The Nature of Social Reality

Searle's theory of social reality is increasingly meeting with worldwide recognition, and is undoubtedly the most prominent theory of social ontology (at least in the post-analytical tradition), even if actual research in this domain is engaged in critical confrontation with it. Searle's approach continues to shape the debate, but his construction is more and more sharply dissected, both in its details and in its general assumptions. Furthermore, new perspectives, not rooted in the analytical tradition, are taking place, so that not only alternative answers, but alternative questions are arising. This book posits that we should approach the issue from another angle, and that we should retrace the origins of such a concept in order to gain a different, and possibly more interesting, perspective. Are we able to delineate some issues that represent what we think the next development of these core problems could be? This book proposes three possible routes. Firstly, the necessity to account for, but not to relegate the object of social ontology only inside an analysis of language in which Social Objects arise and by which they are described and put under debate. Secondly, the necessity not to consider social sciences (from law studies to sociology, from political analysis to historical and widely philosophical instances) merely as derived products of the reflections about language. Thirdly, by resuming the first two issues and synthetizing them, we can debate the number of realities in question and their natures themselves.