Anthropological Theory

Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
http://ant.sagepub.com
Vol 6(1): 5–11
10.1177/1463499606061729

Searle and his critics

Steven Lukes
New York University, USA

Abstract
The ensuing articles pose various challenges to Searle’s thesis concerning social reality.
Some exhibit misunderstandings; others identify inadequacies in the formulation of
his thesis and failures to address issues within the limits of his project, notably his
inattention to unintended consequences. Searle’s project is to distinguish social from
biological and physical reality, but that, it is argued, offers a restrictive account of what
social scientists study, which extends well beyond linguistically-constituted institutions
to include the ‘brute realities’ of social life and, most significantly, the interactions
between the ‘institutional’ and the ‘brute’, for example between ‘institutional’ and
‘brute’ power. Searle’s critique of Durkheim’s social ontology is, in part, endorsed but
also criticized for focusing on the latter’s methodological pronouncements rather than
on the ontology implicit in his substantive work. What bearing, in general, does
getting social ontology right have on substantive social scientific work? Some
suggestions are offered concerning the substantive implications of Searle’s theory.

Key Words
Durkheim • institution • intentionality • objective • ontology • power • social facts •
social reality • subjective

When philosophers engage with anthropology, interesting things can happen. Lucien
Lévy-Bruhl developed his ideas about ‘pre-logical mentality’ in reaction to the anthro-
pology of his time (Lévy-Bruhl, 1910). John Ladd (Ladd, 1957), the Edels (Edel and
Edel, 1959) and Richard Brandt (Brandt, 1954) explored the ethics of various tribal
societies in response to the cultural anthropology of theirs. Peter Winch’s essay ‘Under-
standing a Primitive Society’ (Winch, 1964), deploying Wittgensteinian ideas in relation
to E.E. Evans-Pritchard’s studies of the Zande and the Nuer, generated a debate, that
ranged deep and wide, which continues to this day (see Wilson, 1970; Hollis and Lukes,
1982; Risjord, 2000; Lukes, 2006).1 It gets really interesting when the anthropologists
and social scientists respond, as Durkheim did to Lévy-Bruhl (Durkheim, 1913), reject-
ing the idea of the pre-logical, and as Ernest Gellner (Gellner, 1968) and Robin Horton
(Horton, 1976), among others, did to Winch. This remarkable symposium, consisting
of John Searle’s essay, the various responses to it and his replies to these, constitutes a
further, striking proof of the value of such mutual engagements. It is a coherent and

5
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 6(1)

focused collection of contributions that are all intellectually serious, challenging and
well-written. They exhibit differing styles of thought, backgrounds and ranges of refer-
ence, but all grapple with the same range of basic issues raised in Searle’s characteristi-
cally clearly-stated and structured argument. These issues are fundamental to all the
social sciences, but they are issues with which, as Searle remarks, contemporary philos-
ophers rarely concern themselves.
Roy D’Andrade points to the question at the center of Searle’s theory by stating a
paradox: that ‘one cannot think an institution away because it is more than a thought,
yet an institution cannot exist unless people think it is real’ (p. 34). A paradox is an
apparent contradiction and Searle’s theory, which has that rare virtue of being at once
simple and deep, offers to resolve the paradox, by showing that the contradiction is
merely apparent. Its aim is to give an account of social reality in general and institutional
reality in particular. Animals, including human animals, are social, exhibiting collective
intentionality, but human animals have institutions, created and sustained entirely in
individual minds by collective intentionality and enabling and empowering them,
through the constitutive power of language, to act on desire-independent reasons. To
appreciate the force and reach of this abstractly stated thesis one must read The Construc-
tion of Social Reality (1995) and, more particularly, the essay published here, summariz-
ing and developing that thesis. Institutional facts are facts about money, property,
government, marriage and so on, but it is important to note that Searle uses ‘institution’
as a technical term of art, stressing that it presupposes language in its constitutive role,
set out initially in his speech-act theory. What he seeks to do here is to address the
question: What are the distinguishing features of human social reality? In doing so, he
articulates a view, distinguishing ‘institutional reality’ from ‘brute reality’, that is, as the
reader will discover, sharply distinct from several other views. His work is, as he
comments in his response to D’Andrade, ‘an effort to answer the challenge of sociobi-
ology’ with its ‘implicit message . . . that humans are not different from other social
animals and that the terms in which we need to understand human social behavior are
essentially biological and above all evolutionary’ (pp. 40–1). He claims to take language,
and in particular its constitutive role, seriously, as opposed, for example, to the ‘rich
tradition of linguistic anthropology’ and contemporary sociological theorists such as
Bourdieu, Habermas and Foucault. He firmly asserts the view that ‘the world consists
entirely of physical particles in fields of force (or whatever the ultimately correct physics
tells us are the final building blocks of matter)’ (p. 13) and so rejects theories that postu-
late further realities. There is, he insists, only one (unified, causally integrated) world,
not two, or, as Popper claimed, three, or, as Richard Shweder, advocating ‘romantic
pluralism’, suggests, as many worlds as there are alternative world views. And, in response
to Neil Gross, he rather fiercely distinguishes his view from Durkheim’s account of social
facts, which, he writes, is ‘mistaken’ and ‘not remotely like’, indeed ‘quite the opposite
of ’ his own. To that matter I will return.
D’Andrade’s article is a thoughtful and thought-provoking attempt to think through
and re-state in social scientists’ language (‘culture’, ‘values’, ‘norms’ and so on) Searle’s
thesis and its implications. As Searle notes, his essay is exploratory and, at certain points,
indecisive, but it captures the main thrust of Searle’s idea and sees its importance, not
least for how we are to think about personality, culture and social structure. I agree with
Searle that the suggestion that we should no longer think of these as ‘separate kinds of

6
LUKES Searle and his critics

things’ but, as D’Andrade puts it, as ‘words for different organizing processes’ is
challenging and worth further reflection.
The remaining articles pose a series of challenges to which Searle responds, with
exemplary care and clarity. Among these, some are due to misunderstandings, some
allege that there are deficiencies in his formulations and some point to his failure, within
the limits of his own project, to address certain issues.
Among the misunderstandings, which Searle succeeds, in my view, in rectifying, are
these. In saying that institutional facts have a ‘logical structure’ he means (contra
Friedman), not that they are not illogical or irrational, but that they have a propositional
content and structure (such as X counts as Y in context C: thus these actions count as
declaring war in these circumstances). He is not, in the accepted meaning, a ‘material-
ist’ (Friedman), even an inconsistent one (Shweder), or a ‘reductionist’ (Gross), reducing
‘narratives’ to ‘constitutive rules’. His ontological project does not exclude giving
historical explanations (Friedman and Gross); he describes ‘logical structures, not their
histories or their relations to larger social contexts’ (reply to Friedman). And Searle
responds to Shweder’s detailed and eloquent ‘romantic pluralist’ critique by insisting,
correctly, that he can, indeed that one must, distinguish institutional facts that involve
illusions and falsehoods (e.g. that being a witch gives you supernatural powers) from
those that do not and that his position does not require him to accept the perspective-
dependence of all social knowledge claims. He also correctly denies that his ‘external
realism’ is a metaphysical ‘leap of faith’, arguing that it must, indeed, be presupposed in
order to identify the spirit- and ghost-infested belief systems in which anthropologists
such as Shweder are interested. And, responding to Gross, he refutes the objection that
his notion of collective intentionality excludes habitual acceptance of relations of
domination, while admitting the central importance of explaining how this occurs – a
topic on which I, for one, would rejoice in reading his reflections.
A challenge which, in my view, reveals an inadequacy in Searle’s formulation of his
view is Friedman’s doubt about his use of the notion of ‘observer-dependence’ to
characterize the ‘intentionality’ and ‘ontological subjectivity’ of institutional facts. In
response, Searle says that he means by ‘observer’ to indicate ‘all of the forms of inten-
tionality that human beings have in dealing with their environment’. Indeed, he goes
on to say that he is referring to ‘participants in the institution, and not the observer from
outside’. But this is genuinely confusing, and it would have been clearer to speak of
‘participant-dependence’. (In using, possessing, borrowing money and so on, we do not
‘observe’ it.) I also think that Friedman has secured a hit with his all too brief observa-
tion about ‘non-intentional systemic realities’ – of which Friedman cites business cycles
as an example. In citing the unexpected effects of players being right- or left-handed
pitchers and batters, Searle has not taken the measure of this objection, though from his
reply it looks as though he acknowledges its importance. As things stand, unintended
consequences play no role in Searle’s argumentation and that must be a weakness, given
his ontological project. Social institutions – economic, political, judicial, penal, and so
on – are non-transparent, or opaque, to the extent that individuals who ‘accept’ them
neither expect nor understand how they function and what their effects are. As Friedman
argues, they have ramifying consequences for all of us. It is social scientists’ chief task to
reveal these. Surely, therefore, opacity must be a crucial aspect for which a theory of
social ontology must account. Furthermore, several of the contributors seem uneasy with

7
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 6(1)

his use of the term ‘acceptance’, as in the formula ‘We accept (S has power [S does A])’.
What exactly is acceptance and shared acceptance? What are the criteria for identifying
its presence? How do we distinguish genuine or voluntary ‘acceptance’ from acquies-
cence induced by power relations? This deep and difficult question relates to that raised
by Gross referred to earlier.
These questions concerning non-intended consequences and power raise a more
general issue which none of the contributors ventures to press. ‘Institutions’ (whether in
Searle’s sense or a wider sense) do not exhaust the realm of the social. Consider, for
example, what Durkheim called ‘social facts of an “anatomic” or “morphological”
nature’: ‘the number and nature of the elementary parts which constitute society, the
way in which they are articulated, the degree of coalescence they have attained, the distri-
bution of population over the earth’s surface, the extent and nature of the network of
communications, the design of dwellings, etc.’ (Durkheim, 1982: 57).2 Searle’s title is
‘Social ontology: Some basic principles’ and his book is entitled The Construction of
Social Reality, and this might suggest that his topic encompasses the whole domain of
social facts that constitute the object of the social sciences, such as anthropology. But,
as I have sought to make clear, his interest as a philosopher is in ascertaining what is
uniquely characteristic of human beings and thus distinctive of human social reality, that
is, what distinguishes it from the biological and the physical, and his answer is: linguis-
tically constituted institutions. But that is not to say that social scientists’ object of
inquiry and explanation is similarly restricted. On the contrary, their concern must be
with both the ‘institutional’ and the ‘brute’ realities of social life and, most particularly,
with the zone of interaction between them.
Consider, for example, political power. Institutionalized power consists, as Searle
writes, of deontic power. This embraces rights, duties, obligations, commitments,
authorizations, requirements, permissions and privileges. But ‘brute’ power does not
always coincide with these, with what the constitutive rules require. Bargaining power
and also the power to induce acquiescence to disadvantage or subordination are obvious
instances of this. Which constitutive rules get instituted and accepted can be determined
by who wins a struggle for brute power. Furthermore, the very adherence of citizens to
the constitutive rules can be a problem; people will have ‘brute interests’ which may or
may not lead them so to adhere. When this occurs, ‘institutional interests’ can be forged
to encourage such adherence, as when the socialist parties were induced to enter into
electoral competition, or when the American constitutional founders divided power into
separate branches, so that these would develop their own separate interests. In short, as
Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca has argued, we need a theory ‘capable of explaining how brute
and institutional power interact in concrete cases’ (Sánchez-Cuenca, 2003: 90).3
I can see no reason why Searle need deny any of this, though he does sometimes write
as though the non- and extra-institutional dimensions of the social were of no signifi-
cance (especially when choosing his titles). His rather homely examples, typically from
games, university life and contemporary politics, do not raise the key issue of legitimacy.
And in a separate essay on ‘Social Ontology and Political Power’ he displays a similarly
restricted, institutionally consensual view of politics, writing that ‘all political power is
deontic power’, indeed that ‘the essence [sic] of political power is deontic power’ (Searle,
2003: 204, 207, emphasis in original). If what I have argued here is cogent, then this is
at best highly misleading.

8
LUKES Searle and his critics

One sub-theme running throughout these texts is what we might call the
Searle–Durkheim debate, or rather confrontation. This arises from Gross’s challenge,
which turns out to be far more of an attack on Searle than its author evidently intended.
To Searle’s considerable discomfort, Gross claims that his work re-expresses Durkheimian
ideas in an analytic idiom (the other contributors make similar claims). In response, Searle
mounts a 10-point refutation of Durkheim (for the sake of brevity). Some of this is, in
my view, compelling as a critique of The Rules of Sociological Method and Durkheim’s essay
on ‘Individual and Collective Representations’. Especially helpful is his dissection of
Durkheim’s favored analogies in claiming the sui generis reality of social facts, as set out in
the latter. Searle effectively shows just why the analogies of chemical alloys, of living
matter and its chemical ‘substratum’ and of mental life and the activities of neurons are
unsatisfactory. He effectively shows that Durkheim runs together four different senses
of ‘coercion’ when explaining the constraining character of social facts.4 He also
complains about Durkheim’s view that social facts are ‘things’. He cites Durkheim insist-
ing that they be studied objectively as external things, rather than representations in the
mind. But what Durkheim is here insisting upon is precisely the need to study them as
data, rather than relying on preconceived and speculative ‘facts’. Moreover, Durkheim’s
slogan ‘consider social facts as things’ needs to be understood in its context. Impressed
by the successes of German social science, Durkheim was urging that education in Third
Republic France should be ‘à l’école des choses’ to induce in students a proper sense of
the complexity of their social and political world, the better to predict and control it.
Searle is, of course, right that Durkheim lacked his distinctions between observer-
relative and observer-independent phenomena and between the ontological sense of the
objective/subjective distinction and the epistemic sense, though, as already stated, I think
it clearer to say that ontological subjectivity is a case of participant-, not observer-
relativity. Clearly, Durkheim was after epistemic objectivity. Searle writes that Durkheim
failed ‘to see that we can have an epistemically objective science of a domain that is onto-
logically subjective’ (p. 63, emphasis in original). This I doubt. Searle claims that Durkheim
‘thinks that collective representations are not in the minds of individual actors’ (p. 66),
yet he himself quotes Durkheim writing that the conscience commune ‘is only realized in
individuals ’ (p. 61, my emphasis). There are many such assertions by Durkheim, along-
side others which suggest a sui generis reality and even a collective mind and personality.
The point is that Durkheim was, in making these apparently contradictory statements,
expressing the very paradox noted by D’Andrade: that from the perspective of individual
agents, social facts appear external and constraining, while from the analyst’s they (or,
more specifically, the institutional facts in Searle’s sense) are only real because people think
they are. My suggestion is that Durkheim did indeed see what Searle says he failed to see,
but that he lacked the analytical apparatus to work it out. Moreover, much of Durkheim’s
substantive sociology, especially his later writings, consists in the analysis of the function-
ing of collective representations. Searle is right that he ‘was not in a position to state the
precise details of collective representations because he lacked the logical apparatus’ (p. 62).
This raises a more general point. I do think that Searle’s critique of Durkheim lacks
judicious balance or, better still, fairness. Though The Rules, in my view, provides a poor
guide to his practice, and although I agree with Searle that his argument suffers from its
innocence of subsequent advances in analytic philosophy, and although I fully agree that
Durkheim fails to incorporate the enabling aspect of social facts into his purely

9
 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORY 6(1)

constraint-focused account there, nevertheless Searle altogether fails to appreciate the

explanatory power of his sociological vision, exemplified (as Gross rightly suggests) above
all in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In fact, I think that Searle would come up
with a much less dismissive view of Durkheim if he were to reflect on the ontology
implicit in his substantive work as opposed to his inadequate reflections on his own
ontology and methodology.
This raises the last point I wish to make, in the form of a question. What bearing does
this discussion of social ontology have on substantive social scientific work? (Do good
practicing social scientists have to be good philosophers – or, more precisely, do they have
to be good at giving an accurate and philosophically adequate account of their own
practice? Very often, when they try, they are rather bad at it.) What can we explain better,
and in what ways would our explanations be better, if we accept Searle’s ontological theory?
Which kinds of explanatory approach should we avoid, and which should we pursue?
Here are some tentative suggestions. First, following D’Andrade’s suggestion, we can
avoid treating culture and personality as ‘different kinds of stuff ’ but view them as differ-
ent ways of organizing their component elements. Second, in similar spirit, Searle’s work
can induce a certain skepticism about the application of economics-based models to other
spheres of social life, such as politics. Within economic life, motivation is typically
assumed to be desire-dependent; hence the central role in economic theory of the notion
of ‘preference’. As Searle himself has written, ‘not all political motivation is self-
interested or prudential’ and, comparing economic and political systems, he observes that,
though ‘the logical structures are similar, the systems of rational motivation are interest-
ingly different’ (Searle, 2003: 207). This is obviously no less true of other non-economic
spheres of social life. Indeed, perhaps Searle’s theory, with its focus on the role of ‘desire-
independent reasons’, suggests a plausible basis on which to criticize rational choice
theories which often, perhaps inherently, involve a kind of ‘brute reductionism’ of insti-
tutional interests to brute desires (see Lukes and Haglund, 2005). And finally, and more
positively, as I have suggested, we can apply Searle’s distinction by attending, as he does
not, to the interactions between the institutional and the brute realities of social life.

Notes
1 Two fine recent examples are Moody-Adams (1997) and Cook (1999).
2 This passage, indeed the whole paragraph from which it comes, was inexplicably omitted
from the 1938 translation of The Rules, which was the only one available until 1982.
3 I am indebted to this fine article for the examples cited.
4 He is not the first to notice this. See Lukes (1973: 12–13).

References
Brandt, R. (1954) Hopi Ethics: A Theoretical Analysis. Chicago, IL: Chicago University
Press.
Cook, J.W. (1999) Morality and Cultural Differences. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Durkheim E. (1913) ‘Review of Lévy-Bruhl 1910’, L’Année sociologique XII: 33–7.
Durkheim, E. (1982) The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology
and its Method (edited with an introduction by Steven Lukes, translated by
W.D. Halls). Basingstoke: Macmillan.

10
LUKES Searle and his critics

Durkheim, E. (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press.
Edel, M. and A. Edel (1959) Anthropology and Ethics. Springfield, IL: Thomas.
Gellner, E. (1968) ‘The New Idealism – Cause and Meaning in the Social Sciences’, in
I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds) Problems in the Philosophy of Science, pp. 377–406.
Amsterdam: North Holland. (Reprinted in E. Gellner, 1973, Cause and Meaning in
the Social Sciences. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.)
Hollis, M. and S. Lukes, eds (1982) Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Horton, R. (1976) ‘Professor Winch on Safari’, Archives européennes de sociologie 17:
157–80. (Reprinted in R. Horton, 1993, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West:
Selected Theoretical Essays in Magic, Religion and Science. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.)
Ladd, J. (1957) The Structure of a Moral Code: A Philosophical Analysis of Ethical Discourse
Applied to the Ethics of the Navaho Indians. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lévy-Bruhl, L. (1910) Les Fonction mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: Alcan.
(Translated as How Natives Think by L.A. Clare, 1926. London: Allen and Unwin.)
Lukes, S. (1973) Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work. A Historical and Critical Study.
London: Allen Lane Press.
Lukes, S. (2006) ‘Apparently Irrational Beliefs’, in S. Turner and M. Risjord (eds)
Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology (in Handbook of the Philosophy of Science),
pp. 274–90. London and Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Lukes, S. and L. Haglund (2005) ‘Power and Luck’, Archives européennes de sociologie
XLVI(1): 45–66.
Moody-Adams, M.M. (1997) Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and
Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Risjord, M. (2000) Woodcutters and Witchcraft: Rationality and Interpretive Change in
the Social Sciences. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Sánchez-Cuenca, I. (2003) ‘Power, Rules and Compliance’, in J.J. Maravall and
A. Przeworski (eds) Democracy and the Rule of Law, pp. 62–93. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Searle, John R. (1995) The Construction of Social Reality. New York: The Free Press.
Searle, J. (2003) ‘Social Ontology and Political Power’, in F.F. Schmitt (ed.) Socializing
Metaphysics: The Nature of Social Reality, pp. 195–210. Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield.
Wilson, B.R., ed. (1970) Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell.
Winch, P. (1964) ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’, American Philosophical Quarterly
1: 307–24. (Reprinted in B.R. Wilson, ed., 1970, Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell.)

STEVEN LUKES is Professor of Sociology at New York University. He has previously held posts at Balliol
College, Oxford, the European University Institute in Florence, the University of Siena and the London School
of Economics. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an editor of the European Journal of Sociology. His
published works include Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work; Individualism, Marxism and Morality; Liberals
and Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity; The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Comedy of Ideas
and Power: A Radical View, which has just appeared in a much expanded second edition, published by Palgrave.
He also co-edited Rationality and Relativism and The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History.
[email: steven.lukes@nyu.edu]

11