The Construction Of Social Reality

This thesis makes a detailed analysis of John R Searle's thoughts about the social reality ontology, and states Searle's theory point on how the social reality construct does, and based on this analyzes and evaluates the value,significance and still existing problems of Searle's social reality thoughts.The first part of the thesis mainly states the generated backgrounds of Searle's social reality thoughts. Firstly, the view of Enlightenment made people realize the universe had a kind of significant, a kind of intelligibility. With the stable increase of knowledge and understanding, it will become easier to be understood. Secondly, the thoughts of positivism claims that the research objects of social science are the "facts" constructed by social phenomenon and the relation between social phenomenon. Thirdly, the thoughts of post-positivism collapse the system of positivism theory and shock the foundation of social science philosophy. The thoughts of Searle are just the return of Enlightenment thoughts.The second part of the thesis analyzes Searle's thoughts in details. At first, it expounds the concept of the brute fact and the social fact given by Searle. And then, it deals with the difference between the independent observation and the dependent observation which Searle stressed. And separately introduces in details three new factors incoming by Searle for elaborating his own social reality thoughts: collective intentionality,the belonging of function and the rules of construction. Finally, it illustrates the effects of language in the institutional reality.The last part of the thesis makes a detailed analysis on the value,significance and still existing problems of Searle's social reality thoughts. Firstly, Searle's social reality thoughts generated under the special academia and his own major background. Secondly, Searle's work had important enlightening significance in many fields of social science. In addition to the great contribution in social reality issues, Searle's work still shows two points of referential experiences by social science. But Searle's social reality thoughts still had many problems which need further illustration and completeness. There are some problems in the social science philosophy field need to be analyzed and to be debated, such as the reality of institutional fact doesn't certainly require the logical onward of the original fact, how the collective intentionality needn't restore the individual intentionality, how the construction rules and the standard rules had the essential differences, and the construction and the acceptation of social institutions.