What follows is a brief commentary to Dan Sperber's plenary lecture at ECAP7 "The deconstruction of social unreality". Sperber's main criticism to Searle's socia lontology is that Searle attributes a causal role to mere Cambridge properties (in Sperber'sexample: Jones dies, so the rest of the world gains the Cambridge status of "Jones' survivors"). Sperber then argues that declarations do not create institutional facts causally, criticizes the Serlean theory of recognition/acceptance and put forward his thesis using the concept cognitive causal chains

Feis, Guglielmo

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Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Analitica Junior 2:2 (2011)ISSN 2037-4445 CC© http://www.rifanalitica.itSponsored by Società Italiana di Filosofia AnaliticaMEETING DAN SPERBER’S CHALLENGE TO SEARLEANSOCIAL ONTOLOGYGuglielmo FeisABSTRACT. What follows is a brief commentary to Dan Sperber’s plenary lec-ture at ECAP7 “The deconstruction of social unreality”. Sperber’s main criticismto Searle’s social ontology1 is that Searle attributes a causal role to mere Cam-bridge properties (in Sperber’s example: Jones dies, so the rest of the world gainsthe Cambridge status of “Jones’ survivors”). Sperber then argues that declara-tions do not create institutional facts causally, criticizes the Serlean theory of re-cognition/acceptance and put forward his thesis using the concept cognitive causalchains.KEYWORDS. Social Ontology, Dan Sperber, John Searle, Cambridge Properties.1In his talk Sperber worked on the latter view of social ontology of Searle (2010).COPYRIGHT. CC© BY:© $\© C© 2011 Guglielmo Feis. Published in Italy. Some rights reserved.AUTHOR. Guglielmo Feis. g_feis@hotmail.itRECEIVED. 5th October 2011 ACCEPTED. 31st October 2011Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Analitica Junior 2:2 (2011)I agree with Sperber’s new frame and I’m fascinated by his approach in which institutionsare high-ordered level representation that causally cheracterize the distribution of lower leveland by his use of cognitive causal chains as building blocks of social reality. Here I try to goalong Sperber’s path and, avoiding hypostatization of Cambridge chance, I want to provide abetter descripted taxonomy of he insititutional real with the help of three parameters I willuse to map and track social entities.My three parameters will be:1. The degree of materiality of the entity (i.e. is the entity a concrete object? Is it afreestanding Y term? If so, what are its empirical representations?);2. The amount of conceptual resources that are needed both in the creation and the reco-gnition of an entity (i.e. creating and understanding the status function of “boarder” or“leader” is in some sense “easier” then manipulate financial products);3. The amount (and possibly the different kinds) of deontic powers associated to the entity(i.e. even if you consider the realm of legal institutions you will have different amountsof powers between a traffic assistant and a president; if you consider friendship as partof social ontology, you may want to claim it is different from statutory laws, etc).Concerning the first parameter –materiality – and our area of application (social ontology)I think we can distinguish between concrete, freestanding and ideal objects2For conceptual resources I will distinguish low, mid and high. Low is what you need tounderstand the objects involved in brute facts such as potatoes in the Anscombe example3 orthe stone in the kicking a stone; mid is what we usually have in social facts or joint activitiessuch as going for a walk, playing a game and maybe friendship; high is the level of complexand formalized institutions such as the Supreme Court or the IMF.4The same goes for deontic powers in which I distinguish low, mid and high. Low (or zero)is what you have in brute facts; mid is for the social facts or joint activities (if you play indefense in a game you have some deontic powers associated to the fact that, in the game,you ought to avoid that the other team scores points; if you receive a mail there are deonticpowers suggesting you to answer and so on); high is for complex institution in which there is arecognized authority issuing the permission and executing the sanctions in case of violation.This allows us to plot a graph for each entity using the following table that, once filled,will tell us the three parameters of the entity under consideration:CategoryMateriality concrete freestanding idealCognitive resources low mid highDeontic powers low mid highSuch a table offers 27 combinations under which we can classify the social world we haveproduced using cognitive causal chains.2You can have a better taxonomy, I know that both material and abstract objects have lots of different ontologicalproposals. I think this quite easy setting allows us to discuss the specific ontological problems of social ontology (i.e.brute facts vs. institutional; freestanding Y-terms; the ontological status of legal norms and entities like promises).3Anscombe (1958).4Again, filling exactly the chart is problematic. There can be games as complex as formal legal institutions, youmay want to say friendship is an institution and even that there are brute facts that are really demanding to beunderstood (rainbows, maybe).121Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Analitica Junior 2:2 (2011)I think that 27 combinations will be enough for the descriptive part of a social ontology.The next step and challenge to prescriptive ontology is to try to figure out if all the 27 com-binations are meaningful: is it possible to have an ideal object with low demanding cognitiveresources? Can we establish a connection between the degree of deontic powers and the de-gree of cognitive resources needed to grasp the entity (i.e. can we have high deontic powerswith low cognitive resources employment)?The provided framework enables us also to track the development of social entities throu-gh time: all we need to do is to collect the data and build repeated graphs for the same entityat different times. This gives dyachronicity to our system: if a line of stones is no longer aborder we will see a shift from high deontic powers to low (zero) in going from a graph toanother.The next challenge, is the one of identifying the regularities and proposing different typesof social entities according to the mixture of the parameters. In that case, instead of “entity”in the upper table line we will have the name of a category of social entity and, below, youwill have its characteristics spelt out.CategoryMateriality concrete freestanding idealCognitive resources low mid highDeontic powers low mid highSo we might have a category for highly material entities, deontic and another one for con-ceptual, almost immaterial and without powers, conceptually spontaneous, emergent entitiesand so on. We may try to label them, for example, the concrete-high-high combination mightbe “iconic social objects” like a crown or a wedding ring and the ideal-low-low one “socialpractices” like friendship or playing children’s game that have no formal rules.The last and more general problem is that, to be fully articulated, my proposal presuppo-ses that we are able to measure cognitive capacities and deontic powers. One chance could beto have a common digital framework (a program language) in which we are able to describe,using a program, all the functions and relationships between the entities and the associateddeontic powers. Once this is done, we can compare different programs length correspondingto different objects and then we have a way to rank different entities that could be filled intothe categories. Anyway, to fully meet Sperber’s challenge, a lot of research is still needed.122Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Analitica Junior 2:2 (2011)Riferimenti bibliograficiAnscombe, G. (1958). On brute facts. Analysis. 106Searle, J. (2010). Making the world social. The structure of human civilization. OxfordUniversity Press. 1123

Meeting Dan Sperber’s Challenge to Searlean Social Ontology

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Meeting Dan Sperber’s Challenge to Searlean Social Ontology

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