Introduction to Social Philosophy, Lecture 3
John Dupré
Searle Ch.3
Why is language essential to institutional reality?
Answer:
1. Thoughts are essential to institutional facts
2. Those thoughts are language dependent.
Premise 1 is already established: for X to count as Y is for people to think of X as Y, or believe that X
is Y.
To establish premise 2, we need to consider what thoughts (if any) are language dependent.
Language contains symbolic entities. An entity (not necessarily a word) is symbolic if it represents
something else, by means of a convention, that is publicly understandable.
Some, but not all, facts are language-dependent. Obviously such facts as that 'grass is green' is an
English sentence, is language dependent, because it is a fact about language. Searle's thesis is that facts
such as that this is a $20 bill, are equally language dependent, because of their dependence on language
dependent thoughts.
Searle distinguishes language independent thoughts from language dependent thoughts. The former
could be entertained by an animal without any linguistic capacity.
First examples are feelings of hunger, thirst, etc., clearly possessed by many non-linguistic animals.
[Question: are these appropriately described as thoughts?] But a dog can also believe that a cat is up a
tree.
A thought can contain mental states as essential constituents without itself being language dependent.
Searle's example: 'dogbone' any bone desired by at least one dog.
The difference between dogbones and money is that, Searle claims, the imposition of a status function
(Y) on a thing (X) is always a linguistic move.
So what makes any thought language dependent?
1. Empirical impossibility because of complexity (371 + 248 = 619). But no necessity of dependence.
2. Logical necessity from the linguistic content of the thought. (Dates vs. dogs.)
3. Institutional facts. There can be no prelinguistic or non-linguistic perception of an institutional fact,
because until it is represented there is nothing there to perceive. (Example: we can perceive a ball
crossing a line without language, but this is only scoring a goal when we have agreed to count this as
(represent it as) a goal.)
This is connected to the 'deontic' or normative aspect of institutional facts: they create rights and
responsibilities, not just dispositions to behave in certain ways. Once the line of stones functions
normatively (you mustn't cross it) rather than merely dispositionally (people don't usually cross it) it is
acting as a symbol, or representation, not merely a cause or trigger of behaviour.
Does language presuppose itself?
If language is an institutional fact, and institutional facts require language, do we have a circle or an
infinite regress?
No because 'language is a self-identifying category of institutional facts' (p.73).
[An idea along these lines has been made clearest by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his book Philosophical
Investigations (this is one of the most brilliant and famous (but difficult) philosophical works of the
20th. century). Wittgenstein emphasises that children are trained to use language. They do not start
out knowing some innate language and learn English or Chinese or... as a second language. They begin
simply to make noises in the presence of objects and gradually learn (a) to use the noise to represent the
thing when it isn't present and (b) to use language normatively (e.g. to understand or produce criticisms
of incorrect uses or to explain meanings of words to foreigners). Representation is something people
are taught to do as they are taught language.]
Further functions of language in Institutional Facts.
The argument so far has concerned the conceptually necessary role of language in institutional facts.
There are some much more mundane and pragmatic grounds for the connection between these two
things:
1. We couldn't come to know what statuses attach to what objects without receiving this information in
language.
2. Many institutional facts could not function without the possibility of communicating the conferral of
statuses from one person to another. One must be able to communicate that one is the chairman, the
meeting is adjourned, etc.
3. The complexity of institutional facts requires a complex system of representation, i.e. a language.
4. Linguistic representation is needed to constitute the persistence of institutional facts.