The intentional structure of cultural objects in the philosophy of John Searle and the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl

This dissertation is an investigation into the ontology of socially constructed objects. John Searle offers an intentionalist theory of social reality based on the insight that some things are what they are because of how we think about them, making behaviorist and functionalist theories inappropriate. He focuses on "status functions": the use of things not merely for their physical causal properties but as having a status carrying deontic power (rights and obligations) within a group. Searle's insistence on an intentionalist account of human social reality is fundamentally correct, but when we think through the details of his theory we find some confusions and unclarities. The major confusion regards whether his is in the end an intentional analysis given his appeal to non-intentional neurophysiological abilities to explain most institutional actions. The major unclarity regards Searle's basic concepts of the status function and deontic power, which are not adequately defined.; Husserl also offers an intentional analysis of "culture," understood as "objectified spirit," the residue of mental life when it shows up as part of the world. Cultural objects have interpersonal spiritual significances originating in our intending of the other people's bodies as expressive of their subjective lives. Because we apprehend irreal determinations in the world relating back to others' valuing and doing, real objects become the foundation for intersubjectively meaningful "objectified spirit." Also, cultural objects occur within historical intersubjectivity. Through appropriation, repetition, and passing on of communal habits, communities regenerate themselves and their spiritual worlds.; Two major themes that arise in this juxtaposition of Searle and Husserl on socially constructed reality regard, first, whether we can have a serious intentionalist description of social reality and avoid understanding our social lives primarily in terms of biological mechanism, and second, how we should understand mental passivity and activity in our social lives. By starting at a lower level, distinguishing more types of cultural object, articulating the development of the cultural world as correlated to that of the person, and illuminating how culture is formed in both mental passivity and activity, Husserl better illuminates the pervasiveness and depth and tensions of culture in human life.