John R. Searle (1995), The Free Press, New York (xiii + 241 pp.; ISBN 0-02-928045-1) — no DOI; WorldCat OCLC 31411549
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, under the topic
social-ontology that ADR-017 added, as the founding statement of
Searle’s account of institutions.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read
and no NOTE is filed. What follows is only what the catalogue records
and the contents say, and what Searle’s own 2006 restatement says about
the book.
Contents (from a library table-of-contents scan):
- Introduction (p. xi)
- 1 The Building Blocks of Social Reality (1)
- 2 Creating Institutional Facts (31)
- 3 Language and Social Reality (59)
- 4 The General Theory of Institutional Facts, Part I: Iteration, Interaction, and Logical Structure (79)
- 5 The General Theory of Institutional Facts, Part II: Creation, Maintenance, and the Hierarchy (113)
- 6 Background Abilities and the Explanation of Social Phenomena (127)
- 7 Does the Real World Exist? Part I: Attacks on Realism (149)
- 8 Does the Real World Exist? Part II: Could There Be a Proof of External Realism? (177)
- 9 Truth and Correspondence (199)
- Conclusion (227)
The last three chapters are a defence of realism and of correspondence
truth, which is why epistemology and metaphysics are tagged alongside
social-ontology.
What Searle’s 2006 restatement says the book holds (LIT-482, read in NOTE-388):
- the distinction between observer-relative and observer-independent facts, and between epistemic and ontological objectivity;
- three primitives: collective intentionality, the assignment of function, and constitutive rules of the form “X counts as Y in C”, given in the book’s early chapters as the basic form of the institutional fact;
- a “later formulation” in the book, “We accept (S has power (S does A))”, which the 2006 paper calls “much more general”;
- status indicators, which the 2006 paper develops further.
The 2006 paper revises the book in one direction it names: some status functions have no X (“free-standing Y terms”, after Barry Smith).
For collective intentionality, the 2006 paper refers to “Collective Intentions and Actions” (LIT-490) rather than to this book.
Neighbours. Hindriks & Guala (LIT-481) take this book’s constitutive rules as their target and argue that they reduce to regulative rules. Searle’s Chinese Room (LIT-400) is a different subject.
No instruction for machine-learning practice is visible in what was seen, so nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.
What a reading should check.
- How chapter 1 argues that collective intentionality is primitive, and whether it adds anything to the 1990 paper.
- Whether chapter 2’s “X counts as Y in C” is stated as a necessary form of institutional facts. The rules-in-equilibrium critique depends on it.
- What chapter 6’s “Background abilities” contribute to explaining social phenomena without rules being followed consciously.