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).

A Wittgensteinian Take on Linguistic Rules & Meanings

Quine expresses a position on understanding expressions that is pure Wittgenstein. Christopher Hookway expresses Quine’s and Wittgenstein’s position by writing that

"I understand an expression when I know the rule which governs its use and use it in accordance with that rule". [1988]

In that case, rules take the place which abstract meanings had in much traditional philosophy. Instead of our understanding of an expression (or a statement) depending on that expression's meaning, we depend instead on its rule-of-use. More clearly, this rule will "govern its use". It tells us how we must use that expression.

Not only is this the case with understanding: the rule must make us "use the word" in accordance with it. Instead of meanings being of prime importance when it comes to understanding expressions, rules instead take that role.

Of course rules are very different things when compared to meanings.

Whereas rules tell us how to use an expression (or how they govern a word’s use), meanings don't tell us to do anything. In another sense, abstract meanings (taken in and of themselves) don't actually tell us anything. Instead, in terms of understanding an expression, what we must do is gain access to its meaning and then determine the actual nature of that meaning. A meaning, therefore, isn't normative in the way a rule is. If meanings don't determine the rules, we must use rules when using an expression. Then, in a sense, a meaning needs to be interpreted and understood; which is in opposition to the fact that rules aren't really interpreted at all (i.e., they're not abstract objects – they're linguistic).

Rules must also be understood in a different way.

If rules are always expressed linguistically and clearly, then there's a sense in which we can't go wrong in understanding and using them. Meanings, on the other hand, are either abstract objects or abstract mental entities. And if that's what they are, if they're something non-linguistic (when we first gain access to them), then there will be ways that make it the case that we could go wrong. The difference between a meaning and a rule would therefore be a little like an electrical device that comes with its instructions and one that does not. A meaning would be analogous in some way to the electrical device without instructions and the rule would correspond to the one that came with its own instructions.

Let's give an example of a linguistic rule in practice.

Take the expression 'cat'. In this case a conventional rule will tell us that this expression must always refer to a cat or to cats. We understand 'cat', then, when we accept the rule that tells us that it must be used to refer to cats. In terms of rules governing the actual use of the expression 'cat': they only apply in the situations in which we want other people to know that we're referring to (or talking about) a cat. We must only use 'cat' - and always use that word - when we want to refer to cats and also when we want to be understood by others as referring to a cat. And because this and all similar rules are both relatively strict and precise, then by definition it will rule out certain obvious - and not so obvious - mistakes in the use and understanding of 'cat'.

For example, we can't use the word to express our thought that "politicians are all liars". This is an obvious misuse of the word. However, neither can we use 'cat' to refer to only cats that are brown in colour. If that were the case, we would either require a new expression or a new rule. (In some cases we would require both.)

In terms of the misuses of the word 'cat' when it comes to understanding that word.

Clearly we can't take the rule to state that 'cat' is an expression that must always be used to express the fact that "cars are likely to crash on this road". In that case, we can say: "I don't like this road. It is a cat road." Clearly this is an extreme misunderstanding of the word 'cat' if we've already accepted the initial rules that explained to us how that word must be used and understood. However, we could misunderstand 'cat' and take it to be an expression that must always be taken as referring only to brown cats. And this would be the case according to the initial rule. It's clearly a misreading of that rule. In order for that word to be taken as always referring to brown cats, a new rule must be introduced that makes it the case that 'cat' only refers to brown cats. This, of course, would be a strange and unhelpful rule for the understanding and use of the word 'cat'. Yet it's in the nature of Wittgenstein's linguistic rules that a rule could be formulated by a particular convention or community that would indeed make it the case that within this convention or community the word 'cat' must always be understood as referring exclusively to brown cats. There's no logical reason that 'cat' couldn't be used in these counter-intuitive ways – that is, by people who were brought up on the original (our) understanding and rule for the word 'cat'!

This must also mean that it can't be the case that there are absolute, necessary or un-ignorable meanings that will make it the case that 'cat' must always be taken as an expression that can only refer to cats as a whole, not only to brown cats. This certainly is engendered by Wittgenstein’s philosophical position on abstract meanings and what he takes to be their nature.

But meanings aren't rules.

So how can meaning-realists talk in terms of 'absolute', 'necessary' or 'un-ignorable' meanings which we must abide by? How do the rules-of-use come from abstract meanings when there's no way in which they can say that an expression must be understood in such-and-such a way and must also be used in such-and-such a way? Such normative demands or rules couldn’t come from meanings themselves because they never tell us what must be the case: certainly not in the case of understanding linguistic expressions.

Strangely enough, even the meaning-realist all along must have been understanding 'cat' in a certain way and using that word in a particular way. Even he would admit that, like the Wittgensteinian, he too must use 'cat' in a certain way and he must understand it in a certain way. Even if we accepted the existence, and even the nature as stated by realists, of abstract meanings, we would still need to ask the meaning-realist where, exactly, his normative musts actually come from. In addition, what about the detailed rules that determine (in precise ways) both how 'cat' must be understood and how that word must be used? For the meaning-realist there would still be detailed rules - perhaps not actually called 'rules' - or simple standards that would tell him how he must understand and use certain expressions. In other words, there would still be normative aspects to his understanding and usage of expressions.

It's not the case, therefore, that a meaning-realist denies that there are linguistic rules of some kind that specify and determine our understandings and uses of expressions. Indeed how could he? He does differ from the Wittgensteinian, however, in two ways.

Firstly, he doesn't take rules to be as essential and important as the Wittgensteinian takes them to be. Instead he takes abstract meanings to be essential and important.

Secondly, the actual nature of rules would be seen differently by the meaning-realist. Perhaps he wouldn't even use the word 'rule'.

For example, he wouldn't take rules, and therefore conventions, to be quite so autonomous, contingent, and even arbitrary as he takes the Wittgensteinian to believe them to be. He would take rules (or some other normative notion) as themselves being dependent upon and determined by abstract meanings. In that case he may think that his rules would be less contingent and less autonomous than Wittgensteinian rules. Perhaps he wouldn't take them to be contingent at all. 

Because of this possible meaning-realist's introduction of abstract meanings into this debate about linguistic rules, then many of the arguments he'd previously used about expressions and their meanings could now be applied to his position on rules. So just as abstract meanings both guaranteed and demanded universal, certain and necessary understandings and uses of expressions, now he may say similar things about his rules. He may now argue that rules themselves are universal, certain, necessary and determinate; just as the understandings and uses of expressions are of abstract meanings. Now he thinks that he can use and accept rules without - in the slightest respect -being a Wittgensteinian or a linguistic conventionalist.

We must again state what was stated earlier.

OK, I can accept the existence of abstract meanings. I can even accept the nature of meanings as you yourself have described them. For example, I can also provisionally accept that meanings are universal, certain, absolute and determinate. I can accept that such meanings also determine the linguistic rules to some extent. However, none of these provisional acceptances would - by themselves - allow me to use rules that have some kind of normative content - or even a lot of normative content. 

Again, abstract meanings can't tell me how expressions must be understood and how they must be used in specific ways. Even the universal, certain and determinate properties of meanings couldn't determine rules expressed by normative modal terms like 'must'. And if these essential and important meanings, as you see them, determine the understandings, rules and uses of expression, then they still couldn't supply us with the normative content required for linguistic rules. If I accept at all that meanings determine expressions, understandings, uses and rules, I could only accept - even only provisionally - that they determine all these things in some kind of limited way. It would be a limited determination precisely because abstract meanings alone (whatever they're taken to be) can't determine the normative nature of our understandings and uses of expressions. And therefore also the normative nature of the rules which tell us how to understand and use expressions. All the arguments I've used about this limited nature of meanings, still apply despite your descriptions of the nature of meanings.

Where do rules really come from? They come from conventions and communities, according to Wittgenstein. They must therefore come from persons (or groups of persons). Now we can say that rules can't possibly come from anything that's essentially non-human or non-social. They can't come from abstract meanings, as argued. And precisely because of their normative nature, it can also be said that rules can't possibly come from anything that's non-human or non-social. The notion of normativity is applicable only to persons and, therefore, also to communities, conventions, institutions, etc. of persons. The rules too must express normative notions and display what an anti-Wittgensteinian may call anthropocentric properties.

Following on from that, the very idea that rules can somehow come from - or be determined by - abstract meanings is surely wrong. Indeed because rules are normative and normative notions are only applicable to persons and their creations, then saying that rules somehow and in some way come from meanings is as close to being a Rylian "category mistake" as anything could be.

The meaning-realist's position on meanings and rules is a very good example of Wittgenstein's claim that so many philosophers have attempted the task of transcending - or moving beyond - natural languages and the human world. In the case of the meaning-realist, he does so by stressing the essential and important nature of abstract meanings when it comes to rules and therefore to the understandings and usages of expressions. Clearly abstract meanings are neither linguistic nor personal. In that sense, the meaning-realist’s meanings transcend language and the human world. Indeed he would probably think it important that they should transcend language and the human world as a whole because such things can only offer us contingency, uncertainty, conventionality, particularity and all the other vices of the natural languages and the social world. Abstract meanings, on the other hand, offer us the exact antitheses of all these properties. And they do so precisely because they're taken to transcend language and the social.

The meaning-realist would accept that Wittgenstein is partly right in what he says about transcending or moving beyond language and the social. However, the difference would be that whereas Wittgenstein believed that such acts of transcendence are always futile precisely because they couldn't in fact be achieved; so our meaning-realist believes that acts of transcendence beyond language and the social are not only possible: they can be (or are) highly beneficial to philosophy. The meaning-realist's acts of language transcendence wouldn't be futile; as Wittgenstein argued they are.

Further Reading

Hookway, C – (1988) Quine, Polity Press
Wittgenstein, L (1953/1958) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford

An Aspect of Susan Haak’s Foundherentism

It could be said that if a foundationalist believes that “basic beliefs are about observable physical objects” (e.g., “there’s a dog”), then he's not in fact a genuine foundationalist at all. If he believes that a dog is in fact a dog, then he has already brought beliefs to bear on the dog-experience to start with.

How does he know that it is in fact a dog? Because of his prior beliefs about dogs. Perhaps he tacitly uses the conditional: If an object or animal barks and has four legs and a tail, then that object must be a dog.


“There’s a dog” can't be a foundational belief in any sense of that term. The only thing he could say is that it is a belief caused by actual interactions with dogs, whereas some of his other dog-thoughts aren't caused by causal interaction with concrete dogs. In that case, perhaps we could say that the causal interaction with a dog is foundational; though not the belief itself. In that case, as Susan Haak says, it is

“only propositions, not events [or objects], that can stand in logical relations to other propositions [or beliefs]”. (227)

The causal interaction itself is neither a belief nor a proposition. Therefore it can't “stand in logical relations to other propositions” or beliefs. The causal interaction with the dog might have been (as it were) a first cause of the belief or beliefs about the dog; though in and of itself, it is neither evidence for such beliefs nor a justification for further beliefs.


In any case, the same causal context - taken only in itself - can cause different beliefs in different people and possibly different beliefs in the same person at different times. The interpretations of our causal contacts depend on our prior beliefs and the prior concepts which we apply to our causal interactions or contacts. And even if a particular causal contact brings about the formulation of new beliefs or new concepts, these will still be dependent upon or related to prior beliefs and prior concepts. Such things do not spring up ex nihilo and neither are they “first beginnings” or “first causes” (as it were).


Even the adverbial versions of foundationalism smuggle in prior concepts and beliefs.


For example, “I am appeared to brownly” still uses the concept [brown]. And even the concept [appears] implies that the speaker is making a distinction between appearance and reality. In addition, even if that statement isn't object-involving, it's still property-involving. And where there are properties, there are also objects to which the properties can be predicated. Unless the subject thought that brown itself, or brownness itself, qua trope, appeared to him “brownly”. That isn't likely.


If the speaker can identify the property- concept [brown], then why can’t he also identify an object-concept, say, [dog]? He might not have done so that this particular time, of course; though there was nothing to stop him doing so. And if something “looks like a dog”, it still looks like a dog even if it isn't an actual dog. The prior concept [dog] is still (surreptitiously or tacitly) used by the adverbial foundationalist.