Time to get blogging again

Encouraged by the example of my friend and colleague in the publishing business, Andrew Carey, I've kick-started a blog I began a year ago today.

I'm currently reading John Searle's fascinating and very accessible book The Construction of Social Reality. Like many of the books I've read since joining my late father's publishing business, it came off the shelves of his study in his home near the coast of Dorset, England. Searle is the first philosopher I've come across who embraces common sense as well as using his mental powers to delve deep below the surface of common wisdom. He takes the elements of life (thoughts, feelings, bodies, relationships, social facts and events, parties and so on) as given rather than trying to explain them away as many other Western philosophers seem to me to do.

In this book, Searle investigates the nature of institutional facts such as partnerships and personal possessions: their logical structure and the way they are constructed. To do this, he looks at the basic and very general formulation X counts as Y in C where X is a token of some kind, Y is the status of the token and C is the context within which X has the status Y. Examples are these deeds count as ownership of a home in 21st Century England and this piece of paper (e.g. a £1 note) counted as money in 20th Century Scotland. One of his most interesting conclusions is that institutional facts are essentially linguistic, so that institutions like marriage and money are only possible in a world with language. Even in cases where institutional facts do not seem to need language (for example, a boundary line separating two territories) he argues persuasively that they are inherently linguistic (in this case, the line is a symbol denoting the boundary in a similar way to how the English word "boundary" denotes the same object).

I am not quite sure yet what fascinates me so much about this work apart from the way it is simultaneously readable (almost: entertaining) and very general. It makes me think differently about Cultural Theory, for one thing. The five solidarities of cultural theory give rise to five very different flavours of institutional facts. What social status means to the egalitarian is very different to what it means to the hierarchist. Searle concentrates on hierarchical facts (such as the fact of Barack Obama being President of the United States) but I think his approach applies equally well to the other flavours.

For another, it reminds me of the ideas we were playing with when I worked on developing an unusual form of modality within mathematical logic with Michael Mendler (it is called Lax Logic). It was developed to represent rigorously the idea of truth within context.

I hope to clarify my take on this book later. In any case, I recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in philosophy as a powerful antidote to any feeling that Western philosophy is dry, boring and irrelevant to everyday life.