Searle and De Soto: The New Ontology of the Social World

In Barry Smith, David Mark & Isaac Ehrlich (eds.), The Mystery of Capital and the Construction of Social Reality. Open Court. pp. 35-51 (2008)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Consider a game of blind chess between two chess masters that is recorded in some standard chess notation. The recording is a representation of the game. But what is the game itself? This question is, we believe, central to the entire domain of social ontology. We argue that the recorded game is a special sort of quasi-abstract pattern, something that is: (i) like abstract entities such as numbers or forms, in that it is both nonphysical and nonpsychological; but at the same time, (ii) through its association with specific players and a specific occasion, tied to time and history. We discover other abstract patterns of this sort especially in the domains of law and commerce. This essay draws on the work in social ontology, we of Hernando de Soto and of John Searle to develop an ontology of the social world based on an analysis of the peculiar interdependence between quasi-abstract patterns and their representations in documents of different sorts.

Links

PhilArchive

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

How to Do Things with Documents.Barry Smith - 2012 - Rivista di Estetica 50:179-198.
A Realer Institutional Reality: Deepening Searle’s (De)Ontology of Civilization.Molly Brigid Flynn - 2012 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 20 (1):43-67.
Social Space and the Ontology of Recognition.Italo Testa - 2011 - In Heikki Ikäheimo Arto Laitinen (ed.), Recognition and Social Ontology. Brill Books (pp. 287-308).
Making Social Worlds.Andrius Gališanka - 2012 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (1):115-133.
Self-in-a-vat: On John Searle's ontology of reasons for acting.Laurence Kaufmann - 2005 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 35 (4):447-479.
The reviled art.Stuart Rachels - 2008 - In Benjamin Hale (ed.), Philosophy Looks at Chess. Open Court Press.
Power and Social Ontology.Åsa Andersson - 2007 - Lund: Bokbox Publications.
Lupita's dress: Care in time.Colin Danby - 2004 - Hypatia 19 (4):23-48.

Analytics

Added to PP
2012-11-25

Downloads
633 (#24,161)

6 months
69 (#56,892)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Barry Smith
University at Buffalo

Citations of this work

Document Acts.Barry Smith - 2014 - In Anita Konzelmann-Ziv & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents: Contributions to Social Ontology. Springer. pp. 19-31.
Installation Art and Performance: A Shared Ontology.Sherri Irvin - 2013 - In Christy Mag Uidhir (ed.), Art and Abstract Objects. Oxford University Press. pp. 242-262.
Making space: The natural, cultural, cognitive and social niches of human activity.Barry Smith - 2021 - Cognitive Processing 22 (supplementary issue 1):77-87.

View all 20 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

The Construction of Social Reality.John Searle - 1995 - Philosophy 71 (276):313-315.
A Theory of Granular Partitions.Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith - 2003 - In M. Duckham, M. F. Goodchild & M. F. Worboys (eds.), Foundations of Geographic Information Science. London: Taylor & Francis. pp. 117-151.
Quantum mereotopology.Barry Smith & Berit O. Brogaard - 2002 - Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 36 (1):153-175.

View all 7 references / Add more references