Comment on Searle

Abstract

While appreciative of Searle's contributions, this commentary questions whether the core insights of The Construction of Social Reality advance all that much beyond the position staked out more than a century ago by Emile Durkheim. Durkheim, to be sure, was no analytic philosopher, but both Durkheim and Searle recognize the existence of something like collective representations, view a key feature of such representations as being that of imposing new statuses, powers, and meanings on objects, and accept that social institutions are composed of individual actors who act on the basis of this collective imposition of status functions. For this reason, some of the criticisms that may be levelled against Durkheim's approach to social ontology – for example, that it ignores situations where collective representations are intrinsically coercive in nature – may also apply to Searle.