Abstract
Contemporary political theory is fractured in its account of ontology and methods. One prominent fault line is between empirical and normative theory – the former usually called ‘philosophy of social science’, or ‘social-science methodology’, and not ‘theory’ at all. A second fault line exists between analytical and post-modern (or ‘late-modern’) political theory. These fractures prevent political researchers who engage with the same substantive issues, such as the right of same-sex couples to marry, from speaking to one another in a common language. This paper's first section discusses the history of the fact-value divide in political studies: a history that led to the contemporary state of the discipline. The second section argues that Searle's philosophy provides tools that can bridge this divide. The third section raises normative objections that limit the extent to which one can accept Searle's theory as a fully general account of social and political reality. Although limited in scope, Searle's argument should be welcomed as an attempt to provide a common set of important tools for political researchers on all sides of these debates.
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Notes
For more on the correspondence theory of truth, see Tarski (1944) and Platts (1979).
Berlin (1969) clearly fits into this picture, but there is no space fully to explore the relationship of his ideas to the 1950s/1960s political science mainstream.
An interpretivist approach is also endorsed, though presented less carefully and comprehensively in terms of its relationship to fundamental social-science debates, by Dworkin (1986, Chapter 2).
A Weberian conception of ‘social facts’ is that they are relevant to social-scientific study only to the extent that they can be observed, for example, in surveys and election results. The concept of a ‘social fact’ is further defined, explained and developed throughout the section ‘How Searle's Thought Provide Common Ground’.
It is outside the scope of the paper to discuss the speaker referent/semantic referent distinction in detail, but as a starting point see Kripke (1977).
It is legitimate to apply coherentism when looking at statements internal to social reality. It is still the case that the relationship of social reality to the rest of reality, for example, brute reality, is not best explicable in coherentist terms. Belief (1) – a brute fact – for example, is not subject to revision on the grounds of a lack of consistency with beliefs (2)–(5).
One could make a case that the nature of agents does become relatively more fixed when the relevant agents are humans ‘as humans’ (see Barry, 1986).
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Acknowledgements
This paper benefited immensely from comments and criticisms provided by the following people: Saladin Meckled-Garcia, Alex Brown, Laura Valentini, Julio Montero, James McKee, Jock Gunn and two anonymous referees. This paper was presented at the PhD Workshop in Political Theory at UCL on Wednesday 16 January 2008; many thanks to all of the participants who attended this workshop.
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Karp, D. Facts and values in politics and Searle's Construction of Social Reality. Contemp Polit Theory 8, 152–175 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.28
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2008.28