Construction of Social Reality

Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Introduction......Page 12
The Metaphysical Burden of Social Reality......Page 15
The Invisible Structure of Social Reality......Page 18
Fundamental Ontology......Page 19
Objectivity and Our Contemporary World View......Page 21
The Distinction Between Intrinsic and Observer-Relative Features of the World......Page 23
The Assignment of Function......Page 27
Collective Intentionality......Page 37
Figure 1.2......Page 40
Constitutive Rules and the Distinction Between Brule and Institutional Facts......Page 41
Some Apparent Features of Social Reality......Page 45
Constitutive Rules: X counts as Y in C......Page 57
Why Self-Referentiality Does Not Result in Circularity......Page 66
The Use of Performative I Iterances in ihe Creation of Institutional Pacts......Page 68
The Logical Priority of Brule Pac ts over Institutional Fac ts......Page 69
Systematic Relations and the Primacy of the Act over the Object......Page 70
Language and Social Reality......Page 72
Language-Dependent Thoughts and Language- Dependent Facts......Page 73
Why Are Any Thoughts Language Dependent?......Page 77
Games and Institutional Reality......Page 79
Does Language Require Language?......Page 85
Other Functions of Language in Institutional Facts......Page 89
Generalizing the Analysis......Page 92
Codification......Page 100
Some of the Issues at Stake in the Analysis......Page 103
Some Types of Imposition of Status-Functions......Page 107
The Logical Structure olConventional Power......Page 117
Conclusion......Page 123
The Creation and Maintenance of Institutional Facts......Page 126
Figure 5.1......Page 134
Institutional Marts and the Background......Page 138
Constitutive Rules and Causation......Page 140
What Is the Background and How Does It Work?......Page 142
Background Causation......Page 150
Does the Real World Exist?......Page 162
Some Presuppositions of Our Contemporary World View......Page 163
Whal Is Realism?......Page 166
The Argument from Conceptual Relativity Against Realism......Page 173
Figure 7.1......Page 175
The Verificationist Argument......Page 180
The Ding an Sich Argument......Page 186
Diagnosis of the Problem......Page 188
Realism as a Background Condition ol Intelligibility......Page 190
A "Transcendental" Argument for External Realism.......Page 196
The Distinction Between Brute Reality and Socially Constructed Reality......Page 203
Strengths and Limitations of the Foregoing Arguments......Page 207
Truth and Correspondence......Page 211
The Intuitive Idea of Truth as Correspondence......Page 212
Strawson's Objections to the Correspondence Theory......Page 216
Truth, Facts, Disquotation, and Correspondence......Page 220
Designing a Language......Page 228
Summary and Conclusion......Page 231
Conclusion......Page 239
Endnotes......Page 241
Subject Index......Page 250