The Construction of Social Reality by John R. Searle

Author:John R. Searle
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 1995-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Hierarchy of Facts: From Brute to Institutional

There is an implicit hierarchical taxonomy in the account I have been giving, and I would now like to try to make it explicit. The world of Supreme Court decisions and of the collapse of communism is the same world as the world of the formation of planets and of the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics. One of the aims of this book is to show how that can be so, how the world of institutions is part of the “physical” world. A hierarchical taxonomy will show the place of the social, institutional, and mental reality within a single physical reality.

However, constructing such a taxonomy is no simple task because several different and crisscrossing distinctions need to be recognized. With some hesitation, I provide a simplified version of the hierarchical relations between the different types of fact in Figure 5.1.

Our original distinction between brute and institutional facts has now been transcended and must be absorbed within the following further set of distinctions.

Figure 5.1

Hierarchical Taxonomy of (Certain Types of) Facts

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