Persons and acts – collective and social. from ontology to politics

Kevin Mulligan

pp. 17-45

in: Alessandro Salice, Hans B. Schmid (eds), The phenomenological approach to social reality, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstrakt

This paper orchestrates a confrontation between the social ontology, social and political philosophy of Searle and the views on these matters of the earliest phenomenologists. According to Searle, social objects depend on declarations and on collective acceptance or recognition of the results of declarations. After first (§2) drawing attention to some distinctions and claims which go back to Reinach and which will be important in what follows, I then (§3) consider what Reinach and Searle have to say about declarations. Since collective acceptance is a type of collective intentionality I examine what Searle and the phenomenologists have to say about collective intentionality and the subjects or bearers of this type of intentionality (§4). I then look at the relation between states and social acts (§5), the relations between what Searle calls deontic powers and Reinach jural powers and some possible roles of such powers (§6) and conclude with a brief sketch of the role of primitive certainty in social ontology (§7).