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Rationality-in-relations - Extensions and Criticisms
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2003 by Hans Bernhard Schmid
In his Construction of Social Reality, John R. Searle outlines what he likes to see as a new academic discipline. "Philosophy of society," as he calls it, is centered on the question of how society and the individual relate to each other. (1) According to Searle, this question is as central to the philosophy of society as the mind-body question is to the philosophy of mind. Indeed, it seems that in the time after his theory of speech acts (2) these two questions have become the focus of Searle's philosophical project (he takes it to be a contribution to a "general theory" (3)), which aims at answering the question of how social and cultural phenomena such as speech acts are possible in a world of atoms and fields of force. To "get from the physics to the semantics," (4) Searle takes two steps. First, he shows the way "from matter to mind," giving an account of how consciousness is possible in a world that consists basically of atoms and fields of force. In a second step, he goes from the individual mind to so ciety, showing how the "construction" of social facts is possible, given consciousness and intentionality. Whereas Searle is well aware that philosophy has been concerned with the mind-body question for centuries, he leads his readers into thinking that the philosophy of society has no considerable ancestry. (5) But Searle is, of course, not the first to try to shed light on the relation between individuals and society. The topic has been on the map at least since the time human beings were first described as "individuals" or "subjects," as irreducible and autonomous bearers of their intentionality. With this change in the semantics of the self-description of humans, it has become impossible to conceive of the social simply in terms of an organic whole that contains the single human beings as its parts or organs. (6) Thus in a certain sense, philosophy of society owes its basic question to the same philosopher as the philosophy of mind. It was Rene Descartes who described the mind (res cogitans) as something distinctly different of the sphere of the bodies (res extensae). And, reflecting on his own mind in his "lonely withdrawal" (7) from society, Descartes also described it as something distinctly individual. In his meditationes, the mental comes exclusively in the form ego cogito (and not, as Charles Horton Cooley would have liked to have it, (8) in the form nos cogitamus).
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Searle rejects both Cartesian views. In his philosophy of mind, Searle opposes dualism with regard to the mind-body relation (consciousness is, following Searle, just a "higher order feature" of the brain that is distinguished from other entities by its first-person ontology). And the basic trait of his answer to the core question of philosophy of society is no less critical of Descartes. Drawing on an idea first developed by Wilfrid Sellars, (9) Searle points out that in the mind of individuals, there are not only intentions of the form "I intend x," but also intentions of the form "we intend x." This "collective" form of intentionality is, following Searle, irreducible to any set of intentions of the form "I intend x." (10) It is a "biologically primitive" form of intentionality, and it is involved in all coordinated action." Thus it appears that the individual intentional actions involved in coordinated action, in "social action" or "group action," is not something only derivatively social. It is not the c ase that when performing together, my intention is just to play the piano knowing that your intention happens to be to sing. The intentionality involved in such action is social in a sense different from merely having individual intentions while "counting" on other's individual intentions. It is our intention to perform that lies beneath my individual intention to play my part. (12)
With his Construction of Social Reality in general and his theory of collective intentionality in particular, Searle has established himself as one of the leading philosophers and a major source of conceptual inspiration for the theory of the social sciences. Searle's view on intentionality opens a new perspective on the structure of coordination, which is a central topic of the theory of social sciences since coordination is not only required in cooperative forms of collective action, but also in those cases of conflict in which the actions of the conflicting parties are either regulated or constituted by underlying rules. (13) It seems that the theory of collective intentionality can provide a simple answer to a problem that is surprisingly difficult to answer within the "orthodox" theory of action: How are "conventions" (in Davis Lewis' sense of the word (14)) possible? Why is it that, when driving in countries where keeping to the right is the rule, we can reasonably expect the other drivers to keep to th eir right, which makes it rational for us to keep to our right, too--even though we could also get by each other collision-free by both keeping to the left? How is it that, technically speaking, in situations with multiple proper coordination equilibria, given normal circumstances (such as minimal rationality on the side of the participants and a common conception of the situation) and a single best (or even merely "salient" (15)) equilibrium, each participant can rely on his expectation that the other participants will choose the strategy that, given the other's appropriate choice, brings about the optimal (or "salient") result?
