Social Reality - Searle

Searle

John Searle has used the theory of speech acts to explore the nature of social/institutional reality, so as to describe such aspects of social reality which he instances under the rubrics of “marriage, property, hiring, firing, war, revolutions, cocktail parties, governments, meetings, unions, parliaments, corporations, laws, restaurants, vacations, lawyers, professors, doctors, medieval knights, and taxes, for example”.

Searle argued that such institutional realities interact with each other in what he called “systematic relationships (e.g., governments, marriages, corporations, universities, armies, churches)” to create a multi-layered social reality.

For Searle, language was the key to the formation of social reality because “language is precisely designed to be a self-identifying category of institutional facts” - a system of publicly and widely accepted symbols which “persist through time independently of the urges and inclinations of the participants.”