11 - Ontology
from Part III - Philosophy of society and other matters
Summary
External realism
Searle is not content to be a specialist. In Chapters 9 and 10 we saw him move away from his old haunts of philosophy of language and mind to deal with issues concerned with social reality. In this chapter we see how he moves still further away from his old studies to deal with issues concerned with what there is, that is, with ontology. In a way this moving away is not a moving away. In being concerned with ontology, he brings with him and uses most of the tools collected from his old studies. As was noted in the previous two chapters, it is almost as if he were not in position to deal systematically with ontological issues until he had completed his tool collection – one which includes important parts of his theory of language, Intentionality, Background, and the distinction between brute and institutional facts.
Searle calls his ontological position external realism. His initial characterization of it is as follows: “The world (or alternatively, reality or the universe) exists independently of our representations of it” (1995a: 150). Of representations he says:
Human beings have a variety of interconnected ways of having access to and representing features of the world to themselves. These include perception, thought, language, beliefs and desires as well as pictures, maps, diagrams, etc. Just to have a general term I will call these collectively “representations.” A feature of representations so defined is that they all have intentionality, both intrinsic intentionality, as in beliefs and perceptions and derived intentionality, as in maps and sentences.
(1995a: 150–51)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- John Searle , pp. 213 - 230Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2000