Comment on Searle's ‘Social ontology’: The reality of the imaginary and the cunning of the non-intentional.  

Oleh:

Friedman, Jonathan

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Anthropological Theory vol. 06 no. 01 (Mar. 2006), page 70.
Topik: fetish ; functionalism ; imaginary ; linguistic determinism ; logic ; non-intentional
Fulltext: 70.pdf (107.98KB)

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This discussion of Searle’s article attempts to come to grips with a number of issues that the latter has made so important for the social sciences. First, regarding the issue of objectivity/subjectivity, it is argued that there are natural properties of reality that are unaltered by observation, but that what is constructed as a phenomenon is always partly the result of human interpretation. The same is argued to be true of social phenomena, which cannot be reduced to human constitution first because they become institutional realities and second because they contain properties that are external to acts of human construction. The characterization of the social as instituted via language, especially the language of linked propositions, is taken up in relation to other approaches to social reality, arguing that Castoriadis’ social imaginary, as well as a certain interpretation of Marx’s fetishism, argues for the dominance of such constructions in the creation of social worlds. Within the intentional world such phenomena account for the way in which social life can be seen in part as the materialization of the imaginary, the latter being non-symbolic in the sense that it is not a representation of an already existing reality or referent but the immediate constitution of the real. On the other hand, a crucial aspect of such worlds that Searle does not address is the non-intentional systemic properties of the social, for example in the form of business cycles, politico-economic declines and expansions, and other properties of social reality that are not deducible from intentional organization. They are not a mere spin-off but crucial elements of social systems.

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