in which the plurality of normative projections are linked together as an agreeable multiple order without constructing a new uniform law of normativity or lending a validity to the particular allistic cultures that would result in the dissolution of normativity itself so reading his books I brought some of them with me is one thing for example speech acts the campus wore intentionality minds brains and science the construction of social reality the mystery of consciousness mind language and society and so forth and also a book that I could not find in Germany Occidental a multiculturalism oh and which had the chance to talk about this book and the genesis of this book that is a fake book insofar as it is just in translation of what you said during a conference and they made a book out of it and we would I would so much like to read the book but you said oh would I like to read that book a job so I make here a point at the last one making the social world the structure of human civilization what gave also at the title for the conference today the normative structure of human civilization is a major contribution to the debate that in my perception is an encounter of philosophy and the social sciences however reading all these books and hundreds of articles is one way to improve one's knowledge being inspired by the words the elocution a fever of the charismatic speaker is another way to do philosophy and to see how the growth of knowledge about a real world is possible thank you very much for coming to our Center dear john and sharing your mind with us and the floor is yours thank you well I want to thank you for that generous introduction it's a bit daunting to try to get up and talk after that but anyway here goes I'm going to talk about some aspects of human civilization and I'm on a situate of the discussion within a larger intellectual context it seems to me there's only one overriding problem in philosophy today it has many different aspects and the problem is how do we give an account of the human reality that makes it consistent with and not merely consistent with a natural consequence of what we know about the basic reality is described by physics chemistry and evolutionary biology you see there is a central intellectual fact about the present era and that is knowledge growth we just know a whole lot more than our grandparents did and our grandchildren already starting to know more than we know and this is an enormous sea change in intellectual life we have a certain perception of ourselves we think we're conscious mindful rational speech at performing ethical aesthetic political beings but the world as described by the hard sciences tells us it's all mindless meaningless physical particles and even particles isn't no right but no nobody's listening particles and how do we make those two consistent and it isn't enough that they should be consistent you've got to show how civilization is a natural consequence of the basic structure of the world you've got this it you've got to show how that elections I've got to have electrons and presidents have to have protons and if nobody brings the electrons you can't have an election I mean you just wrap we have to show how the social institutional civilized reality is a natural consequence of the more fundamental reality now there are certain obstacles for that and I want to tell you about some of the obstacles because I have to give them out of the way at the beginning first of all there is a tradition a very strong that says we're not about of the physical reality that's the tradition of God the soul and the immortality we shouldn't think of human reality as part of nature no it's a consequence of the supernatural and I'm not going to argue against that tradition I'm just going to call attention to the dangers that it presents there's another tradition that says science is inconsistent with this human reality not a real sign for the conception well so the reality is just an illusion I reject both of those I want to reject that the tradition of thanks can you hear me all right okay I want to reject the tradition of God the soul and immortality I mean perfectly happy to talk about it in the discussion somebody asked me at lunch if I was an atheist and I said well if I thought the issue was worth worrying about highs I would be an atheist you know but am I an atheist about Santa Claus for example no I mean it's just I don't I don't worry enough about it to be an atheist but in any case there is that tradition and then there is a misconception about science that somehow other there is science names and ontological domain and scientific reality is somehow inconsistent with the human reality so I'm rejecting both of those I reject any kind of a dualism is the great cheat of our intellectual tradition where you cheat by saying well there these two world says the world of the mind and the world of the body and it's even sounds grander and in German we got words like Geist and which we don't have in English but in any case I'm gonna I'm rejecting any kind of dualism and it got worse when various people said well really there are three worlds how does the world have physics and the world of the mind and then there was a world of culture in all its manifestations I hold a view that we live in one world at most I mean that's the one we've got to try to describe okay so in order to do that in order to give that description I have to make a couple of distinctions at the beginning because these really are the failure to make these distinctions is really a tremendous obstacle in our intellectual culture objectivity is a big deal for us and the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is crucial but the problem is that those distinctions are systematically ambiguous and I want to sort out the ambiguities there are two different senses of the objective subjective distinction there's an ontological sense and an epistemic sense epistemically the distinction is between different types of claims so if I say van gock was a van gock died in France well that as they say as a matter of objective fact that's epistemic Lee objective if I say van gock was a better painter than Goga well that as they say is a matter of opinion that is epistemic Lee subjective but underlying that distinction is a distinction in ontology about modes of existence some entities have an existence which is dependent on human or animal subjects pains and tickles and itches only exist in so far as they are experienced they are ontologically subjective but mountains and molecules and tectonic plates are ontologically objective now here is part of the reason why it's essential to make this distinction I'm going to try to give you an account of how it's possible to of epistemic ly objective claims about a domain which is ontologically subjective or contains subjective elements this is crucial to get clear about this when I first got interested in consciousness I would go to my friends in the neurobiology in the neurosciences and say why don't you guys get busy and solve the problem of consciousness what the hell am I paying you for and their answer was typically look you admit consciousness is subjective science is objective there cannot be a science of consciousness now that is a systematic confusion everybody sees that between the epistemic sense in the ontological sense consciousness is ontologically subjective but that that's no reason why we cannot have an epistemic objective science of a domain that's ontological e subjective and this is I'm going to give you an account of a domain or various domains that are ontologically subjective or contain elements of ontological subjectivity but it ought to be possible to get an epistemic ly objective account of those domains okay so that's one crucial distinction not another distinction we're going to need is but a related to this is the distinction between those facts in the world are those features of the world that exist independently of any human observers and those facts and features that are in some sense dependent on our attitudes I and just to have a piece of jargon I'll talk about features that are observer-relative and observer-independent it's a bit misleading because observer might suggest some outside anthropological observer and I mean to include also participants within the facts that make something observe a relative or observer independent so it's the chemical structure of this thing is observer independent but that we use it as a microphone and not as a paperweight that's observer-relative that's relative to our interests and what we've designed it for and my favorite example are these weird bits of paper that I carry in my wallet and though they're physically rather trivial it's cellulose fibers with various ink stains on it we think it's interesting because it's money and what fact about it makes it money not affect about the physical and chemical structure to put it very crudely will refine this a bit later the fact that it's money derives from the fact that people think it's money it's money if we think it's money and it's only money because we think it's money and that makes money observer-relative and thus contains an element of ontological subjectivity because the attitudes of these observers are ontologically subjective but at the same time it's just a plain fact that it's money it's epistemic objective American tourists always amazed by the fact that you can get away with presenting these bits of paper in payment does it doesn't look like money but it works I've tried it you know they don't say well maybe you think it's money no it really does work now how does it work well it works because people agree on it they have collective intentionality okay and I want you to keep those two distinctions in in mind as we proceed with the first distinction I is between these two senses of the objective subjective distinction and the second distinction is between the observer relative and the observer independent we're all observer-relative phenomena have at least an element of ontological subjectivity okay I'm a fairly heavily jet-lagged so I'm going to take I'm going to be drinking a lot of water okay so now let's go to work we start with a world of physical particles and it started 15 billion years ago and I wish these guys would make up their mind because the latest figure are 13 billion years you mean you're only wrong by 2 billion years well anyway ok 13 billion years and then I won't even tell you how long ago I life started to evolve because here's a scandal we don't know when life began and we don't know how it began now that seems to me a scandal but anyway I guess we will figure it out eventually but we do know this there are a lot of large carbon-based molecules with a lot of nitrogen hydrogen and oxygen now why should we have this fetish for those four elements well we do that's our life a carbon-based molecules with lots of hydrogen nitrogen and oxygen and they begin to be alive and to evolve and develop and I'm going to skip over a few billion years and to get to us and we are the product of that evolution now what have we got that's so interesting that for our discussion tonight well we got two features and they're systematically related we've got consciousness which is a which is a natural product of neurobiological processes but at the same time is realized in the neurobiology of humans and animals there's always some philosopher who says animals are not conscious well I want to introduce him to my dogs I mean I've had in my life now I've had four dogs Fraga russell ludwig i and well actually five dogs my latest puppy is tarski I know tarski I owe a lot to love tense up because the dog I wanted died search around the only one I could find on the net lived in Warsaw it was a puppy but Lufthansa flew him in I saw how to name him with a Polish name he didn't hate it he didn't know that his name was tarski when he arrived but anyway okay now I want to say you think dogs aren't conscious you just look at my dogs I mean it's just I seem to be incredible than anybody would deny that they're conscious okay so we've got humans and animals that have consciousness and with consciousness they have I hate this word but we're stuck with it intentionality they have the capacity of minds represent or be directed see intentionality doesn't bother Germans because it doesn't remind them of intending because object does not sound like intentional it ate but like a lot of confusing terms in English language floss we got it from the German so intentionality for those few of you who are native English speakers had no special connection with intending that's just one kind of intentionality um on others all right and now comes an amazing fact and that is humans and lots of animals have the capacity to cooperate they have collective intentionality where it isn't just that I am doing something and you are doing something but we are doing it together and that gives you an enormous leap our 'fl device and I want to show you how given collective intentionality you can create human civilization now I want to introduce another notion and that is we assign functions to objects and we do that collectively and functions are always observer-relative the thing is a knife or a comb only relative to the fact that we build it for that purpose and we've assigned that purpose to us the observer relativity of functions is disguised from us in biology by the fact that we often discover functions in nature it wasn't until the 17th century that people knew that the function of the heart was to pump blood and that gives us the illusion that somehow other functions are observer-independent but that's not right the the fact that the function of the heart is to pump blood is different from the fact that hearts do in fact pump blood because there's a normativity attached to the notion of a function we value life and survival if if we all thought that life and survival were bad and ought to be extinguished then hearts would be dysfunctional but we don't think that we think life and survival have value and for that reason we can discover functions in nature those that serve life and survival ok so we've got the assignment of functions that humans make and some animals do as well to objects and states of affairs but now there is a remarkable development and that is there are objects that perform their functions not just in virtue of their Fizz Nicoll structure but there are people and objects that have functions assigned to them where the assignment assigns to them a status and the function is performed in virtue of the fact that there is a collective intentionality there's a collective acceptance of that status and I call those not very strikingly status functions so for example it isn't just that I have these objects that perform functions in virtue of their physical structure but money performs its function not in virtue of its physical structure but in virtue of the fact that it has a status assigned to it the status of being money and that gives it a function that it would not otherwise have I and this is pervasive if you think of Barack Obama as President of the United States well that's not a result of his biochemistry or his DNA but it's a in virtue of the fact that a status has been assigned to him and he performs the function of the presidency in virtue of having collective acceptance of that status now here is the question how does that work you see we live in a sea of status functions every one of us in this room is a citizen of a country or a student or a professor I wear a holder of a valid driver's license and a beneficiary of an insurance policy we are convicted for having drunk drunk too much the last time we drove or whatever all of these are status functions we live in a sea of invisible status functions and I want to say this is the key to understanding human civilization animals have rich social structures with alpha males and alpha females and a hierarchy of power relations but they do not have status functions status functions give us an enormous power and indeed I'm going to argue they are the glue that holds civilization together how does it work does something acquire a status function well I'm going to say a little bit about the development of my own thinking on this because I it my first book on this is it didn't go as far as my second book and I want to explain that how we doing now Here I am lecturing in English too many people who for whom it's not their first language am I going too fast everybody okay I mean I no point in lecturing if it's not absolutely clear to everybody so let me make it as clear as I can alright so here we are with these status functions how do they come about well I want to say my first idea was that you had to have the notion of a constitutive rule and that rules can be divided into two kinds those that regulate previously existing activities or activities that can exist independently of the rule like the rule drive on the right-hand side of the road you don't have to have that rule in order to have driving but there and that rule is of the form do X or do I say on the right or say on the left but there are other rules that I say are not just regulative but are constitutive rules in the sense that engaging the any activity regulated by the rule consists in following the rules or sets of rules so the philosophers favorite example is always the rules of chess they're not like the rules of driving it is not the case that a lot of guys were pushing bits of wood around on boards and some guy said fellas we got to get rules because your night keeps banging into my bishop no that's not not how it is it isn't like preventing a chess accidents so we have rules that constitute the game of chess and I at one time thought well they all have the same form they have the form X counts as Y in C so in context C so such and such a move counts as a legal night move such in such a position counts as you being in check such in such a kind of check counts as checkmate or are getting two examples that are more important getting a majority of votes in the electoral college counts as being President of the United States elect i satisfying certain conditions that i satisfy count as being a professor in the University of california-berkeley why do we have this why is this the form of these things well you see it isn't intrinsically money and he's not intrinsically a president and I'm not intrinsically a professor but rather there's collective intentionality by which we count somebody as a professor or we count something as money or private property or marriage or government or cocktail party or summer vacation all of those are what I call status functions now that ties in with a notion I had earlier of the institutional fact and the distinction between institutional facts and brute facts and the hypothesis that I'm putting forward now is that all institutional facts about money and property and marriage and government all of those are status functions and they're all created by applications of this principle X counts as Y and C they're all created by reiated reiterated applications of constitutive rules and I think that's a pretty good theory but I'm going to show you that some weaknesses to it and how we can improve it but first of all let's deal with a possible objection somebody might say well look that's too pathetic and apparatus you can't create human civilization with that it's too fragile in fact from a purely formal logical point of view it has two remarkable properties that give it a lot of strength first of all it iterates upward indefinitely so I make these noises through my mouth they count as sentences of English but uttering certain sentences of English counts as making a promise and making a certain kind of promise counts as making a legally binding contract now you see what's going on here you mount up in a hierarchy with this X one counts as Y 1 but Y 1 is identical with X 2 which counts as Y 2 and you can go on up indefinitely that legally binding contract counts as getting married and of course from an institutional point of view in the state of California when you get married all hell breaks loose you got spousal benefits and all sorts of income tax rights and I friend of mine at a difficult a male friend of mine had a difficult pregnancy and so I had to take time off from the university I mean all kinds of bizarre aspects to this but all of these are cases where it iterates upward and then the other point is it doesn't just iterate upward but it spreads out laterally so I don't just have money but I have money in my bank account which is in the bank of America and Berkeley California and it's put there by my employers the Regents of the University and I use it to pay my credit card bills in my state and federal income tax every noun phrase I uttered names a status function names an institutional fact and I said we live in a sea of institutional facts okay so that sounds like it's a pretty good theory what's wrong with it well a couple of things that worry us about it first of all you don't have to have a previous institution in order to count something has something a group of kids might just count somebody as the captain of the football team and they don't have an institution whereby they follow a pre-existing rule you have I ad hoc cases furthermore with the human ingenuity sometimes we create an institutional fact where there is no previously existing object my favorite example are corporations corporations are remarkable invention because it's not intuitive I that you can create something out of nothing but that's what the law about corporation says it says you can form a corporation essentially by saying we're forming a corporation you have to file Articles of Incorporation but if we want it to all of us in this room under California law could we could become the the normative structure of human civilization corporation and file it we wouldn't do it because it costs money and there's nothing in it for us but but you can't do it in the state of California so you have what Barry Smith calls freestanding wide terms there is no X term there's nothing that counts as the corporation you just invent it out of thin air how does that work and in fact my favorite example money money actually does not require any physical existence you see I when you think about money you're tempted to think about the bits of paper or the coins in your wallet or your pocket but in fact most of your money has no physical reality at all there are magnetic traces on computer discs in banks that represent the amount of money you have but the magnetic traces are not money they represent money they represent the amount that you have and you don't actually need physical currency in order to have money so what's going on in these cases where you have the free standing wide terms and you have institutional facts created I without a previously existing rule where people just decide to treat somebody as the leader or the boss and what how should we account for these cases well okay that leads me how to extend the theory and now we get closer to the normativity questions okay I'm getting kind of hot I might take my jacket off yeah sorry unfortunately I keep my wallet my wallets in my pants yeah okay so now I have to go a step back and say I've been talking as if language were just an instant one institution among others such-and-such an utterance counts as a statement let's say the snow is white and such-and-such a piece of paper counts as a currency in the European Union but I think if we look a little closer we'll see that language is not just one I institution among others it's the fundamental institution in that all of the others are created by linguistic operations and I now want to spend a few minutes explaining that because that is one of the most important arguments that I'm going to give you in this lecture if you look at speech act theory you find that language has different ways of relating to reality so the Philosopher's favorite is to take a statement which can be true or false and philosophers examples tend to be rather boring snow is white two plus two equals four I men are mortal but those are cases where the utterance is supposed to relate to an independently existing reality and it has what I call the word to world direction of fit the words are supposed to fit the world not all audiences are like that orders and promises are not supposed to fit a pre-existing reality they're supposed to provide a motivation for changing reality and they have the world two word direction of fit like that that's the world is supposed to change to match the words and the simplest test for whether or not something has this downhill direction of it is can you literally say that it's true or false because truth and falsity are the terms we have for assessing success in the word to world direction of fit whereas we don't say of commands and promises that they're true or false we say the command was obeyed or the promise was kept there are various other in English at least there are different vocabularies that we have for describing success in achieving this direction of fit now here is a remarkable fact I don't know of any animal language that has this but human languages definitely do and that is there are utterances where we create a reality and thus achieve the world to word direction of fit but we create that reality by representing it as having been created by making an utterance that has the word to world direction of fit the most famous examples were discovered by my old teacher John Austin and they're called performative so the guy says the meeting is adjourned I pronounce you husband and wife or you're fired or you're hired or I hereby declare you President of the United States all of those are cases where you make something the case you make it the case that the meeting is adjourned by representing the meeting as being adjourned and I call those heads I'll give you some jargon here the first class where we try to describe things are those I call assertive x' and those include assertions and statements and descriptions and explanations the second classes where you have the world--to word are either directives or Cammisa --vs directives like orders requests and commands and committees like promises and vows and pledges but now here's an interesting category that doesn't fit either of these and I call those declarations where you make something the case declarations where you make something in a case by declaring it to be the case and the declaration has both directions of fit when you adjourn the meeting by saying the meeting is adjourned you make something make it the case that the meeting is adjourned but you do it by representing it as being the case and thus one on this same speech act has both directions of fit at the same time see you're not performing two speech acts when you say the meeting is adjourned or I pronounce you husband and wife you're performing one speech act that has both directions of fit simultaneously hi and that is the key to understanding these status functions that I was talking about and I'm going to call those status function declarations declarations that create status functions see what is what kind of a speech act is this counting something as having a certain status that is the form of a declaration where you make it the case that this X term this piece of paper or this guy is money or president or professor or student you make it the case by representing it as being the case and the declarations need not be explicit I sometimes you can make somebody the boss just by treating them as the boss we can't decide this question because Sally's not here and we have to wait till Sally gets here all of those are cases those are cases that have the form of the status function declarations even though it is quite implicit you don't have to say we hereby make Sally the boss no you can just make Sally the boss by representing her in a variety of ways as being the boss these are cases where the status function is created insofar as it is represented but the logical form of that representation is the status function declaration but now we have remarkable distinction between language and other institutions language is not one institution among others it is the central institution in that all institutional facts come from repeated applications of utterances that have a representations that have this form where we count something as having a status which it does not have intrinsically language is different however in that in the case of language the semantics the meanings of the words I don't explain meaning but the meanings of the words combine to form the meaning of the sentence and that enables you to use the to perform a speech egg so take a simple example snow is white if you know English or Schnee advice in German you know English you know that the knowledge of English is sufficient to enable you to make the statement that snow is white by uttering that sentence but in the case of making somebody prison in the United States or a professor or graduate of this university the semantic powers of the sentences are used to create powers that go beyond semantics you see the semantics of the of the president of the sentence snow is white that's all that does is enable you to perform a speech act saying the snow is white but in the case of declaring war a state of war now exists in that case you create a reality using the semantics but the reality goes beyond the semantics the reality now involves what well that's the next thing I'm going to tell you why do we do this I mean why do we go through all this iterated application of these constitutive rules and we have cases where you can just create a y term by declaration where you make something a corporation or you make it to be money or you do it on an ad hoc basis why do we do that and the answer is all of these create power relations all of this all of these are forms of power now why white what kind of power is it and why do we do it well the power is a very peculiar kind of power I and again I think animals don't have not only whiskey animals don't have these kinds of power relations and in English they have names like rights duties obligations authorizations permissions and authority of various kinds and just to have a piece of jargon I call these deontic powers we create that comes from the Greek word for duty we create deontic powers by repeated applications of representations that have the form of a status function declaration well let's go the next step do all this stuff you make money property marriage government cocktail parties summer vacations and by the way sabbaticals how you be surprised that the deontic power you get out of sabbaticals i'm constantly being asked to serve on some damn-fool committee and I say I'm on sabbatical and this I said I mean people respect that the Dianna Cour I now have rights that I wouldn't otherwise have all of those are cases of status functions and we do that to create deontic powers rights duties and obligations and how do deontic powers work what's the mechanism there and the mechanism again I think is remarkable and here it is if you get people to accept a status function they are committed to accepting a deontic power and why is that a big deal because the deontic power gives them reasons for acting which are independent of their inclinations now that is a remarkable fact humans create institutional realities of Rights duties and obligations which give them reason for acting which are independent of their immediate inclinations I'd give an example a guy asked me to give a talk in Bonn on such-and-such a day the day arrives and I don't say hell I'm too jet-lagged I'll go more I drink more of the local beer know I have an obligation I made a promise and this is I as I said this is the glue that holds human civilization together we're locked in a sea of status functions that give us reasons for acting which are independent of our desires which I want to call them desire independent reasons for acting so you get an interesting set of equations and I won't write it all out because I'm running out of paper on this sheet but anyway here they are all institutional facts without exception our status functions all status functions are created by applications of a form of representation that has the form of a status function declaration it need not be explicit but that's the logical form what's going on all status function declarations create deontic powers and all deontic powers give people reasons for acting that are independent of what inclinations they might otherwise have again my dogs are great dogs but they do not act on obligations they're not they're sitting there thing about what am i under an obligation to do now that's just yeah they don't that's not a worry that they have I and that means that they don't worry about the next meeting they have to go to or about paying their income tax or doing all the things that involve obligations now I want to add to this so we got this set of equations institutional facts are status functions they're created by repeated applications of a certain type of representation of status function declaration they create deontic powers deontic powers give people reasons for acting which are independent of their immediate inclinations and that's for that reason they're the glue that holds human civilization together and what makes us different from other animals now I'm not knocking other animals I think they're just great and if you if it turns out that you got a tribe of chimpanzees that's been doing this for millions of years fine welcome to the club it's just I haven't found out about them and as far as I can see it's only humans that do all this stuff okay well look now how much more have I got any more time can I okay well alright but yeah alright okay but a few more things I want to say now I said incidentally that all of these institutional facts are not only created but they are maintained in their existence by representations that have this form and that's a more subtle argument to make out but you see that if you look at how revolutionary movements try to get control of the vocabulary you see in I in Russia after the Revolution they did not want people to be called by their pre-revolution titles they want everybody to be comrade they wanted to be addressed as comrade and comrade marked a different status function it marked a different way of relating I had to for people to be situated in society or not taking an example closer to home in the early days of the feminist movement in the United States they were very anxious to get rid of the terminology of ladies and gentlemen I'm you know it was not supposed to be the ladies room and the gentlemen's room because they wanted those marks status functions that they wanted to alter I and indeed you watch how certain terms become obsolete and you will see changes in status functions so if you look at older American laws the word spinster occurs often you know so-and-so as a spinster or spinsters have certain rights and I asked my class how many of you are spinsters see one middle-aged woman raised her arm I admired her she had courage but it's an obsolete concept because the status function that went with being a spinster it's already a metaphor it Menza an unmarried woman who spent a lot of time spinning I mean I'm making a cloth but that's now become obsolete and who knows maybe bachelors going the same way I mean in California nobody refers to himself as a bachelor anymore because you know they're well I won't go into the sociological details for that but in any case they the terminal I that that the changes in terminology are good clue as to what's going on in these cases now another feature that is essential to understanding this is that typically status functions require status function indicators you have to have an indication of your status function and those are all speed checks if you wear a wedding ring that is a status function indicator because if the wearing it is a speech act it says I'm married I an a forms of dress are also status indicators when I first got to Berkeley I could tell who was a professor and who wasn't because the professor's had ties on and the undergraduates didn't then there came a period in the 60s when the only way you could tell was the professor's have shoes on now where the desert tonight so you had changes in status function indicators but there are a whole lot of variety and Germans I think particularly are sensitive to this because I've seen it advertised that you could get a job where you would be annexed by UMTA and you would be a uniformed Bayamo you'd have a uniform and of course the uniform is a status function indicator so these acquire kind of life of their own I don't know how you'd live in California without a California driver's license even and now even if you don't drive they will issue a thing that looks like a driver's license because you need it to show of yourself for identification to buy beer I mean even me they want they want me to show that really I'm over 21 Kosala it's too stupid but in any case ok status function indicators function largely now I want to say a few words about normativity I think I've said this implicit but I won't make it fully explicit the normative structure the official normative structure of human civilization comes out in the fact that all of these status functions bear a normative burden and how do we get away with it if it's just a matter of counting something as something the answer is get people to accept it if you can get people to accept the status function you and you've got them to accept an extremely powerful motivating force because you've got them to accept reasons for acting that are independent of their desires well ok couple other questions I want to discuss how can anybody act on a desire independent reason because all actions all voluntary intentional actions are among other things the expression of a desire to perform that action and the the secret of understanding the answer that is to see that you can accept something as a valid reason for an action and thus form a desire to do the thing that you accept you have a valid reason for doing even though the desire is based on the reason and not the reason on the desire you see it's because you recognize that you made a promise that you form a desire to do something but the prom recognizing of the promise was not itself the recognition of a pre-existing desire now it doesn't always work I mean a lot of times people say okay so I made a promise who gives a damn and then they don't do the thing they promised to do but when it when it does work it works because of rationality and and the system that I've been describing to you locks into human rationality people can say well because I owe you the money or I made a promise or I have an obligation as a professor I or I have I'm a citizen and have to pay my taxes because they recognize the validity of the status function they form a desire to do the thing that they recognize they have a valid reason for doing but it's very essential to see then in those cases the desire is based on the reason and not the reason on the desire that it's because you recognize the validity of the reason that you recognize that you have all right that you can form a desire for doing to doing something even though you don't have an antecedent existing desire to do that thing what's the proof of that I think the simplest proof is to look at linguistic look at language cases where I get a medical report that I'd rather not believe I but I have a very good reason for accepting it because it is epistemic ly overwhelmingly justified and so you have cases for accepting something where you didn't have a previous you had a no desire to accept that that you've got such-and-such a disease which they have discovered but you have a desire independent reason namely your commitment to the truth which gives you a reason for accepting something that you wouldn't otherwise want to accept so I think I mean all the economics that I was taught as an undergraduate is based on a denial of this fact I mean they think that all rationality is based on desires and that's just wrong there are lots of tires that there are based on reasons where the reasons are not themselves desires now there is another a source of confusion in our intellectual culture and that is the traditional fact value dichotomy and I want you to see that in the cases that I've been describing I that dichotomy gets bored because once you recognize an institutional fact and it is epistemic ly objective it's an epistemic ly objective fact that I have a debt that I made a promise that I am a professor in the university that I am a husband and a father and all those other things and in in those cases I have a reason for doing something I have a valid reason for doing something which is independent of my other inclinations and as I've said over and over you couldn't make civilization work without that alright now I think I should say something about how this relates to the law and then I'll stop because I want to leave plenty of time for question it seems to me lawyers ought to be interested in this for a very simple reason I am advancing a theory which if it's right has the following consequence human civilization exists only because it's represented it's represented in a certain way linguistic representations don't just describe an independently existing reality but they create the very reality that they represent at least in this little corner and that's not true in physics or chemistry I mean there was I don't know if you suffered and listen Germany but in the 1990s there was a nutty movement in the United States in literary departments where they said well all of reality is created by us all some of them were in French departments illa textually to text there are certain kinds of nonsense you can only say in French and now is it it's all a text related text and of course I'm not accepting that it's this little corner of human creation where we create something by representing it but in physics you don't create the fact that hydrogen atoms have one electron you discover that fact you need a vocabulary to state that fact but the fact is not created by the vocabulary but when it comes to money and private property and summer vacations and sabbaticals those are created by representation and the representations I'm claiming had this linguistic form now if that's right if I'm right about that then we ought to take this seriously in the law and I don't know much about the law but maybe some of you can help me with this it seems to me intuitively you would want a distinction in the legal system between laws that have the form of commands that is the criminal law and those like the laws for forming corporations that have the form of constitutive rules and what I would like of course is a much richer taxonomy we need a much richer account of how different kind of laws relate to this but I think that if I'm right about then this is important for the study of law because lawyers deal with representations and in the kind of society that we live in they live in they deal with written representations I there's an interesting problem that's come up and that is the State Department sent a friend of mine on to Afghanistan to assist them with their legal system to creating a better legal system and she discovered a depressing fact namely the judges were almost without exception illiterate the judges couldn't read now try to imagine what the German or American legal system would be like if the judges were illiterate now my son who was a combat officer in in Afghanistan was a lieutenant colonel in the Special Forces he didn't think that was any special problem they just have a different way of handling legal system and he pointed out that Afghanistan has not had not been competently governed since Alexander the Great he's a historian among other things so we shouldn't be too I wish we shouldn't be too snobby about the fact that their judges don't spend a lot of time reading and writing okay I think they may have problems and that we may be mistaken in supposing that we can simply ship democratic forms of government and juridical systems to a society that has their particular structure anyway just to conclude then basically what I've been telling you is that there that language is not one institution among others it is the basic institution in that all other institutions depend on language in a way the language does not depend on other institutions if an anthropologists come back from the anther from the Amazon basin and she says I've discovered a tribe I that has language but they don't have money and private property and marriage while that makes sense it'd be unusual but okay why not I but if she comes back and says well I've discovered a tribe that's got a rich system of money and private property and marriage and government but no language nobody ever communicates linguistically well that's incredible that couldn't be the case and what I've been doing is try to explain why that is the case so what I think I'll do now is is just say that what I've described you is kind of just the the the basic form of a general account of human society but I don't see this as finished I think this is an ongoing research project thank you for your patience it's a great relief to talk in a German university audience where at the end they don't just do this you

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Views: 17,624

Rating: 4.821229 out of 5

Keywords: John Searle, Normative Structure, Human Civilization, Law, Culture, Sociology, Philosophy, Werner Gephart, Käte Hamburger, Kolleg, Institute, Forum, Recht, Kultur, Legal, Theory, Nazgol Majlessi

Id: edn8R7ojXFg

Length: 60min 9sec (3609 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 16 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

His interview on Wittgenstein/linguistic philosophy is great too.

I believe Searle's Oxford thesis was on Wittgenstein.

When it comes to free will, has a slightly naive attitude about it. He just uses the analogy of raising your arm (which is volition, and easily explained without free will) and says that the difference between raising one's arm and blind reflex is so vast that free will must exist or our models must leave room for it until we can detect it or account for it. I'm all for leaving place-holders, but it doesn't seem necessary.