The Construction of Social Reality

Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. Free Press.

Type

Book

Intellectual base

Review or monograph

Year

1995

Link

https://archive.org/details/constructionofso00searmatched

Cited from

linguistics_semiotics, philosophy, sociology_anthropology, speech_language_pathology

Cited by

8 citations across 8 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Arbitrariness of Symbolic Conventions
  • Modern solution: symbols are arbitrary at the formal level (any form can be assigned), but grounding in embodied experience and community practice provides the semantic content that arbitrariness permits
• Downward Causation
  • Sober & Wilson (1998) applied downward causation to multilevel selection in evolutionary biology. Searle, J. R. (1995) grounded social ontology in institutional facts subject to top-down constraints.

    This sourceTheory of institutional facts, collective intentionality, and status functions (X counts as Y in C); supports D19-083 (social ontology grounded in institutional facts subject to top-down/collective constraint).

• Holism
  • Social ontology and collectivism: Searle (1995)
• Institution
  • Each participant accepts the currency because they expect everyone else to accept it, and that expectation is enforced by legal tender laws, sanctioned by the practical impossibility of transacting otherwise, and reproduced as each new entrant to the economy is socialized into using it.
• Ontology
  • Biomedicine and healthcare — disease ontologies (SNOMED CT, ICD hierarchies) for interoperability and clinical decision support; phenotype and genotype ontologies; drug and treatment ontologies; patient-centered outcome measures. Social and political theory — social ontology (Searle, Gilbert): institutions, money, property, groups; ontology of race, gender, and other constructed categories; critical realism (Bhaskar) with stratified social ontology; decolonial ontologies challenging Western-centric commitments.
• Performativity
  • This is why the prime is so often invoked precisely where the line between "describing reality" and "constructing reality" is contested.
• Social Construction of Reality
  • Importantly, the thesis does not claim all reality is socially constructed; Searle's distinction between brute facts (mass, position, chemistry) and institutional facts (marriage, money, borders) preserves the scope of what is and is not constructed
• Symbolic Representation
  • Searle (1995) develops the broader account in which money, property, marriage, and citizenship are institutional facts whose existence depends on collective acceptance of constitutive symbolic conventions.

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Links previously used in the corpus

Before the registry existed this work was also linked 2 other ways.

• https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Construction_of_Social_Reality/MoDhXBxad_oC ×1
• https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Construction_of_Social_Reality/zrLQwJCcoOsC ×1

Registry ID ref:748672059906 · see in the full table