Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xxxvi

   PDF

2. Aspects of Collective Intentionality

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 30-30

      PDF

   2. Searle and Collective Intentions

      • Margaret Gilbert

      Pages 31-48

   3. Foundations of Social Reality in Collective Intentional Behavior

      • Kirk Ludwig

      Pages 49-71

   4. Joint Action: The Individual Strikes Back

      • Seumas Miller

      Pages 73-92

   5. Collective Speech Acts

      • Anthonie Meijers

      Pages 93-110

3. From Intentions to Institutions: Development and Evolution

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 112-112

      PDF

   2. The Ontogeny of Social Ontology: Steps to Shared Intentionality and Status Functions

      • Hannes Rakoczy, Michael Tomasello

      Pages 113-137

   3. Social Reality and Institutional Facts: Sociality Within and Without Intentionality

      • Robert A. Wilson

      Pages 139-153

4. Aspects of Institutional Reality

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 156-156

      PDF

   2. The Varieties of Normativity: An Essay on Social Ontology

      • Leo Zaibert, Barry Smith

      Pages 157-173

   3. A Behavioural Critique of Searle's Theory of Institutions

      • Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca

      Pages 175-189

   4. Searle versus Durkheim

      • Steven Lukes

      Pages 191-202

   5. Searle's Derivation of Promissory Obligation

      • Savas L. Tsohatzidis

      Pages 203-217

5. Back Matter

   Pages 219-224

   PDF

Savas L. Tsohatzidis John Searle is famous for his contributions to two fields with long and dist- guished traditions within analytic philosophy—the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind—, but his interests and achievements extend beyond these fields. From the early 1990s he has added to his research agenda a theme that was not only largely new to his philosophical preoccupations, but also largely absent from the concerns of analytic philosophy as a whole: the syst- atic examination of the mode of being of a particular kind of facts, institutional facts, that appear to be no less objectively knowable than ordinary physical facts, yet seem to be essentially dependent for their existence on the subjectivity of human minds (to recall one of his favourite examples, one can know that something is a piece of paper as objectively as one can know that it is a twenty-dollar bill, but something’s being a piece of paper does not depend on anyone’s taking it to be a piece of paper, whereas its being a twenty-dollar bill crucially depends on a lot of people taking it to be a twenty-dollar bill). Searle’s attempt to give a systematic account of the combination of epistemic objectivity and ontological subjectivity that, in his view, characterizes institutional facts has led to a full-blown theory that he presented in his 1995 book, The Construction of Social Reality, and further developed in his 2001 book, Rationality in Action.

• Collective intentionality
• Institutional reality
• John Rogers Searle
• Moral
• Social Ontology
• ontology
• proposition

• Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece

  Savas L. Tsohatzidis

Policies and ethics