A linguagem na construção da realidade social: fundamentos da ontologia de John Searle

Abstract

The investigation of social ontology is concerned with social objects and the ways in which they come to exist in the universe, forming what we know as institutional reality. In this work, we focus on analyzing the reasons that position language as a fundamental mechanism for the construction of the social world within John Searle's theoretical framework. The central objective, both for the theoretical field of social ontology and for the philosopher Searle, is to understand how entities such as money, laws, and government have causal power in the material reality even while possessing a metaphysical nature. Searle's thesis focuses its efforts on pointing to the linguistic apparatus as a fundamental and indispensable vehicle for this process. To this end, he draws on a theory of mind, named biological naturalism and developed by him, which posits the mind as an exclusively material phenomenon. Searle also commits to collective intentionality to justify the behavior observed in the establishment of institutional reality. Furthermore, he applies the theory of speech acts, already well-established in his previous work. In line with these theoretical commitments, Searle proposes the general formula we use to institute the institutional world. Through collective intentionality, language, and its deontic capacity, we create states of affairs in the world and enable the emergence of new realities. This process is carried out through the formula "X counts as Y in context C." By virtue of language's deontic capacity, we utter declarations and, through the mechanism of status assignment, construct the social entities and positions of the institutional world. However, this framework faces criticism, including that of Velasco, who points out the exclusive and incomplete character of Searle's theory for centering the efforts of the institutional world on language. He argues that this notion is mistaken because it overlooks the manifestations of other species that would be considered institutional but do not use the linguistic device to establish themselves. Finally, we seek to elucidate the reason why the language is privileged in the Searlean theory and the arguments with which John Searle responds to the criticisms leveled against his linguistic primacy.