A Study Of Searle’s Social Reality Constructionism Based On Biological Naturalism

This dissertation takes language as the basic thread and the biological naturalism as a perspective,and conducts a comprehensive investigation into the social ontology from John Searle,a famous contemporary American analytical philosopher.The thesis illustrates the development of Searle’s theories,analyzes the stance of biological naturalism and language issues in the whole evolution of Searle’s thought and their influence on Searles social ontology,reveals Searle’s grand philosophy from speech act to intentionality to social ontology.This research also points out that the construction process of Searle’s theories has implications for dialogue and communication,critique and reconstruction in academic research in the light of the dialogue between Searle and contemporary philosophers.Respective studies on Searle’s theories are seen in domestic and foreign academia,but there are fewer interpretations of his grand philosophy from a holistic perspective.This study presents a comprehensive study of Searle’s entire intellectual process and his social ontology from the perspective of a bio-naturalistic realist standpoint,taking his philosophical thought on language as a clue.The thesis is oriented to the analysis of the problem and its evolution,using a combination of research methods-literature interpretation,comparative studies and case studies,and also research methods of analytic philosophy and phenomenology.Chapter 1 of the dissertation reviews the current studies on Searle’s theory at home and abroad,and finds that most of the previous studies take a certain perspective to analyze or criticize Searle’s studies,lacking a systematic and holistic perspective to analyze the evolution of Searle’s philosophy in his whole life.Chapter 2 reviews the evolution of Searle’s philosophical thought and compares the differences between Searle’s and Austin’s speech act theories,examining both the establishment of his early positivistic naturalistic position and showing the centrality of language in Searle’s thought;then analyzes Searle’s theory of intentionality and causality to explore the formal establishment of his biological naturalism;the naturalistic standpoint of language and the bio-naturalistic philosophy of mind lay the groundwork for a correlative study of Searle’s social ontology.Chapter 3 focuses on Searle’s biological naturalism in terms of its connotations and characteristics,elucidating its first-person ontological features and the problem of cause and effect in bio-naturalism,which can both argue for Searle’s opinion of the language and social reality and guarantee of philosophy for the construction of the social reality.Chapter 4 examines Searle’s theory on the construction of social reality standing on biological naturalism.Collective intentionality is brought in through an analysis of free will and is combined with Searle’s naturalistic position to ultimately elucidate the fundamental role of language in the construction of institutional facts.If Searle’s view on language,mind,and society is a complete circle,this chapter draws the whole theoretical puzzle by connecting language and society with biological naturalism.Since Searle’s philosophical ideas from the bio-naturalist standpoint have different grounding and theoretical definitions from many contemporary philosophical views,and even,he also criticizes many philosophers’ ideas that are different from his theories,the dialogues between Searle and various philosophers also brings a lot of insights to the study of this paper.The two-direction fit of language and the world creates facts,and the process of creating social facts in different countries and different social platforms,are the social facts word-world direction?The controversy of realism never ends.What are the new applications biological naturalism in today’s rapidly developing artificial intelligence?Can the process of social reality construction be employed in thinking about the human rights and obligations?The process of constructing Searle’s views in dialogues sheds light on the need of dialogue and communication,critique and reconstruction of a theory in academic research.The research of this dissertation leads to the following conclusions:Firstly,Searle’s philosophy in different periods is coherent.The realism stance obtained in the early research on speech acts has continued throughout his academic career,and later in the research on the philosophy of mind,his naturalism then developing into biological naturalism,which is finally reflected in the research on social ontology.Secondly,Searle’s social ontology is based on his biological naturalism stance.Searle’s late study of social ontology completes the last puzzle in his grand philosophy.In his study of social ontology,he echoes language realism in his earlier theory of speech acts and answers the question of how the institutional facts are constructed by language.Through inquiry of his social ontology,this dissertation reveals that Searle,as always,holds fast to a biological naturalist position in social ontology.Thirdly,although Searle’s philosophy seems to complete a circle of ontology based on biological naturalism,his theory still has its own limits and faces great challenges in various aspects,requiring deep advance on the basis of his reflections.The challenges to Searle comes from the anti-positivism and anti-essentialism in the study of philosophy of language on the one hand,and from the opposition to its naive biological naturalistic position on the other.It is also precisely these questions and debates that indicate the attention and influence of his theory,which is the stumulus to the evolution and development of Searle’s thought.