The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature
of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property,
governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football
games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the
creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make
statements about social facts that are completely objective, for
example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece
of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in
London, etc. And yet these facts only exist because we think they
exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective
knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This
is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of
ourselves, with our peculiar human traits - mind, reason, freedom,
society - in a world that we know independently consists of
mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social
and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In
answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms
of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a
physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how
the human reality fits into that one reality. Mind, language, and
civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the
physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle
explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate
structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve
to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and
often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a
way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together.
Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free
will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a
world created and maintained by language.
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