| Sumario: | Searle's philosophical construction of social reality has three basic “building blocks”: collective intentionality, constitutive rules, and the imposition of functions. This article will focus on the first of these, collective intentionality, which is taken to be the central span on the bridge from physics to society. Searle analyzes this notion in terms of his own internalist theory of intentionality. In his view, we could have all the collective intentionality we have even if we were a brain in a vat, i.e., even if we were radically mistaken about the outside world. It will be argued that such an internalist view of collective intentionality cannot capture normative aspects of social phenomena. Social reality requires a radical relational approach. It is one of the merits of Searle's book The Construction of Social Reality that it has renewed the interest in the ontology of the social world. Philosophers and social scientists nowadays increasingly focus on the ontology of institutions, the role of speech acts in the creation of social facts, the intentionality of collective agents, and the functions these agents impose on non-intentional entities. The interest that The Construction of Social Reality has aroused in wider circles clearly shows that Searle is not solely a philosopher's philosopher. He is very influential in the intellectual community at large, which is a virtue in itself in an era of increased specialization in almost all philosophical disciplines. In this article I will first situate The Construction of Social Reality in Searle's overall philosophical project (Section I). Searle's interest in social phenomena has been part of this project ever since his first book, Speech Acts, in which he analyzes speech acts as social acts. In Section II, I will focus on one of Searle's main “building blocks” of social reality: the notion of collective intentionality. Any fact involving collective intentionality is defined by Searle as a social fact. I will argue in this section that Searle's internalist conception of collective intentionality cannot account for the normativity of social phenomena. In Section III, I will diagnose the problem in Searle's position, which is, that a single model is assumed to apply to all types of intentional states. Searle's internalism stands in the way of an adequate concept of collective intentionality, which incorporates social relations. A conclusion follows in the final section. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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