Searle on the Presupposition of the World’s Existence

There are many anti-sceptical arguments which claim that the sceptic - of whatever kind - must assume and take as true certain things before he can offer us his sceptical possibilities or conclusions. Wittgenstein talked about the ‘hinges’ on which all discourse must turn - even sceptical discourse. Hume and Strawson believed that we must accept the existence of objects, other minds and even the existence of the ‘external’ world. Similarly, the premises on which both sceptical and paradoxical conclusions are built must be taken as true or even certain by the sceptic or paradox merchant.


John Searle talks specifically about the "presupposition of an independently existing" (185). He calls this 'a background presupposition". He says:

"It’s not something that’s up for grabs in the way that whether or not the human genome project will have such and such an effect is... I point out that it plays a certain role in our background presupposition, because it’s what we take for granted when we engage in discourse." (186)

This must mean that Searle thinks that even the global sceptic will take the existence of the world "for granted when [he] engages in discourse" (186). It seems, according to Searle, that he wouldn't even be able to say anything, or, more strongly, claim anything, if he didn't presuppose, perhaps tacitly, that the world actually existed. Perhaps he doesn't even know that he's doing this when he's doing it.


The very structure of language itself may include certain presuppositions as to the existence of the ‘external’ world. However, as I said about the meaning and the propositional attitude sceptic, the external world sceptic can't help but use the only language which he has. He has no choice but to do so. Perhaps the existence of God and Superman (as philosophers have argued) is written into our ‘ordinary’ and even our philosophical grammar. That doesn't mean that we are automatically committed to the existence of either God or Superman. It's simply a fact about our language and how it's structured.


Searle gives us a rather mundane example of a case of the presupposition that the world really exists:

"You and I made an arrangement to meet at a certain place at a certain time. We couldn’t make that and we couldn’t have our normal understanding of that unless we assume there is a place in space and in time that is independent of us and we can meet at that particular place. That is external realism." (186)

I don’t see immediately how it follows that because you and I arrange to meet at a place and a time that they must be ‘independent of us’. After all, I may be - or both of us may be - brains in vats fed by the same simulations.


Alternatively, on an idealist reading of Searle’s scenario, we can say that what he says happens could still happen if what the idealists claim is true. This place and time may just be mental ideas in our minds. Alternatively, they may be false sensory simulations given to us by an evil demon or a malicious scientist. According to the sceptic, the sceptical version would be identical to the non-sceptical scenario as far as our actual experiences are concerned.


So there doesn't seem to be any direct or automatic ‘presupposition’ of a mind-independent world here. In any case, not many people talk of - or even think at all about - the world’s mind-independence or its mind-dependence – that isn't the way people look at or think about the world.


So there needn't be either epistemological or ontological presuppositions involved when you or I arrange to meet somewhere at a place and a time.


Alternatively, if we arrange to meet at a particular building and unknown to us that building is just a facade from a film set, we still wouldn't assume that it's not a facade or, indeed, that it is a facade. Though it could be a facade. That wouldn't affect our meeting and what we thought about the meeting. (The street could also be a facade as well as having artificial traffic and human-like robots walking up and down it.)


Similarly, we could meet at this building at 6 O’ clock even thought it's 7 O’ clock when we actually meet. However, the clock on the building says it is 6 O’ clock and we think it is 6 O’clock because it says so. Not even that: it may well be 6 O’ clock when the clock says 6’ clock; though unknown to us that clock stopped three months ago and it's just a happy coincidence that it stopped at that time.


Again, none of this means that we need to assume the existence of the world and none of this has any impact on its existence or our knowledge of its existence.

John Searle on Our Obsession With Scepticism

Many philosophers criticise both Quine and Rorty for not taking "scepticism seriously" (187). John Searle, an ‘external realist’, doesn't take scepticism seriously either. Some of the reasons Searle gives for not taking scepticism seriously are exactly the same as those given by Quine; and they're even more similar to those of Rorty.

At the heart of this critique - in the case of both Rorty and Searle (less so in the case of Quine) - is a criticism of Cartesian epistemology and the dominant role it has had in Western philosophy for about three hundred years – perhaps right up to late Wittgenstein and other philosophers:

"There’s deeper objection I have to this whole tradition and that is that I think our obsession with epistemology was a 300-year mistake. Descartes set us off on this and we just have to get out of the idea that the main aim of philosophy is to answer scepticism. There are all sorts of much more interesting questions. I don’t take scepticism seriously. I take it seriously in the way I take Zeno’s paradoxes seriously – they’re nice puzzles. But when I hear about Zeno’s paradoxes I don’t think, “Oh my God, maybe space and time don’t exist.” I think, “That’s an interesting paradox, let’s worked it out.” That’s how I feel about the sceptical paradoxes. I don’t feel that they show that the real world doesn’t exist or that we can never have knowledge of it. I’m quite stunned, in a way, that we’ve had three hundred years of taking scepticism seriously." [187]

What Searle says about epistemology’s ‘obsession’ with scepticism (or our obsession with epistemology itself) is more or less exactly what Rorty says. Indeed it's also more or less what the late Wittgenstein and even Heidegger said! They too not only said that scepticism was/is the prime issue of epistemology; but that epistemology itself (or at least epistemology as it was influenced by Descartes) created the problems of scepticism. That's why Rorty and Michael Williams don't only question scepticism itself, they also question the whole of epistemology which was partly (or fully) building on Cartesian-induced scepticism.

It's interesting to note, then, that Searle compares the sceptical ‘possibilities’ with Zeno’s paradoxes. He doesn’t "take [these] seriously" either. However, he does see them as "nice puzzles" (187). The philosophers who've been interested in paradoxes - Zeno’s or others - surely wouldn’t have seen them as simply ‘nice puzzles’ – or would they?

Bertrand Russell, for instance, did see the paradoxes as nice puzzles. They were useful because they challenge our cognitive abilities and challenge our ordinary ways of thinking about the world. However, perhaps that doesn't imply that we ever actually believe their conclusions or take them seriously. That is, like Searle, no one really thought that "maybe space and time don’t exist" (187) or that the hare could never have caught up with the tortoise. Similarly, no one, unless he were mad, ever thought "that the real world doesn’t exist or that we can’t have knowledge of it" (187). Or if they seemingly did, perhaps this was an example of the ‘false doubt’ that C.S. Peirce talked about when he castigated Cartesians.

We must conclude with a question:

Have we really been obsessed by epistemology - and therefore scepticism - in the last three hundred years? And was it really the case that scepticism was epistemology’s prime concern?

Come to think of it, it's quite easy to see that scepticism was epistemology’s prime concern because that's what epistemology is essentially about – whether we can have knowledge at all; and not just of the ‘external world'.

John Searle on Social Facts

John Searle argues that there are indeed normative facts and he applies this position to his ontology of social reality, which is set within a broadly Wittgensteinian framework. Thus:

"I say that’s the key element in understanding institutional reality: there’s a class of objectively existing facts in the world that are only the facts they are because we collectively recognise them as such, and that goes with prime ministers, governments, marriage, private property, universities, professorships, conferences and the English language. They’re all very important in our life but they are all cases of “status-functions” – where the fact can only perform the function in virtue of collective acceptance or recognition." (189)

This is a recognition of Wittgenstein’s positions on social practices, norms and rule-following. However, Searle adds a realist ontology to the basically constructivist position of Wittgenstein. Either that, or Wittgenstein himself was basically a realist when it came to these matters – only that there are ‘social facts’ as well as the facts recognised by physics and perhaps by other sciences.


Why shouldn’t there be social facts anyway?


People and institutions behave in certain ways, so why can’t these things be deemed to be factual simply because they aren't about natural laws, electrons and other things accepted by physics?


In addition, some of these social facts are themselves constituted by the facts of physics; though they are further up the line of physics, as it were. (Quine would make a similar point to this.) Our recognition and indeed construction of prime ministers, governments, marriage and the rest doesn’t seem to make them any less factual than natural laws and electrons. Why should they be any less factual than the arcane entities of physics?


Searle then goes into greater philosophical detail as to why there are such things as ‘institutional facts’:

"Now here’s the point: institutional facts do have an ontologically subjective component. They’re only the facts they are because we think they are. But that doesn’t prevent them from being epistemically objective. It’s just an objective fact, epistemically speaking, that this piece of paper in my hand is a five-pound note. That is, it isn’t just my opinion that it’s a five-pound note." (190)

Institutional facts "have an ontologically subjective component" (190) in the sense that we create certain institutional facts, like the fact that five-pound notes can buy 10 cigarettes, etc. More to the point, they’re "only the facts they are because we think they are" (190). Though that too is a fact – that we think that institutional facts are facts. That is, even if five-pound notes are ‘social constructions’ it is still a fact that they are social constructions and it is still a fact that we can buy 10 cigarettes with a five-pound note.


I’m not immediately sure why Searle calls such facts ‘epistemically objective’ rather than ‘ontologically objective’. Are they epistemically objectively because it's about what we know about these institutional facts and not about what they are regardless of our contingent knowledge or how they are ‘in themselves’?Only in the latter case would institutional facts be ontologically objective.


Again, it's an ‘objective fact’ - even if an epistemically objective fact - that a five-pound note is a five-pound note and that this five-pound note can buy 10 cigs, amongst other things. The institutional creation of five-pound notes, amongst indefinite other things, doesn’t at all change the factual status of any of these things.


Social reality is objective reality even if social reality is a ‘construction’ or indeed an invention of human beings and therefore, yes, ontologically subjective. The fact remains that this element of ontological subjectivity doesn't take away the epistemically objective status of all institutional facts. The two modes of ontology, according to Searle at least, can run alongside each other without contradiction.

John Searle on Theory & the Piecemeal Approach

It's often said that analytic philosophy is essentially ‘piecemeal’ in approach and is therefore highly suspicious of not just ‘grand systems’ but of theory itself. (This was certainly the case when it comes to the late Wittgenstein.) However, over the last forty or so years many philosophers, especially metaphysicians, have been creating their own large-scale theories of philosophy, if not their own ‘grand systems’.

John Searle sees the importance of the philosophical construction of theories, if not ‘grand theories’:

"When I was in Oxford the term piecemeal was a term of praise. What we wanted were little bitty results. We were suspicious of large results. But I think that was due to the fact that philosophers who wanted large results had done such a bad job... I think Hume very much had a general theory, Locke had a general theory, even Berkeley in his way had a general theory... You want to know how it all hangs together." (191)

We can say that the ‘piecemeal’ approach was nothing but a reaction to the large-scale approaches to philosophy. Similarly, Searle’s own large-scale approach is nothing more than a reaction against the piecemeal approach. That ‘s how philosophy, and indeed politics and much else, work. Reaction and counter-reaction and so on. In thirty years’ time no doubt some philosopher, or many philosophers, will have equally disparaging things to say about Searle’s own large-scale approach and they too, in time, will create a reaction to what they've done.

In addition, Searle says that "philosophers who wanted large results had done such a bad job" (191). Who’s to say that philosophers in the future won’t also think Searle has done ‘a bad job’ with his general or theoretical philosophies? This is almost bound to be the case.

In any case, there have been a few systematisers in analytic philosophy, especially in America. Some would include, for instance, Sellars, Nelson Goodman, Dewey, and even Quine in this category. Perhaps also Davidson. It may even be the case that Dummett, here at home, is a systematiser just as his hero Frege was a kind of systematiser. Of course Russell and Collingwood were also guilty of some broad-sweeping theories or generalisation in parts of their philosophies. Indeed, because Collingwood was a historicist of sorts, it's hardly a surprise that he went for ‘large results’ when he practised his philosophy.

Perhaps a concern with the philosophical minutia of this or that says more about the types of minds or intellects of certain philosophers than it does about their antipathy towards grand systems or theory. Perhaps they are simply incapable of synthesis or of looking at things contextually or broadly. Of course we can look at this inversely. The systematisers may be incapable of dealing with the minutia for reasons of intellectual deficiency or perhaps it simply bores them rigid. The best philosophers may be those who can both synthesise and analyse and see the pros and cons of both approaches and also see when one or the other is required within a particular philosophical context.

Is it the case, anyway, that the systematisers really did ‘such a bad job’ (191) anyway? Did Kant do such a bad job? What about Hegel? Of course not everything they said was first-rate or even correct; though was everything J.L. Austin said first rate and correct? More to the point, is everything said by Searle first rate or even correct?

Being first-rate or even correct may not have anything or much to do with whether or not one is a systematiser or a practitioner of the piecemeal approach. Good and bad philosophy occurs in both approaches and isn't exclusive to either one or the other. There is good large-scale work and bad analytic work. There is good analytic work and bad large-scale work. Why generalise at all about either of these approaches, especially when bearing in mind the piecemeal protagonists’ dismissal of all generalisations and generalising tendencies?

In addition, perhaps many hard-core analytic types, even now, simply don't "want to know how it all hangs together" (191). Perhaps they would even claim that the very idea of philosophy showing us how it all hangs together doesn’t make much sense. Either that, or the very attempt to show how it all hangs together is intrinsically suspect and far too ‘Continental’ a desire for the hard-core Anglo-American analytic. Again, perhaps the large-scale just bores them just as the minutia bores many Continental philosophers.

Though perhaps ‘theory’ is nothing particularly complex or even esoteric anyway. The way Searle describes theory it would certainly not seem so:

".... the idea that you has a systematic set of propositions, logically related to each other which could account for a whole domain, that’s a wonderful idea. Euclid’s Elements is one of the classics. Aristotle’s full of theories. That’s what I want. I want a theory in the classical, Greek, Aristotelian sense." (191/2)

That way of describing theory, or a theory, seems to make just about every philosopher a theoretician – even those, like Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida, who are supposedly ‘anti-theoretical’. Most philosophers, both in and out of the Continent, would have thought that they had "a systematic set of propositions" (191). Again, even if they were anti-theory or anti-truth. Whether they also thought that these propositions were "logically related to each other" (191) is something else. It would depend on how they take ‘logically related’ or how serious their logical skills were. Would any philosophers want a set of propositions which were not logically – or otherwise – related to each other? Not even Derrida!

Even when Wittgenstein argued that ‘whole domains’ could never be accounted for (at least in the case of language or language-use), then his domain of an unaccountable domain was still his domain – even if it couldn’t be accounted for. Similarly, Gödel’s domain was still the whole of mathematics even if the whole of mathematics couldn’t be fully accounted for in terms of both its completeness and consistency (in the case, at least, of individual axiom systems).